Notes For March 25th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 25th, 1925, the famous American writer Flannery O'Connor was born. She was born Mary Flannery O' Connor in Savannah, Georgia. She described herself as "a pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex."

When she was six years old, she taught her pet chicken to walk backwards. The story made the local news, then was picked up Pathe News for one of its national newsreels. O'Connor and her chicken appeared in a newsreel segment titled Little Mary O'Connor and Her Trained Chicken.

When she was fifteen, her father died of lupus, a hereditary disease that ran in the O'Connor family. She was devastated by the loss. She graduated from the Peabody Laboratory School in 1942 and went on to earn a Social Sciences degree at the Georgia State College for Women, now known as Georgia College State University.

A year later, in 1946, she was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she had enrolled to study journalism. While in the Writers' Workshop, she became friends with some important writers and critics who taught there, including Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, and Paul Engle.

Writer and essayist Andrew Lytle, also the longtime editor of the Sewanee Review, was an early admirer of Flannery O'Connor's work. He published her short stories and others' essays on her work.

Poet and novelist Paul Engle, the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was the first to read and critique the early drafts of what would become O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood (1952).

Flannery O'Connor's writings were heavily influenced by her experiences growing up a liberal Catholic in the fiercely conservative, fundamentalist Protestant "Bible Belt" of the American South. Her style was a unique form of Southern Gothic.

Her backward (often grotesquely backward) Southern characters would undergo a transformation bringing them close to her way of thinking. She didn't shy away from controversial subjects such as racism, poverty, and the dangers of fundamentalism.

O'Connor was best known as a master of the short story, foreshadowing and irony her trademarks. She published two short story collections, A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge, published posthumously in 1965 - a year after her death.

The title story of A Good Man is Hard to Find was her most famous and brilliant short story. In it, an unnamed old woman accompanies her son Bailey and his family on their vacation to Florida. She really wants to go to Georgia to see her childhood home, and pesters Bailey until she gets her way.

The old woman's directions lead the family down an abandoned dirt road, and she realizes that her childhood home is in Tennessee, not Georgia. Frustrated, she spooks her cat, which attacks Bailey and causes him to have an accident. No one is seriously injured.

Not wanting to face Bailey's wrath, the old woman fakes an injury to gain sympathy. The family waits for a passerby to help them. A car pulls up and some men get out. One is a shirtless, bespectacled man with a gun.

He seems to be a good Samaritan, but the old woman recognizes him as an escaped murderer called The Misfit. When she identifies him as The Misfit, he tells his accomplices to murder the family. The old woman begs for her own life and tries to preach to him about Jesus.

This makes him angrier, and he tells her that he doesn't want to waste his life serving someone who may not exist, nor does he want to displease a God who may exist. Frustrated by this paradox, his philosophy is "There's no pleasure but meanness."

When the old woman reaches out to The Misfit and calls him her child, he recoils and shoots her three times. After his accomplices murder the rest of the family, The Misfit cleans his glasses and thinks about the old woman.

He sums her up by saying that "she would have been a good woman... if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." When one of his accomplices mentions how much fun they had killing the family, The Misfit angrily chides him, saying "It's no real pleasure."

Another one of Flannery O'Connor's great stories was The Life You Save May Be Your Own. It told the haunting tale of an old woman so desperate to marry off her mute daughter Lucynell that she ends up paying a poor drifter to marry the girl.

Although mute and simple, Lucynell is so beautiful that when a young man sees her asleep at a diner counter, he comments that "She looks like an angel of God." Her husband abandons her, then later, while driving as a storm is breaking, he notices a road sign that says "Drive carefully - the life you save may be your own."

O'Connor's novels took her distinctive style even further, painting dark portraits of religion and faith. Wise Blood (1952) was a dark comedy about an American soldier, Hazel Motes, who returns home after serving in Korea.

He carouses with a prostitute, then embarks on a new career path - after meeting some religious hucksters, he decides to become one himself. His war experiences convinced him that the only way to escape sin is to have no soul.

So, Motes founds the "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ," casting himself in the role of prophet. He begins to believe in his own false prophecy, which leads to his tragic and surreal downfall.

The Violent Bear It Away (1960) told an even darker story of the perversion of religion and faith. The novel opens with the death of Mason Tarwater, an insanely religious old man. Tarwater had been grooming his great-nephew Francis (whom he kidnapped shortly after he was born) to be a prophet.

After Tarwater dies, Francis goes to stay with his anti-religious uncle Rayber. Despite Rayber's intentions and Francis's own determination to resist his calling, the boy can't escape the fact that he's losing his mind.

Francis ultimately accepts his "destiny" to become a prophet and goes completely mad - both of which occur after he is drugged and raped by a man who had given him a ride.

In 1951, Flannery O'Connor was diagnosed with lupus - the disease that killed her father. The doctors gave her five years to live, but she lived for fourteen years, writing two novels and over two dozen short stories.

She also wrote over a hundred book reviews which appeared in two local Catholic newspapers. She died of lupus complications in 1964 at the age of 39. Nearly sixty years after her death, she remains one of America's most celebrated writers.

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Quote Of The Day

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"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, and brutal."

- Flannery O'Connor

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a rare recording of Flannery O'Connor reading her classic short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find. Enjoy!

IWW Members' Publishing Successes For The Week Ending 3/23/25

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Paul S. Fein

I'm thrilled to report that the AIPS Awards annual writing competition longlisted my entries, Are You Not Entertained! and For the Love of the Game. This is the biggest and best sports media competition in the world.

I want to thank the skillful IWW critiquers who improved these articles and made them contest-ready - most notably Irma Navarro, Bill Bartlett, Cathy Moser, Sala Wyman, Sheri McGregor, Ellen Dreyer, Chandrika Radhakrishnan, and Johnny Motley, with an apology to anyone else I may have omitted.

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Notes For March 21st, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 21st, 1556, the famous English writer and cleric Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake. Cranmer, a leader of the English Reformation and the Archbishop of Canterbury, was part of the Oxford Martyrs - three men who were executed by order of Queen Mary I.

The other two Oxford Martyrs were Hugh Latimer, the Bishop of Worcester, and Nicholas Ridley, the Bishop of Rochester. They had all been charged with heresy.

Mary I, England's notorious Catholic queen, would be known as "Bloody Mary" for having over 300 Protestant clerics and reformers executed during her five-year reign.

Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was Queen Mary's most prized target, for he had championed William Tyndale's English language Bible, deemed heretical by the Vatican, which had declared the Latin Bible to be the only true Bible, though the Old Testament was originally written in Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, and the New Testament in Ancient Greek.

Cranmer had also been partly responsible for the Church of England's break with the Holy See by building a case for the divorce of Mary's father, King Henry VIII, from her mother, Catherine of Aragon.

Worst of all, Cranmer had written and compiled the first two editions of The Book of Common Prayer which contained not just prayers but also the complete liturgy of the Anglican Church. This was the ultimate violation of Queen Mary's heresy laws.

The Queen had not originally intended to execute Cranmer; she had a different plan for him which she hoped would result in a huge propaganda coup against the Anglican Church.

First, Cranmer was forced to watch his friends Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley be tried, convicted, and burned at the stake right after the verdicts were delivered.

Then, Cranmer himself was tried for heresy and treason. He appealed to Rome to be tried by a papal court instead of the Queen's secular court. His appeal was denied.

After his conviction, he was sent to prison to await execution. He was offered a commutation of his death sentence if he would recant his Protestant faith in writing.

Thomas Cranmer would write not one, not two, but four recantations during the two years he spent in prison. The authorities believed that his fourth recantation was most likely genuine.

He was released to the custody of the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. While living at the Dean's house, Cranmer was counselled by a Dominican friar, Juan de Villagarcia.

Although Cranmer had in writing pledged his loyalty to the English monarchy and recognized the Pope's authority as head of the Church, he had conceded little in the matter of Protestant versus Catholic doctrine, so he was returned to prison.

Two days after a writ for Cranmer's execution was issued, he wrote a fifth recantation which was deemed genuine. He was a broken old man so desperate to save his life that he wrote a sweeping confession.

In his detailed catalog of his sins against the Catholic Church, Cranmer begged for mercy, but Queen Mary would have none. She ordered his execution to take place, though he was told that he could make one final, public recantation to plead for his life. So he wrote one.

Then, the day before his execution, while on the pulpit at University Church to make his final recantation, Thomas Cranmer changed his mind and decided to go out in a blaze of glory - literally.

Instead of delivering a final, ultimate recantation of his Protestant faith, he renounced all of his previous recantations, blasted the Catholic Church, and denounced the Pope.

Cranmer was seized, removed from the pulpit, taken to the place where Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were burned at the stake before him, and executed. He put his right hand, which had written his recantations, into the fire before it consumed the rest of his body.

Two years later, Queen Mary I died of influenza at the age of 42. Her successor and half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I, restored the Anglican Church to power, repealed the heresy laws, and brokered a historic settlement between the Anglican and Catholic Churches.

An adapted version of Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer would be designated the new Anglican Church's official liturgy.

The burning of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley would inspire the legendary American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury to write his classic novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953).

The hero, Guy Montag, resists the government's attempts to force him to recant his belief that books shouldn't be burned. Bradbury quotes Latimer's last words to Ridley before their execution:

Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

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Quote Of The Day

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"I have sinned, in that I signed with my hand what I did not believe with my heart. When the flames are lit, this hand shall be the first to burn."

- Thomas Cranmer, his last words

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features the final speech given by Thomas Cranmer before his execution. Note: you'll want to expand this video to full screen. Enjoy!

Notes For March 20th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 20th, 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the classic novel by the legendary American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, was published. Like most novels of the time, it first appeared in a serialized version. It was published by The National Era, an abolitionist magazine.

The author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and her husband, Calvin Stowe, were both ferocious abolitionists and dedicated their home to the Underground Railroad - the famous secret network of safe houses for fugitive slaves traveling en route to free states.

In 1850, Congress, bowing to pressure from the South, tried to tighten the screws on the Underground Railroad by passing the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it illegal for people - even those in free states - to help fugitive slaves.

The law also compelled local law enforcement to arrest fugitive slaves and provide assistance to the vicious bounty hunters privately hired to track runaway slaves.

The free states reacted with outrage to the Fugitive Slave Act, which resulted in gross abuses. Many openly defied it. Several free states passed laws granting personal liberties, including the right to a fair trial, to fugitive slaves.

Wisconsin's state Supreme Court declared the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional. The law failed to disrupt the Underground Railroad; by the time it was passed, the network had become far more efficient. Afterward, it grew as the unjust law inspired scores of moderate abolitionists to become passionate activists.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was written as a response to the Fugitive Slave Act - to educate people about the horrors of slavery. The novel told the unforgettable story of a kind and noble slave whose faith and spirit cannot be broken by the evils of slavery.

The novel opens on a Kentucky farm owned by Arthur and Emily Shelby, who like to think that they're kind to their slaves. However, when he needs money, Arthur has no problem selling two of his slaves without regard to where they might end up.

The slaves are Uncle Tom, a wise and compassionate middle-aged man, and Harry, the son of Emily's maid, Eliza. The Shelbys' son George, who looked upon Uncle Tom as a friend and mentor, hates to see him go.

Uncle Tom and Harry are sold to a slave trader and shipped by riverboat down the Mississippi. While on the boat, Uncle Tom strikes up a friendship with Eva, a little white girl. When she falls into the river, he saves her life.

Her grateful father, Augustine St. Clare, buys Uncle Tom from the slave trader and takes him to his home in New Orleans. There, the friendship between Uncle Tom and Eva deepens. Sadly, Eva becomes severely ill and dies - but not before sharing her vision of heaven.

Moved by how much Uncle Tom meant to Eva, her father vows to help him become a free man. His racist cousin Ophelia is moved to reject her prejudice against blacks. Unfortunately, Augustine St. Clare is killed at a tavern, and his wife reneges on his promise to help Uncle Tom.

She sells him at auction to Simon Legree, who owns a plantation in Louisiana. Legree is an evil, perverse, sadistic racist who tortures his male slaves and sexually abuses the women. When Uncle Tom refuses to follow an order to whip another slave, Legree beats him savagely.

The beating fails to break Uncle Tom's spirit or his faith in God. The sight of Uncle Tom reading his bible and comforting other slaves makes Legree's blood boil. He determines to break Uncle Tom and nearly succeeds, as the daily horrors of life on the plantation erode the slave's faith and hope.

Just when it seems that Uncle Tom will succumb to hopelessness, he has two visions - one of little Eva and one of Jesus himself. Moved by these visions, Uncle Tom vows to remain a faithful Christian until the day he dies.

He encourages two fellow slaves, Cassy and Emmeline, to run away. When Simon Legree demands that Uncle Tom reveal their whereabouts, he refuses. A furious Legree orders his overseers to beat Uncle Tom to death.

As he lay dying, Uncle Tom forgives the overseers, which inspires them to repent. George Shelby arrives with money to buy Uncle Tom's freedom. Sadly, it's too late. Uncle Tom dies before he can become a free man.

George returns to his parents' farm in Kentucky and frees their slaves, telling them to always remember Uncle Tom's sacrifice and unshakable faith. That's actually just a bare outline of this classic epic novel.

The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin caused a national uproar. In the North, it was regarded as the bible of abolitionism and inspired many closet abolitionists to come out and join in the fight against slavery.

In the South, the book was regarded as an outrage. It was called utterly false and slanderous - a criminal defamation of the South. Many Southern writers who supported slavery wrote literature dedicated to debunking Harriet Beecher Stowe's expose of the horrors of slavery.

Their writings, called "anti-Tom" literature, portrayed white Southerners as benevolent supervisors of blacks - a helpless, child-like people unable to survive without the direct supervision of their white masters.

To defend herself against the South's accusations of slander and defamation, Stowe wrote and published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), a nonfiction book documenting the horrors of slavery that she both witnessed herself and researched, which inspired her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The book included surprisingly graphic descriptions of the sexual abuse of female slaves, who, in addition to being molested or raped by their white masters and overseers, were also prostituted and forced to "mate" with male slaves to produce offspring that would fetch a good price on the auction block.

When Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared in book form in 1852, it was published in an initial press run of 5,000 copies. That year, it sold 300,000 copies. Its London edition sold 200,000 copies throughout the United Kingdom. It became a hit throughout Europe as well.

Ironically, by the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, the book was out of print in the United States, as Stowe's original publisher had gone out of business. She found another publisher, and when the book was republished in 1862, the demand for copies soared.

That same year, Harriet Beecher Stowe was invited to Washington D.C. to meet with President Abraham Lincoln, who supposedly said to her, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

The novel would be adapted many times for the stage, screen, radio, and television. In the 20th century, Uncle Tom's Cabin courted a new controversy that continues to this day. African-American activists have accused the abolitionist novel of being racist itself, with its use of racial stereotypes and epithets.

These accusations, like the accusations of racism leveled against Mark Twain's classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), come from a failure to place the novel in its proper historical context and consider its overall message.

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Quote Of The Day

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"I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation."

- Harriet Beecher Stowe on her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Enjoy!

Notes For March 19th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 19th, 1933, the famous American writer Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey. His parents were of Ukrainian-Jewish descent. Roth graduated from Newark's Weequahic High School in 1950. He attended Bucknell University and earned a degree in English.

For his graduate studies, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he earned a Master's degree in English and worked briefly as an instructor in the university's creative writing program.

Roth continued his teaching career, teaching creative writing at the University of Iowa and Princeton University. Later, he would teach comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania until he retired in 1991.

While at the University of Chicago, Roth met legendary novelist Saul Bellow and Margaret Martinson, who would become his first wife. Though they separated in 1963 and she was killed in a car accident five years later, she would have a huge impact on his writings and inspire female characters in several of his novels.

Philip Roth began his writing career by publishing short stories and reviews in various magazines. He reviewed movies for The New Republic. In 1959, his first book was published, and it established him as a major talent.

Goodbye, Columbus contained the title novella and five short stories, all of which were steeped deep in Judaism - specifically, Jewish American culture and customs.

The title novella told the story of Neil Klugman, an intelligent college graduate who has remained a poor, working class Jew with a low-paying job. He works at a library and lives with his aunt and uncle.

Neil falls in love with Brenda Patimkin, a student at Radcliffe who comes from a wealthy Jewish family. What begins as a simple summer romance evolves into a complex story of existential angst, as class differences begin to derail Neil and Brenda's relationship.

Goodbye, Columbus won Roth the National Book Award and was adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1969, starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw as Neil and Brenda. Though celebrated by critics and most readers, some Jewish groups objected to Roth's less than flattering portrayal of certain Jewish characters.

In the short story Defender of the Faith, a Jewish American Army sergeant resists when three lazy draftees try to manipulate him into granting them special favors because they are fellow Jews.

In 1962, Philip Roth and the acclaimed black novelist Ralph Ellison appeared on a panel to discuss minority representation in literature. The questions directed at Roth soon turned into denunciations, and he was accused of being a self-loathing Jew.

The label dogged him for most of his career, but Roth would strike back at his Jewish critics with his classic 1969 novel, Portnoy's Complaint, a scathing, raunchy black comedy. It's an experimental novel that takes the form of one long monologue.

The neurotic, middle-aged Alexander Portnoy rants to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel, in a monologue loaded with neuroses, complexes, and of course, sexual hang-ups. He rages at his inability to enjoy sex.

Portnoy is a self-loathing Jew who rages at the injustice of having to grow up Jewish in a gentile dominated country full of anti-Semitism. He rages at his overbearing mother, which burdens him with the heavy chains of guilt. But it's sex that frustrates him most of all.

As a teenager, Portnoy masturbated excessively, not out of lust, but as a form of narcissism. Both attracted to and repelled by gentile women, he uses and abuses them and gives them demeaning nicknames such as "the Pumpkin" and "the Monkey."

Portnoy's absurdly funny sexual exploits are described graphically - so graphically that the novel proved to be quite a shocker for readers in 1969. The book was banned in Australia. When publisher Penguin Books defied the ban and secretly printed copies of the book, the authorities tried to prosecute them and failed.

Philip Roth would write many more great novels. He was most famous for his series of Zuckerman novels, which are narrated by Roth's alter ego, Jewish writer Nathan Zuckerman. The first Zuckerman book was The Ghost Writer, published in 1979.

His 1997 Zuckerman novel, American Pastoral, won him the Pulitzer Prize. In it, Zuckerman attends his 45th high school reunion and runs into his old friend, Jerry Levov, who tells him the tragic life story of his older brother, Seymour "Swede" Levov, who recently died.

Most of the story deals with the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 70s, as Swede's teenage daughter Merry protests the horrors of the Vietnam War by becoming a domestic terrorist and bombing a post office. Years later, she remains in hiding.

American Pastoral was adapted as a feature film in 2016, directed by Ewan McGregor, who also starred in it with Jennifer Connelly and Dakota Fanning.

Other Roth novels of note include The Human Stain (2000), where Nathan Zuckerman tells the story of his new neighbor Coleman Silk, a 71-year-old college professor who falls victim to an unjust accusation.

Silk is accused of racism by two black students, which leads to his resignation. It's later revealed that Silk is actually a light-skinned black man who, for most of his life, has been passing himself off as a white Jew to escape racist persecution.

The Human Stain was adapted as a film in 2003. Directed by Robert Benton, it starred Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk and Gary Sinise as Nathan Zuckerman.

The Plot Against America (2004) is a fascinating piece of "what if" historical fiction. In it, conservative aviation hero Charles Lindbergh (in real life an anti-Semite and Hitler supporter) defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election and becomes President of the United States.

As Lindbergh establishes a cordial relationship with Hitler and keeps the U.S. out of the war, American Jews - including Roth's family - worry what will become of them.

One of Lindbergh's top cronies is car magnate Henry Ford, who in real life was a virulent anti-Semite and the author of a racist nonfiction book called The International Jew - the World's Foremost Problem (1920).

The Plot Against America was adapted as an HBO miniseries in 2020. Created and written by David Simon and Ed Burns, it starred Winona Ryder, Morgan Spector, and John Turturro.

In addition to his novels and short stories, Roth wrote nonfiction works, including an autobiography. His final novel, Nemesis, was released in October of 2010. Set in 1944, it told the story of a Jewish community in Newark, New Jersey struggling to cope with a polio epidemic.

Philip Roth died in May of 2018 at the age of 85.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts."

- Philip Roth

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a full length BBC documentary on Philip Roth. Enjoy!

Notes For March 18th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 18th, 1932, the legendary American writer John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. As a young boy, he would watch his mother - an aspiring writer - as she wrote short stories and tried to get them published:

One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk.... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in – and come back in.

Updike served as class president and graduated high school as valedictorian. He won a full scholarship to Harvard, where he frequently contributed articles and drawings to the Harvard Lampoon, later serving as its president until he graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with an English degree.

Instead of writing, he decided to become a graphic artist and enrolled at The Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford. His wife, Mary Pennington, whom he married a year earlier, went to England with him.

When they returned to the U.S., Updike planned to become a cartoonist, and was soon a frequent contributor of both cartoons and short stories to The New Yorker. His first published books were The Carpentered Hen (1958), a poetry collection, and The Same Door (1959), a collection of short stories.

In 1960, Updike and his family moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he would write his first novel, the first in a highly acclaimed series. It was called Rabbit, Run (1960). It told the story of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a 26-year-old kitchen gadget salesman.

Rabbit is desperate to escape the confines of an unhappy marriage and an unfulfilling middle class life. A former high school basketball player, he impulsively decides to visit Marty Tothero, his old coach.

He has dinner with Tothero and two girls, one of which is Ruth Leonard, a part-time prostitute with whom he has an affair. Rabbit abandons Ruth when his pregnant wife goes into labor. After his baby daughter is born, he reconciles with his wife, but it doesn't last, and he returns to Ruth.

His alcoholic wife starts drinking again, and accidentally drowns the baby. Rabbit tries to reconcile with her once more, but at the funeral of their daughter, his inner turmoil explodes. Proclaiming his innocence in the baby's death, Rabbit runs away and returns to Ruth.

When she tells him that she's pregnant with his child, he's relieved that she decided not to have an abortion, but he won't divorce his wife. He seemingly abandons Ruth yet again, but his fate is unclear as the novel ends.

Updike followed it with three sequels: Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990). Rabbit is Rich won him the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Rabbit at Rest won Updike another Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. The 500+ page epic novel, which ends the series with the main character's death, is considered one of his masterworks.

The two award winning sequels made him one of only three writers to win two Pulitzer Prizes. The other writers were William Faulkner and Booth Tarkington.

John Updike would write other great series of novels including the Bech series, the Scarlet Letter Triology, and the memorable Eastwick books - The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and The Widows of Eastwick (2008).

He also wrote over a dozen solo novels, over a dozen short story collections, poetry collections, and nonfiction works. In 2006, he wrote Terrorist, a timely novel about the evils of religious extremism.

It told the story of Amad Ashmawy Mulloy, an American born devout Muslim teenager who lives in New Jersey with his liberal Irish-Catholic mother, whom he both loves and hates.

He struggles to balance his strict religious practice with the modern Western world in which he lives. Amad's only real friend is Jack Levy, his high school guidance counselor - a Jewish man who rejected his own religion.

When Amad develops sexual feelings for a girl, he represses his natural impulses as per the requirements of his Islamic faith. His frustrations lead him down a path of religious extremism.

Fearing that his education in Western schools will strengthen his growing doubt about his religion, he decides to leave school and become a truck driver. His truck driving skills and religious extremism lead to his recruitment by a terrorist cell.

Amad becomes part of their plot to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in New York. On the day of the attack, his accomplices fail to show up at their planned meeting place, so he decides to carry out the suicide mission alone.

Driving a bomb-laden truck, Amad runs into Jack Levy, who begs him not to go ahead with the attack and warns him that the whole plot was a government sting.

Amad's friend and co-conspirator Charlie Chehab was an undercover CIA agent and the other terrorists beheaded him when his cover was blown. Jack also admits to having an affair with Amad's mother.

As he approaches the location of the bombing, Amad finally reconsiders his extremist beliefs and decides that God doesn't want him to kill anyone. He and Jack return home to New Jersey.

John Updike is rightfully considered to be one of the greatest writers of his generation. He won over two dozen awards, including his two Pulitzer Prizes. He died of lung cancer in January 2009 at the age of 76.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable... writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy."

- John Updike

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a 90-minute interview with John Updike on CSPAN-2's Book TV. Enjoy!

Notes For March 14th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 14th, 1916, the famous American playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote was born. He was born Albert Horton Foote, Jr in Wharton, Texas. When he was ten years old, he determined to become an actor.

By the age of sixteen, Foote had convinced his parents to let him go to acting school. So, he moved to California, where he studied at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Two years later, he moved to New York City to continue his studies and begin his acting career in the theater. He scored several minor roles that got him noticed, but good parts were few and far between.

Foote decided that the best way to get good parts was to write his own plays, so he took up play writing. His first play, Wharton Dance, debuted in 1940. It was the first of many plays that were set in his Texas hometown.

Wharton Dance and Foote's other early plays would be produced Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and at many local theaters. He often acted in his own plays. In 1944, he debuted on Broadway with his play Only the Heart.

Although Horton Foote had originally become a playwright to help his acting career along, he found that he got far better reviews for his writing than his acting. So, he decided to become a full time playwright, and spent the rest of the 1940s writing for the theater. He wrote both mainstream and experimental plays.

By 1948, Foote found a new dramatic medium that he could write for, which would allow him to support himself and subsidize his theatrical career. It was called television, and in its golden age, live TV theater was hugely popular.

Foote wrote his first teleplay for the Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse in 1948. He would also write for other celebrated live drama series, including The United States Steel Hour and Playhouse 90, where Rod Serling made his name as a playwright before he created the legendary TV series, The Twilight Zone.

Besides writing original teleplays, Foote also adapted classic novels as teleplays. His skill at adapting novels as teleplays would lead him to become a screenwriter. He would also adapt his own plays for the screen and write original screenplays as well.

In 1962, Foote adapted Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird as a feature film. The movie, which starred Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and featured an incredible performance by 8-year-old Mary Badham as Scout Finch, is rightfully considered one of the greatest films of all time and one of the greatest novel adaptations of all time.

Foote personally recommended a young actor named Robert Duvall for the part of Boo Radley, and Duvall's stunning performance made his name as an actor. Gregory Peck would win the Best Actor Oscar for his role as Atticus Finch.

Horton Foote also won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay Adaptation, but he didn't go to the Oscars ceremony because he was sure that he wouldn't win. It was a mistake that he wouldn't make again.

Years later, in 1984, Foote won another Oscar, for Best Original Screenplay for Tender Mercies, which featured his old friend Robert Duvall as a broken down, has-been country singer struggling to rebuild his troubled personal life. This time, Foote attended the ceremony and accepted his Oscar in person.

Actress Tess Harper, who co-starred as Rosa Lee in Tender Mercies, famously described Horton Foote as "America's Chekhov," saying that "If he didn't study the Russians, he's a reincarnation of the Russians. He's a quiet man who writes quiet people."

The year after his original screenplay for Tender Mercies won him a second Oscar, he was nominated for a third Oscar for his screenplay adaptation of his own play, The Trip to Bountiful, which he wrote in 1962.

Throughout his incredible theatrical career, Horton Foote wrote nearly 60 plays. He was most famous for The Orphans' Home Cycle, a trilogy of plays that were each comprised of three one act plays.

All these works were written between the early 1960s and mid 1990s. They were set in Foote's Texas hometown and took place between the turn of the 20th century and the early 1930s.

In 1995, Foote brought back characters from The Orphans' Home Cycle for a new play called The Young Man From Atlanta that would win him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Horton Foote died in March of 2009, ten days short of his 92nd birthday. The following year, the last feature film he wrote was released. It was called Main Street.

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Quote Of The Day

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"I've redone plays of mine and made changes. A play is a living thing, and I'd never say I wouldn't rewrite years later. Tennessee Williams did that all the time and it's distressing, because I'd like the play to be out there in its finished form. And then you also have new interpretations. At the same time, you do realize how much you are at the mercy of your interpreters."

- Horton Foote

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features the first part of a 3+ hour interview with Horton Foote. Enjoy! Note: you can watch the whole interview on this site.