This Day In Literary History
On January 2nd, 1949, the famous American playwright Christopher Durang was born in Montclair, New Jersey. His father was an architect, his mother a secretary. He received his primary education in Catholic schools, which would affect him both personally and as a writer.
After earning an English degree at Harvard, Durang earned a Master's in play writing at the Yale School of Drama. While studying at Yale, several of his plays were produced there and he worked at the Yale Cabaret.
Durang collaborated on plays with fellow students Albert Innaurato and Wendy Wasserstein. His first professional production, The Idiots Karamazov, was co-written by Innaurato and starred a young drama student named Meryl Streep as the 80-year-old main character.
As a playwright, Durang specialized in comedy - satire, parody, black comedy, and absurdist comedy. He first made his name as a playwright with his comic play A History of the American Film. A few years later, he became a national sensation when his most controversial play opened.
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You (1979), a scathing black comedy, was based on the author's experiences as a Catholic school student and his coming to terms with his homosexuality despite the homophobic doctrine of the Church.
Opening in December of 1979, the one-act play's title character, Sister Mary Ignatius, is a Catholic school teacher who is reunited with some of her old students.
Now grown, they perform a mock Christmas pageant for their old teacher and reveal how her insane devotion to Catholic doctrine has scarred them psychologically for life. Unmoved, the nasty nun berates them and condemns them to hell for their sins.
In the play's shocking climax, Sister Mary pulls out a gun and shoots two of her former students dead. One of them, a gay man, refuses to admit that homosexuality is a sin, so Sister Mary kills him to save his soul.
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You earned rave reviews from critics after it opened in 1979. Jack Kroll, drama critic for Newsweek magazine, wrote:
Durang is one of the most ferociously funny young American dramatists, and Sister Mary is his most ferociously funny work. The object of his lacerating laughter is the Roman Catholic Church as educator. The figure of Sister Mary accumulates a terrifying comic power as her moral certainty reaches a climax of insanely logical violence...
The classic treatment of this theme is Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where despite his resisting of Jesuit hellfire pedagogy young Stephen Dedalus is accused by a friend of being “supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.” What gives Durang’s play its ultimate kick is the sense that Sister Mary’s belief is stronger in its visionary mania than the ravaged rationalisms that oppose it.
Conservative Catholics weren't laughing - they blasted the play and its author as anti-Catholic. Performances in Boston and St. Louis were picketed, and other protest rallies were held. After the St. Louis protest, two Missouri state senators tried to pass a law barring theaters there from producing offensive plays.
The legendary TV talk show host Phil Donahue devoted a whole show to the censorship controversy, which helped make the play a box office success. In 2001, the play was adapted as a made-for-cable movie, Sister Mary Explains It All, which starred Diane Keaton as Sister Mary.
Christopher Durang's next play, a farce called Beyond Therapy (1981), found two troubled New Yorkers receiving therapy from psychiatrists. All that Bruce and Prudence want is a happy, stable relationship. Their therapists both suggest that they place a personal ad.
Bruce is an overemotional bisexual prone to crying over the least thing. Prudence is homophobic. Their first date proves to be a disaster, but after their second date, they find that they actually like each other. Bruce's male lover, Bob, is determined to nip this budding romance in the bud and keep Bruce for himself.
Beyond Therapy was adapted as a feature film in 1987 by the legendary director Robert Altman, but Durang hated the movie because Altman practically rewrote his entire play. He called the film project "a very unhappy experience and outcome."
Durang wrote numerous other acclaimed plays including The Marriage of Bette and Boo, The Actor's Nightmare, The Vietnamization of New Jersey, Betty's Summer Vacation, Naomi in the Living Room, and the musical Adrift In Macao.
In 2002, he wrote a play for the Christmas season called Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge. In this hilarious parody of Charles Dickens's classic novella A Christmas Carol, Gladys Cratchit, Bob's wife, is the nasty, abusive, hard drinking, suicidal mother of 21 children.
On another drunken bender, Mrs. Cratchit intrudes on Ebenezer Scrooge's transformation, where an inept Ghost of Christmas Past accidentally takes Scrooge into the lives of Oliver Twist and Leona Helmsley.
The play takes comic jabs at Frank Capra's classic Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life, O. Henry's classic Christmas story The Gift of the Magi, the Enron scandal, and the TV series Touched By an Angel.
Durang's plays won him numerous Obie (off Broadway) Awards. In 2013, he won his first Tony Award for his play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. The darkly funny homage to Chekhov also won him the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play and other awards.
In 2012, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. In addition to his plays, Christopher Durang also wrote for the screen and for television and acted on the stage and in movies. In 2014, he married his husband, John Augustine, with whom he lived for the rest of his life.
Two years later, Durang was diagnosed with logopenic progressive aphasia, a type of dementia thought to be caused by a form of Alzheimer's disease. He gradually withdrew from public life, not announcing his condition publicly until 2022.
He died on April 2nd, 2024, at the age of 75.
Quote Of The Day
"I write intuitively, and with most of my plays, I don't know what is always going to happen. This means I can sometimes go off on a wrong tangent, and with luck then rewrite it in a better direction. But it means I sometimes surprise myself as I’m going along."
- Christopher Durang
Vanguard Video
Today's video features clips from a live performance of Christopher Durang's classic play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You - starring cult film icon Mink Stole as Sister Mary! Enjoy!
Happy New Year! The Internet Writing Workshop would like to wish all of its members and blog readers a happy, healthy, prosperous, and productive new year in 2026! This Day In Literary History
On January 1st, 1919, the legendary American writer J.D. Salinger was born. He was born Jerome David Salinger in New York City. His mother Marie was Scotch-Irish, his father Sol was Polish-Jewish and earned his living by selling kosher cheese.
J.D. had an older sister, Doris, who died in 2001. His mother had changed her name to Miriam and passed herself off as Jewish. He would not learn of her true identity until after his bar mitzvah.
J.D. Salinger attended public schools until ninth grade, when he transferred to the private McBurney School. He acted in several school plays and showed a talent for drama, but his father was against him becoming an actor.
Later, he entered the Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania. There, he was able to get away from his overprotective mother. He had begun writing for the McBurney School newspaper; at the military academy, he wrote stories "under the covers [at night], with the aid of a flashlight."
In 1936, at the age of 17, Salinger entered New York University, where he considered studying special education, but he dropped out the following spring. His father wanted him to learn the meat-importing business.
So, he went to work for a company in Vienna, Austria. He spent only six months in Austria, leaving shortly before the country was annexed by Hitler in the spring of 1938.
After spending a semester at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, Salinger attended a writing class at Columbia University taught by Whit Burnett, editor of Story magazine.
Burnett noted that Salinger was an average student at first, but then, about three weeks before the end of the second semester, "he suddenly came to life" and wrote three stories, all of which impressed Burnett. He praised Salinger's talent and accepted one of his stories, The Young Folks, for publication in Story magazine.
In 1941, Salinger met and began dating Oona O'Neill, the daughter of legendary playwright Eugene O'Neill. Although he found her to be a self-absorbed debutante, he fell in love with her. He called her often and wrote her long letters.
Unfortunately, their relationship ended when Oona began dating film legend Charlie Chaplin, whom she would later marry. That same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker magazine, which rejected seven of them.
However, in December of 1941, the magazine accepted Slight Rebellion Off Madison, a short story that introduced Salinger's most popular character - a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield, who had "pre-war jitters."
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the story was deemed unpublishable. It would not appear in The New Yorker until 1946. Several months after the Pearl Harbor attack, in the spring of 1942, J.D. Salinger was drafted into the U.S. Army.
He saw action with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, at Utah Beach on D-Day, and at the Battle of the Bulge. During the Normandy campaign, he arranged to meet a fellow writer named Ernest Hemingway, who had influenced him and was working as a war correspondent in Paris.
Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, despite his gruff public persona. Hemingway was impressed with Salinger's writing, saying of the author, "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." The two men began corresponding; Salinger would later say that his talks with Hemingway were among his few positive memories of the war.
As the war continued, Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence division, where he used his fluency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. He would become one of the first American soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp.
He later told his daughter, "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." The war would leave lifelong psychological scars on Salinger; he had to be hospitalized for combat stress, aka PTSD, for a few weeks after V.E. Day.
After he recovered, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of "denazification" duty in Germany. During this time, he fell in love with and married a German girl named Sylvia Welter. He brought her back with him to the U.S., but the marriage only lasted eight months, and Sylvia returned to Germany.
In the late 1940s, Salinger became a follower of Zen Buddhism, the first of many spiritual pursuits. He resumed his writing career, and in 1948, submitted a new story to The New Yorker titled A Perfect Day For Bananafish. The editors were so impressed with the story that they accepted it right away and signed the author to a contract.
A Perfect Day For Bananafish was the first story that introduced Salinger's recurring characters, the troubled Glass family, consisting of two retired vaudeville performers and their seven precocious kids, Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Walker, Zooey, and Franny.
A Perfect Day For Bananafish featured Seymour Glass. On a second honeymoon with his wife Muriel, Seymour spends a day at the beach while Muriel remains in their hotel room, talking to her mother on the phone.
At the beach, Seymour meets and befriends Sybil Carpenter, a cute and inquisitive six-year-old girl. He enjoys her company and tells her a story about bananafish. Later, Seymour returns to his hotel room and finds his wife asleep. Removing a gun from his luggage, he sits next to Muriel on the bed and blows his brains out.
Not long after the success of Bananafish, Salinger was approached by film producer Samuel Goldwyn, who wanted to buy the rights to his earlier short story, Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut. Salinger immediately agreed, as Hollywood had shown interest in another of his stories, The Varoni Brothers, but nothing ever came of it.
Salinger hoped that Uncle Wiggily "would make a good movie," but when it was released as My Foolish Heart in 1949, the film was a critical and commercial failure and had little to do with the story on which it was based.
A furious Salinger vowed that no more film adaptations of his work would be made - a vow he kept for the rest of his life, despite Hollywood's persistent interest in adapting his celebrated first novel, which was published in 1951, just a couple of years after the Uncle Wiggily film fiasco.
The Catcher In The Rye, Salinger's poignant coming-of-age story, opens with teenage student Holden Caulfield being expelled from Pencey Prep, his boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Holden is an angry, alienated young man who may be losing his mind. He believes that his teachers and fellow students are all a bunch of phonies. After an altercation with his roommate, Holden packs up and leaves school in the middle of the night.
He takes a train back to New York City, but doesn't want to go home to his parents, so he checks into the shabby Edmont Hotel instead. There, he dances with some tourist girls, has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, and gets assaulted by her pimp when he refuses to pay her more than the agreed upon amount.
Holden spends the next two days wandering around the city, drunk and lonely. He sneaks into his parents' apartment while they're out so he can visit his precocious little sister Phoebe - the only family member that he can communicate with.
He shares with her a fantasy - a misinterpretation of Robert Burns's song Comin' Through The Rye - where he watches over children playing in a rye field near the edge of a cliff. He must make sure that they don't wander too close to the edge; he must become a "catcher in the rye."
After leaving the apartment, Holden visits his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who offers him a place to sleep and gives him a speech about life - while guzzling highballs.
Later that night, Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini patting his head in a "flitty" way. Whether or not this is a sexual advance is up for speculation and ultimately left to the reader to decide.
When Holden tells his little sister that he plans to move out West, Phoebe wants to go with him. He refuses to take her, which upsets her greatly, so he tells her that he won't move. The book ends with Holden taking Phoebe to the Central Park Zoo.
He watches with melancholy joy while she rides the carousel. He alludes to possible future events, including "getting sick" and being committed to a mental hospital, and attending another school in September.
That's just a bare outline of The Catcher In The Rye. You must read it for yourself. It's one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and one of the most controversial.
The American Library Association (ALA) has listed it as the 13th most challenged book from 1990-2000 and one of the ten most challenged books of 2005. The complaints range from profanity - including words such as goddamn and fuck - to blasphemy.
When high school English teachers assign the book to their classes, they are often met with protests from disgruntled parents and conservative activist groups who demand that the book be removed from both the teachers' assigned reading lists and the school libraries' shelves.
J.D. Salinger followed his famous novel with a short story collection, Nine Stories, (1953) which would include both A Perfect Day For Bananafish and another celebrated tale, For Esme - With Love And Squalor. The haunting, poingant story is narrated by an American Army officer known only as Staff Sergeant X.
While waiting to be sent into combat, Staff Sergeant X goes to an English tearoom, where a young teenage British girl named Esme approaches him and offers to write to him. He immediately agrees.
Thirty minutes later, Esme leaves, telling X "I hope you return with all your faculties intact." It's because of Esme's letter, which he receives on V.E. Day, that X, confined to a mental hospital for combat stress, is able to regain his faculties.
In 1955, Salinger married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student with whom he would have two children, Margaret and Matthew. He continued to write and publish short stories. In 1961, he published a short novel, Franny And Zooey, which originally appeared as two separate short stories in The New Yorker.
The book tells another story of the Glass family, narrated by Buddy Glass, who tells of how his sister Franny, a college student, has a Holden Caulfield-esque nervous breakdown while having lunch with her boyfriend Lane, troubled by the phoniness of her classmates and the egotism of the faculty.
At the request of their mother, Franny's brother Zooey helps her recover from her nervous breakdown through a long and intimate talk wherein he helps her sort out her personal and spiritual beliefs.
J.D. Salinger would continue to publish sporadically. In June of 1965, his last published work, a novella titled Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in the New Yorker. Afterward, at the age of 47, Salinger retired from writing, tired of all the media attention his novel The Catcher In The Rye continued to bring him.
He began to withdraw from public life. His last interview was given in 1980. Then he became a recluse, appearing only to defend his privacy and his works in court. In 1986, British biographer Ian Hamilton planned to publish In Search of J.D. Salinger - A Writing Life (1935-65).
Salinger learned that the book contained a collection of letters that he'd written to friends and fellow authors, so he sued to halt its publication. After two years of legal wrangling, the biography was published in a revised version, with the letters' contents paraphrased.
In 1995, Salinger had his lawyers block the American premiere of Pari, an unauthorized adaptation of Franny And Zooey by Iranian filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui. And in June of 2009, Salinger obtained an injunction to block the publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye.
The novel was an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher In The Rye, written by Swedish publisher Fredrik Colting under the pseudonym J.D. California. Colting filed an appeal, which resulted in a settlement in 2011.
As part of the settlement, Colting agreed not to publish his book in the U.S. and Canada until The Catcher In The Rye enters the public domain in those countries. He also agreed not to use the title Coming Through The Rye.
In 1999, Salinger's daughter Margaret published a memoir, Dream Catcher, where she depicted her father as a control freak who exerted harrowing control over her mother and suffered from severe post traumatic stress disorder all his life.
Margaret claimed that Salinger maintained his service haircut, wore his Army jacket, and drove around his estate (and town) in an old Jeep. She dispelled the Salinger myths established by Ian Hamilton in his book.
She also discussed her father's passion for films; despite his negative experiences with Hollywood studios, Salinger was a huge film buff and owned a large collection of 16mm film prints.
A few weeks after Dream Catcher was published, Margaret Salinger's brother Matthew wrote a letter to the New York Observer denouncing his sister's "gothic tales of our supposed childhood" and discrediting her memoir.
J.D. Salinger died in 2010 at the age of 91. His classic novel, The Catcher In The Rye, may finally be adapted as a feature film; in a letter written in 1957, Salinger stated that he would be open to an adaptation after his death as a means of providing for his widow and children.
Four years after Salinger's death, a collection of three of his early stories was published. It was followed in 2018 by a Centennial Edition boxed set comprised of four deluxe hardcover editions containing all the writings Salinger published during his lifetime.
A collection of his unpublished works is expected to be released as well.
Quote Of The Day "When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion."
- J.D. Salinger
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of J.D. Salinger's classic short story, A Perfect Day For Bananafish. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On December 31st, 1972, the famous American writer and journalist Pete Hamill quit drinking, winning a 20+ year battle with alcoholism, which he would chronicle in his classic bestselling 1995 memoir, A Drinking Life.
Pete Hamill was the oldest of seven children, the son of Irish immigrants from Belfast. His mother was gentle and fair-minded. His father was a one-legged alcoholic.
In A Drinking Life, Hamill tells of his childhood and adolescence in 1940s Brooklyn. His family lived in an Irish neighborhood where, as he would soon learn, the local tavern was the nucleus of social life.
As a young teenager, Hamill began drinking at the tavern regularly as his father had done before him. Soon, Hamill and his friends were downing pails of beer every night.
Alcohol, he observed, was not a kick, but a way of life and part of his Irish heritage. To be a man, the Irish believe, you have to drink - but you also have to be able to hold your liquor and not become a drunk. Unfortunately, most Irishmen became alcoholics.
Hamill continued to drink. Alcohol became a way of life for him. It helped him overcome his sexual shyness and be confident around the neighborhood girls whom he described as "noble defenders of the holy hymen."
As a teenager, Hamill dropped out of school and lived on his own, working at a Brooklyn shipyard, where he would drink with his co-workers. Yearning for a better life, Hamill joined the Navy, then traveled to Mexico.
Alcohol remained a part of his life, and the results were wild nights of drinking and fighting, most of which he couldn't even remember. Hamill switched gears and decided to pursue his artistic interests, studying at the School of Visual Arts, where he met and fell in love with Laura, an exotic nude model.
By 1960, Hamill had begun a career in journalism, becoming a reporter for the New York Post. He was still drinking, and his alcoholism worsened an already turbulent first marriage. Finally, on New Year's Eve, 1972, when he was 37, Pete Hamill had his last drink - a vodka.
As he looked around the bar and saw all the old drunks passed out, he realized that he was looking at a vision of himself in the future. Terrified at the prospect of becoming a pathetic old drunk, Hamill quit drinking for good and never fell off the wagon.
He was able to quit cold turkey without having to join an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous to help him stay sober. Some readers found it strange that in A Drinking Life, Hamill does not explore the more horrific aspects of alcoholism in detail.
Nor does he sermonize in favor of temperance and prohibition. Instead, he exposes and dissects a culture that has embraced alcohol as part of its identity, indirectly encouraging its people to become alcoholics.
Pete Hamill became one of New York City's best known reporters, writing columns for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and Newsday. As a foreign correspondent, he covered the wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland.
He served as editor-in-chief for the New York Post and the New York Daily News. His work as a journalist landed him on former President Richard M. Nixon's infamous list of enemies.
Best known for writing about New York's underclass and racial division, he also wrote about baseball, boxing, art, and music. As a fiction writer, he published ten novels and two short story collections.
Hamill's first novel, A Killing for Christ, published in 1968, was a thriller centered on a plot to assassinate the Pope in Rome on Easter Sunday. Most of his fiction is set in New York City.
He also wrote screenplay and teleplay adaptations of his novels and appeared as a commentator for two documentary series, Ric Burns's New York and Ken Burns's Prohibition, both of which aired on PBS.
His last book, a novel called Tabloid City, was published in 2011. In it, a wealthy socialite and her secretary are found brutally murdered in a posh West Village town house.
The shocking crime becomes front page news, the most famous murder case in the country, and the catalyst that weaves a together a poetic tapestry of stories of life in New York City.
Pete Hamill died in August of 2020 at the age of 85.
Quote Of The Day
"Human beings write stories, and read them, for the same good reason: to live."
- Pete Hamill
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Pete Hamill on University of California Television, giving a lecture on the history of Lower Manhattan and the origins of New York City. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On December 30th, 1816, the legendary English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley married his second wife, writer Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would become famous for her classic horror novel, Frankenstein.
Five years earlier, after he was expelled from college for refusing to recant the atheist views expressed in a pamphlet he'd written, Percy Bysshe Shelley, then nineteen years old, went to Scotland.
There, he married his 16-year-old girlfriend, Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a pub owner. They were married on August 28th, 1811, and Shelley's father disinherited him as a result.
Three years later, Shelley's marriage to Harriet had become unhappy. He often left her alone with their daughter, Ianthe. When he went to visit the writer, journalist, and philosopher William Godwin at his home and bookshop in London, Shelley also met his daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, with whom he fell in love.
Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was also a writer and philosopher who wrote a classic work of early feminist philosophy, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Sadly, she died shortly after giving birth to her daughter.
On July 28th, 1814, Percy Bysshe Shelley left his wife and ran off with Mary, taking her stepsister Claire Clairmont along for company. They sailed about Europe, wandered through France, and settled in Switzerland, living on a small inheritance Percy had received from his grandfather.
Six weeks later, broke and homesick, they returned to England. In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary made another trip to Switzerland, at the behest of Claire Clairmont, who wanted them to meet the great poet Lord Byron - her ex-lover, whose affections she hoped to recapture.
The Shelleys and Byron rented neighboring houses on Lake Geneva. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron became close friends, and their conversations got Shelley's creative juices flowing again; he began writing prolifically.
In December of 1816, not long after the Shelleys returned to England, Percy's estranged wife Harriet committed suicide, drowning herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London.
A few weeks after Harriet's body was recovered, Percy and Mary Shelley were properly married, partly so Percy could regain custody of his children. The court denied his request for custody because he was an atheist. His children were placed with foster parents.
Six years later, on July 8th, 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a storm while sailing from Livorno to Lirici on his schooner, the Don Juan. The boat, which was custom made for Shelley in Genoa, sank after being pounded by the sudden storm.
Shelley claimed to have had a premonition of his death. Mary Shelley would later claim that her husband's boat wasn't seaworthy. Most believe that it was seaworthy and sank as the result of both the violent storm and the poor seamanship of Percy Shelley and his two mates.
Some have claimed that Percy Shelley may have been depressed and committed suicide at sea, while others believe that Shelley's boat was attacked by pirates who mistook it for Lord Byron's ship.
There is also evidence, albeit scattered and contradictory, that Shelley was murdered for political reasons by an agent of the British government, which he had antagonized with his anti-monarchist, pro-Irish views, writings, and activities.
When Shelley's body washed ashore, he was cremated on the beach as per the requirements of the quarantine laws of the time. His heart was rescued from the pyre by his friend, writer / adventurer Edward Trelawny, and given to Mary Shelley, who kept it with her until the day she died, after which, it was interred next to her grave.
Quote Of The Day
"A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's classic essay, A Defence Of Poetry.
Santa came early! I was notified that my poem, Impressions, won a First Place. The prize (even if it's tacky to tell it) is $400 - that's a nice little stocking stuffer!
This Day In Literary History
On December 26th, 1891, the legendary American writer Henry Miller was born. He was born Heinrich Miller in New York City, the son of German immigrant parents. He had an older sister, Lauretta, whose fate he chronicled in his classic autobiographical novel, Black Spring (1936).
As a young boy, Henry Miller proved to be intellectually gifted and an exceptional student. Disliking his teachers, he educated himself, reading voraciously from a young age. He tried college, but dropped out after one semester.
Miller came of age in New York City's rough and seedy Bowery. He drifted from job to job and became an active member of the American Socialist Party. By 1917, he had landed a long term job at the Western Union Telegraph Company and married his first wife, Beatrice.
Seven years later, in 1924, Miller quit his job and had left his wife for his mistress, a Broadway dancer named June Smith, who would become his second wife. He had determined to become a writer, and June encouraged his literary endeavors.
His first two novels, Clipped Wings (1922) and Moloch, or This Gentile World (1927) were rejected. The latter would be published posthumously in 1992, creating a controversy over some allegedly anti-Semitic passages that were really comic jabs at his Jewish ex-wife, June.
At the time Miller wrote Moloch, or This Gentile World, his relationship with June had deteriorated due to her mental instability. She would leave him for another woman. In 1930, freed from the burden of marriage, he went to Paris.
There, a penniless but happy Henry Miller found work as a proofreader for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune newspaper, thanks to his friend, Austrian writer Alfred Perles, who recognized his talent and supported him.
The literary scene of early 1930s Paris energized Miller's creative juices. He struck up friendships with other writers, including a young woman who would become his close friend, lover, and muse - a Frenchwoman of Danish and Spanish descent named Anaïs Nin.
She and Henry were both struggling, aspiring writers trying to make ends meet, as France had also fallen victim to the Great Depression. They and some of their writer friends soon discovered that they could make around $1 per page writing pornographic literature for an anonymous private collector.
That was about $20 per page in today's money; not much today, but good money back then. At first, they wrote erotica just for their own amusement, but soon it became an important source of income during the dark days of the Depression when work was hard to come by.
Believe it or not, for Henry Miller, writing decent erotica in those days was a struggle. Anaïs Nin, however, was brilliant at it. When she let him read her now famous diaries, they were a revelation to him. Her writing had the poetry and passion that his lacked.
An excited Miller began writing a new novel. The muse seized him by the throat and wouldn't let go; as his fingers flew about the keys of his typewriter, he chain-smoked and listened to the jazz or Beethoven that blared out of his Victrola.
He would write as many as 20, 30, or even 45 pages a day. When he completed the manuscript, he and Anaïs Nin both knew that he had written something special - a novel that would revolutionize literature as the world knew it and probably land its author in jail for obscenity.
Tropic of Cancer was a novel in the form of a memoir. Combining fiction with autobiography, the novel featured a narrative that alternated between conventional and experimental, combining straightforward narration with dazzling stream of consciousness passages.
Funny, sad, joyous, and mad, passionate and poetic, the novel is rightfully considered a masterpiece. In the opening pages, Miller described the book this way:
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse...
One of Miller's dirty corpses was that of his homeland, America. Predicting the uproar over the novel's graphic sexual content, he said:
America will call me the lowest of the low when they see my Cancer. What a laugh I'll have when they begin to spit and fume. I hope they'll learn something about death and futility, about hope, etc. I won't give them a fucking leg to stand on...
Miller was able to get Tropic of Cancer published unexpurgated in Paris in 1934, which was no easy task, even in the liberal, intellectual City of Lights. In his American homeland, the novel was immediately banned as legally obscene.
Tropic of Cancer would remain banned in the United States for over 30 years, available to American readers only in pirated editions sold under the counter in certain bookshops or on the black market.
Henry Miller followed his classic debut novel with another great book, Black Spring (1936), an autobiographical novel chronicling his childhood and young adulthood, including the haunting fate of his older sister, Lauretta.
A sweet-natured girl, she'd been born mildly retarded and considered an embarrassment and a burden by her parents. As a child and adolescent, she was mostly cared for by her younger brother Henry, who adored her. But her parents ultimately decided to have her locked up.
Forced to live along with raving lunatics in a grim, brutal asylum, Lauretta deteriorated quickly and died young. Henry never forgave his parents for locking her up. He never spoke to them again.
He followed Black Spring with more great novels. Among his numerous works are Tropic of Capricorn (1939), The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), and his classic Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy of novels: Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus (1960).
Miller's classic novella Quiet Days in Clichy (1956), often paired with his classic novella length essay The World of Sex (1940), was an autobiographical comic novel based on the author's adventures in early 1930's Paris.
In Quiet Days in Clichy, the narrator and his best friend Carl are two broke, struggling aspiring writers living hand-to-mouth in Paris. They share an apartment and soon acquire another roommate - Colette, a fifteen-year-old French runaway whom Carl brings home.
The young girl becomes their housekeeper and lover - until her parents track her down. Meanwhile, the narrator falls in love with two prostitutes, one of whom reminds him of a woman whom he regrets not marrying.
Henry Miller was no pornographer; he didn't write about sex to titillate his readers, he simply and honestly celebrated his sexual life. In his classic essay The World of Sex (1940), he explained that the sex in his writings was the product of the libertine philosophy that he believed in and based his life on.
He blasted the hypocritical American "values" that condemned sex as sinful. Instead of openly celebrating something as natural and beautiful as sex, Americans would rather decry it as sinful and suppress it, leaving the only outlet for sexual expression to smut peddlers - whose smut they consume on the sly.
Until a landmark censorship trial in 1961 acquitted Tropic of Cancer of obscenity charges, Henry Miller's novels went unseen in America except in pirated editions which became underground bestsellers. The trial took place in the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court and was fought by legendary publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press.
Three years later, the United States Supreme Court overturned the Ohio State Supreme Court's ruling that Tropic of Cancer was legally obscene, making it possible for all of Henry Miller's novels to be published in America.
Miller would marry three more times. His last great love was Brenda Venus, a young actress and dancer who had once posed for Playboy magazine. During the last four years of his life, he exchanged over 1,500 letters with Brenda. A book containing their correspondence was published in 1986.
Henry Miller died in 1980 at the age of 88.
Quote Of The Day
"The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain."
- Henry Miller
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a full length documentary on Henry Miller called The Henry Miller Odyssey. Enjoy!
Happy Holidays!
We at the Internet Writing Workshop would like to wish all of our members and blog readers a happy and safe holiday season. For your holiday reading, I recommend A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, and Old Christmas by Washington Irving.
This Day In Literary History
On December 25th, 1924, the legendary American playwright and screenwriter Rod Serling was born. He was born Rodman Serling in Syracuse, New York. He grew up in Binghamton, where his elementary school teachers dismissed him as an incorrigible class clown.
As a young boy, Rod would act out scenes from stories he'd read in pulp magazines and from movies he'd seen. In junior high school, an English teacher discovered his talent and encouraged him to get involved in the school's extracurricular activities involving public speaking.
In high school, Rod wrote for the school newspaper. He was known for his scathing articles wherein he voiced his strong liberal convictions. He would become editor of the newspaper, a star tennis player, and class valedictorian.
After graduating high school in 1943, with World War II raging, Rod joined the Army. He served as a paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division and saw action in the Philippines. During his training, like other men in his unit, he took up boxing. He became a solid flyweight fighter.
Rod would be transferred to his division's demolition unit, nicknamed "The Death Squad" because of its high casualty rate. He saw death every day, from the horrors of combat to freak accidents, such as a soldier being decapitated by a food crate that dropped on his head.
During his Army service, Rod Serling would win the Purple Heart, the Bronze Medal, and the Philippine Liberation Medal. His war experiences would affect him deeply, both as a human being and as a writer.
He would later say of his military experience, "I was bitter about everything and at loose ends when I got out of the service. I think I turned to writing to get it off my chest."
After the war ended and he had recovered from his injuries, Rod went to college on the G.I. Bill, where he earned a degree in literature. While in college, he wrote, directed, and acted in radio programs for the college radio station, setting the stage for his career.
In the summer of 1946, after graduating from college, Rod began his career in radio as both an actor and writer. His true passion was writing. He wrote scripts for radio programs and served as a continuity writer.
By 1950, Rod realized that radio was dying as a dramatic medium, so he switched to a fledgling new medium that had lots of potential - television. He got his start in television writing ad copy for the sponsors.
During television's golden age, (the late 1940s through the mid 1950s) most shows were performed live. Some of the most popular programs were "live theater" shows which featured performances of plays - both classic plays and new productions written exclusively for television.
Rod Serling would become one of the finest playwrights of the time, writing original Broadway-quality plays for television. His best known plays were Patterns and Requiem For a Heavyweight.
Patterns is a searing look at the brutal world of big business in the 1950s. Ruthless corporate boss Walter Ramsey wants to put aging executive Andy Sloane, a family man, out to pasture. He's been grooming up and coming young vice president Fred Staples to take Sloane's place in the company.
Ramsey humiliates Sloane at every turn, hoping to pressure him into resigning rather than risk tarnishing the company's reputation by firing him outright. Sloane's replacement, the young Staples, is racked with guilt and believes that Sloane is still valuable to the company.
Ramsey is determined to oust him, and turns up the pressure until Sloane suffers a fatal heart attack in the office. Fred Staples quits in disgust, then takes back his resignation, vowing to take revenge against Ramsey - by going after his job and ousting him from the company.
Patterns won Rod Serling an Emmy Award - his first of six Emmys for dramatic writing - and was so popular that it became the first live TV show to receive a repeat performance. The second performance was recorded on kinescope and is available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
In 1956, a year after its first live TV performance, Patterns was adapted as an acclaimed feature film, with Serling reworking his teleplay into a screenplay. The film was directed by Fielder Cook.
Requiem For a Heavyweight, written for the famous Playhouse 90 TV series, told the story of Harlan "Mountain" McClintock, a washed up, punch drunk boxer who is in no shape to fight, but is persuaded to fight again by his sleazy manager, Maish.
Deep in debt, Maish has arranged for McClintock to take a fall in a rigged match. During the bout, the boxer's pride kicks in, and he refuses to go down. Maish loses his money and is now indebted to the mob.
McClintock, still loyal to Maish, agrees to take up professional wrestling to earn back the money. Maish humiliates him by making him wear a hillbilly costume. Then McClintock finds out that Maish is betting against him again and refuses to wrestle. He walks out on Maish, who finds a naive young boxer he can exploit.
Six years after its first live TV performance in 1956, Requiem For a Heavyweight was also adapted by Serling as an acclaimed feature film. This version, darker than the original teleplay, was directed by Ralph Nelson.
During his tenure as a playwright for TV, Serling often found himself at odds with the shows' sponsors, who at that time produced TV shows and controlled their content. Sometimes he was asked to make inconsequential cuts to scripts, other times he had to do major rewrites because the sponsor didn't like the theme of the story.
The last straw came when he wrote an episode of the United States Steel Hour in 1954 that was based on the infamous murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago who was brutally murdered in Missouri by white racists for flirting with a white woman.
The United States Steel company forced Rod to change the story completely. The murder victim became a Jewish pawnbroker in an unnamed town. By 1959, Rod Serling had earned enough clout to produce his own television series. He retained as much creative control as possible.
The Twilight Zone, which aired from 1959-1964, was more than just an anthology series featuring tales of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. By using fantastic settings and scenarios, Rod was able to write morality plays without his morals being questioned by sponsors.
In the classic episode The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street (1960), Serling offered a blistering satire of the Red Scare - the anti-communist paranoia and witch hunts plaguing America at the time.
When strange happenings suddenly occur in a typical American small town, an imaginative young boy convinces his neighbors that space aliens are behind the events, which are part of their plan to take over the Earth - and that aliens are living in the neighborhood, disguised as humans.
Soon, all the neighbors began to suspect each other of being aliens. Close friends turn on each other as fear and paranoia build to a fever pitch, resulting in an unforgettable climax.
Space aliens were behind the strange happenings after all, conducting an experiment on humans before invading the Earth. The aliens conclude that the best way to conquer humanity is to let the people destroy themselves.
The classic episode Eye of the Beholder (1960) offers more potent social commentary. It opens with a woman, Janet Tyler, about to have the bandages removed from her head following her eleventh plastic surgery. She's filled with anxiety about the results.
We hear her thoughts and learn that she was born with facial deformities that made her an outcast. This is her last chance for a normal life. After the doctor removes her bandages, he breaks the bad news to her in a somber voice - the procedure was a failure.
He hands Janet a mirror and she screams in horror at her reflection. Then the camera reveals that she's actually beautiful - strikingly beautiful. The doctor takes off his surgical mask and we see that he has a hideous, pig-like face. So do the nurses and everyone else.
One of the most potent social commentary episodes is A Quality of Mercy (1961). Set on a Pacific island in August 1945, it found an American officer, Lt. Katell, taking command of a weary platoon led by Sgt. Causarano.
Coming across a group of sick and injured Japanese soldiers holed up in a cave, he orders his men to attack them. Sgt. Causarano tries to talk him out of it, as they can be captured easily. Katell holds firm. He wants to prove himself and earn a promotion.
Telling Causarano he intends to keep killing the enemy until he's ordered to stop killing, Katell plans the attack. Then he drops his binoculars. When he goes to pick them up, he is suddenly transported back in time three years, to another Pacific island.
He is now a Japanese soldier, Lt. Yamuri, and his company captain is planning to attack sick and injured American soldiers holed up in a cave. Yamuri tries to talk him out of it, but the captain chides him and says that he will keep killing the enemy until he's ordered to stop.
Relieved of command and ordered to prepare for attack, Lt. Yamuri reaches for his binoculars and is transported back to 1945. He's Lt. Katell again, and his radio man tells him that an atomic bomb has been dropped on Japan and their orders are to wait for the response.
"Well, I wouldn't fret," a sarcastic Sgt. Causarano quips. "There'll be other caves, and other wars, other human beings you can knock off." Lt. Katell stares somberly at the cave and says, "I hope not. God help us, I hope not."
Serling himself appeared in every episode of The Twilight Zone to introduce the story at the beginning and sum up the moral of the story at the end. He also provided the classic opening narration scored to eerie music:
You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead. Your next stop - the Twilight Zone.
Rod Serling personally wrote 92 of the series' 156 episodes. Among the other writers who penned episodes of The Twilight Zone were Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Earl Hamner Jr., and Reginald Rose. The cast of guest stars appearing on the show was a who's who list of great actors and actresses.
During its original TV run, The Twilight Zone had a strong following of fans, but only performed moderately in the ratings. During its syndication runs in the 1970s and 80s, it became a late night TV staple, earned new generations of fans, and became a cultural phenomenon.
The series would be revived several times with new episodes, including remakes of the Rod Serling originals, but nothing can equal or eclipse the brilliance of the original Twilight Zone, which is now available in its entirety on DVD, Blu-Ray, and streaming services.
After The Twilight Zone ended, Serling created and wrote a Western series called The Loner, which only lasted for one season, from 1965-1966, due to poor reviews and low ratings.
In 1970, Rod Serling returned to TV with a new series called Night Gallery. A horror anthology series, each episode would open with Serling in a sinister art gallery, unveiling a painting related to the story. The pilot movie was co-directed by a young Steven Spielberg.
Serling wrote over a third of the series' scripts. Despite the solid writing and performances, Night Gallery only ran for three years. The ratings were never good and Serling had tired of the constant battles over his scripts, this time with network executives instead of commercial sponsors.
In between his work on his TV series, Rod Serling taught writing, drama, and film classes at various universities. After Night Gallery ended, he taught at Ithaca College until he died of a heart attack in 1975 at the age of 50.
Quote Of The Day
"The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time."
- Rod Serling
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 1968 interview of Rod Serling on the Library of Congress TV series. Enjoy!
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