This Day In Writing History
On March 31st, 1836, The Pickwick Papers - the first novel by legendary British writer Charles Dickens, was published. Like most novels of the time, it first appeared in a serialized format, published in twenty monthly installments. When the first installment was published on this date, only 400 copies were printed. By the time the 15th installment came out, it was being published in press runs of 40,000 copies.
Originally titled The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, the novel had originally been commissioned by publishers Chapman and Hall as captions to accompany humorous drawings by illustrator Robert Seymour. Although he wasn't their first choice, the publishers' senior editor had been impressed by Dickens' earlier collection of serialized writings, Sketches by Boz, which had also been written to accompany illustrations. Sketches combined non-fiction articles with short stories. Dickens was just 21 years old when he wrote them.
His Pickwick writings were also originally published under the pseudonym Boz, which he had used for his earlier work. Boz was the childhood nickname Dickens had given his brother Augustus.
Robert Seymour had conceived the original idea for Pickwick, but creative control of the series went to Charles Dickens, who took the idea and improved on it vastly. Seymour had previously suffered a nervous breakdown after a nasty row with Gilbert A'Beckett, editor of Figaro in London magazine. The conflict, over money owed Seymour and the illustrator's parody of another writer's work, resulted in Seymour resigning and A'Beckett mounting a cruel public smear campaign against him. The illustrator returned to work after A'Beckett was replaced as editor.
Now, Seymour found himself in another bad situation. His original idea for Pickwick had been given to someone else, who made it his own and improved it. Seymour was never given credit for his creative input, and to add insult to injury, he wasn't even credited as illustrator. The publisher listed the byline as "Edited by Boz with Illustrations." Before the second installment of Pickwick was completed, a distraught Seymour committed suicide with his shotgun.
Seymour's widow publicly blasted Charles Dickens and the publishers, claiming that the first two installments of Pickwick were her husband's idea, i.e., that he told Dickens what to write. Actually, the opposite was true. Dickens had creative control, and Robert Seymour had struggled to come up with illustrations to compliment Dickens' writing, frustrating the author to the point that he advertised for a new illustrator. After Seymour's death, Dickens took over as editor of the publication and saved it from bankruptcy.
Scholars have agreed that although Robert Seymour came up with the original idea for The Pickwick Papers, if he'd had creative control over the series, the final product would have been completely different and nowhere near as successful. It was Charles Dickens' distinctive style of writing that made the novel what it was. When The Pickwick Papers was issued in book form, the publishers defended themselves and Dickens with the following disclaimer:
"Mr. Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word to be found in this book. Mr. Seymour died when only twenty-four pages of this book were published, and when assuredly not forty-eight were written... all of the input from the artist was in response to the words that had already been written.” Taking a final pot shot at the troubled illustrator, the disclaimer goes on to say “that he took his own life through jealousy, as it was well known that Seymour’s sanity had been questioned.”
Since suicide was considered a disgraceful, scandalous act by Victorian society and a felo de se (felony to self) by the law, Seymour was denied a Christian burial, his estate went to the government, and his widow could receive no royalties for his work on The Pickwick Papers.
Despite the controversy surrounding its conception, The Pickwick Papers made Charles Dickens' name as a novelist. His second novel would make him a legend. It was named after its main character - a poor orphan boy called Oliver Twist.
Quote Of The Day
"'I am ruminating,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'on the strange mutability of human affairs.' 'Ah! I see — in at the palace door one day, out at the window the next. Philosopher, Sir?' 'An observer of human nature, Sir,' said Mr. Pickwick. 'Ah, so am I. Most people are when they've little to do and less to get.'" - Charles Dickens, from The Pickwick Papers
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a reading from Charles Dickens' classic first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Enjoy!
This Day In Writing History
On March 30th, 1820, the famous British children's book writer Anna Sewell was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England. She was born into a devoutly religious Quaker family. She had one sibling, a younger brother named Philip.
As a young girl, Anna Sewell was mostly educated at home by her mother, who established a strict regime of schooling heavily influenced by her religious beliefs. When Anna was twelve, her family moved to Stoke Newington, where she began her formal education. For the first time, she was able to study subjects new to her, such as mathematics and foreign languages.
Two years later, at the age of fourteen, Anna took a nasty fall while walking home from school. She severely injured both her ankles, and since medicine in 1834 was primitive, she never received proper treatment. As a result, she would remain practically lame for the rest of her life, unable to stand without a crutch or walk more than a few steps.
In 1836, Anna's father took a job in Brighton, partly because he hoped the climate there would strengthen his daughter's health. Meanwhile, Anna used horse-drawn carriages to get around, which led her to develop a love of horses and a strong belief in the humane treatment of animals.
Anna Sewell's first introduction to professional writing was through her mother, who was a children's book writer. Mary Wright Sewell had written a series of evangelical children's books that was quite popular during its time. Another of her books, a poetry collection called Mother's Last Words, sold millions of copies. Anna would often help edit her mother's manuscripts.
Later, when she was a grown woman, Anna met many writers, artists, and philosophers as she traveled throughout Europe, visiting spas in an attempt to improve her health. Unfortunately, her health would continue to deteriorate.
Anna would return to England and settle in Old Catton, a village outside of Norwich in Norfolk. She contracted tuberculosis, and her health would decline to the point that she was often bedridden. In 1871, at the age of 51, she began work on a novel - partly to pass the time, partly to inspire those who worked with horses to be kind to the animals. At the time, horses were often beaten by their owners and forced to pull wagons and carriages that were overloaded. As a result, many horses died on their feet from exhaustion - still wearing their harnesses.
To make carriage horses look attractive, some cruel fashions were employed, such as docking, where a horse's tail would be cut short, causing the animal great pain and leaving it vulnerable to insect bites and stings. Another cruel fashion was the bearing rein, which held the horse's head toward its chest. This gave the horse's neck a graceful arc, but it also left the animal unable to breathe properly, which resulted in respiratory problems. The bearing rein also caused horses to suffer from very poor vision and loss of balance.
Anna Sewell completed her novel six years later, in 1877. She struggled to write it, but was determined to finish it. When she was too weak to write, she dictated to her mother. When the novel was completed, Anna sold it to a publisher, Jarrolds, for £40. Although she never intended it to be a children's book, Black Beauty would rightfully be considered one of the greatest works of children's literature ever written.
Black Beauty is a novel in the form of a memoir - the autobiography of a black stallion named Black Beauty. Beginning with his carefree childhood as a colt on an English farm, he tells the story of his life. Most poignant are his recollections of his hard life in London, where he pulled taxicabs for a living. Black Beauty tells many tales of cruelty and kindness as he chronicles his life, ending his story on a bright note as he retires to a happy life in the country.
Anna Sewell's eye for detail - specifically, her extensive and accurate descriptions of the behavior of horses - gives the novel a great sense of realism, despite the fact that it's a story narrated by a horse. Her descriptions of the hard life of working horses led to reforms benefiting horse-drawn taxi drivers so they wouldn't have to work the animals so hard to make a decent living.
The initial sales of Black Beauty would break current publishing records. The novel would go on to sell over 30,000,000 copies. Sadly, Anna Sewell wouldn't live to see the runaway success of her novel. She died of tuberculosis five months after it was published, in 1878, at the age of 58. Black Beauty would be adapted several times for the screen and television.
Quote Of The Day "There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham." - Anna Sewell
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a reading of the first chapter of Anna Sewell's classic children's novel, Black Beauty. Enjoy!
This Day In Writing History
On March 29th, 1936, the famous American novelist Judith Guest was born in Detroit, Michigan. The famous poet Edgar Guest was her great-uncle. Judith Guest studied English and psychology at the University of Michigan, where she belonged to the Sigma Kappa sorority.
In 1975, Guest wrote her first novel. Having no agent, she decided to sell it herself. Her first two submissions were rejected. The first publisher rejected the novel without comment. The second enclosed a note with her rejection slip saying that "While the book has some satiric bite, overall the level of writing does not sustain interest and we will have to decline it."
The third submission proved to be the charm. An editor at Viking Press immediately bought Guest's novel. It was the first time in over 25 years that Viking had bought and published an unsolicited manuscript. The release of the novel was far from immediate; the editor held it back for eight months, so that it would hit bookstores in July of 1976 - the time of the bicentennial celebration in the United States.
To release this particular novel around the time of the country's 200th birthday was clever, as it told the story of an all-American family that falls apart after its mask of perfection is suddenly ripped off. Ordinary People would become a classic novel and make Judith Guest's name as a writer.
Ordinary People opens with the Jarretts, a wealthy upper class family who live in a big house in an exclusive neighborhood in Lake Forest, Illinois, appearing to have come to terms with the sudden death of oldest son Buck in a sailing accident six months earlier. Then, younger son Conrad, 17, attempts suicide by slashing his wrists. He had been suffering from severe depression, as he was on the boat with Buck when a sudden storm hit.
Conrad's parents, Cal and Beth, commit him to a psychiatric hospital. After eight months of treatment, he returns home and goes back to school, but his unresolved issues threaten his sanity. His father, Cal, encourages him to see a therapist. Resistant at first, Conrad agrees to therapy and begins seeing Dr. Tyrone Berger, an eccentric psychiatrist. He begins to open up and Dr. Berger helps him work through his issues.
Conrad's issues include survivor's guilt and an apathetic mother. Beth Jarrett has an anal-retentive "type A" personality and is maniacally devoted to perfection. Determined to be the perfect wife and mother, she keeps a perfect house and had built a perfect family. But that perfection was shattered when Buck died, and now she is incapable of grieving for him, feeling for her troubled surviving son, or dealing with the fact that her perfect life has been shattered.
Beth's husband, Cal, a tax attorney, grew up in an orphanage after losing his mother at the age of 11. He never knew his father. Becoming successful and wealthy after enduring a poor and unhappy childhood is a source of great pride to Cal. He always believed himself lucky, but now that his family is falling apart, he begins wonder who and what he really is and where his life is headed. To add to his mid life crisis, his wife Beth has become cold, distant, and frigid. His marriage is crumbling.
The experimental narrative switches between Cal and Conrad's points of view and includes interior monologues and stream-of-consciousness narration. Ordinary People won Judith Guest the Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize for best first novel.
Before the novel hit the bookstores, legendary actor-filmmaker Robert Redford got a hold of a preview edition. He loved the book, bought the movie rights, and directed the feature film adaptation, which was released in 1980. The highly acclaimed film, which starred Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, and Timothy Hutton, won several Academy Awards. Redford took home the Best Director Oscar for his directorial debut.
With the success of the film, the novel became a subject of study for middle and high school English classes. This led to challenges from some disgruntled parents due to the dark subject matter and a brief sex scene between the troubled, teenage Conrad and his new girlfriend, Jeannine.
Ordinary People would be the first of several novels by Judith Guest that dealt with adolescents in crisis. Her most recent novel, A Tarnished Eye, (2004) was loosely based on a real life crime that took place in her native Michigan. In the novel, the rural community of Blessed, Michigan, is shattered when an entire family - a couple and their four children - are found savagely murdered in their summer home.
The Sheriff, Hugh DeWitt, still reeling from the death of his infant son, must deal with his grief as he tries to solve the killings. There had been a history of conflict between the locals and the rich city folk who come to Blessed to buy up the land for their vacation estates. Could that have been the motivation for such a monstrous crime?
Quote Of The Day
"I wanted to explore the anatomy of depression — how it works and why it happens to people; how you can go from being down but able to handle it, to being so down that you don’t even want to handle it, and then taking a radical step with your life — trying to commit suicide — and failing at that, coming back to the world and having to 'act normal' when, in fact, you have been forever changed." - Judith Guest on her classic novel, Ordinary People.
Vanguard Video
Today's video features the original theatrical trailer for the highly acclaimed 1980 feature film adaptation of Judith Guest's classic debut novel, Ordinary People. Enjoy!
I just learned that The Stasi File survived the second cut in the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest in the general fiction category to the 250 quarter finalists out of the original 5,000 submissions. Keep your fingers crossed for the next tough cut down to the 50 semi finalists.
I was interviewed on the Work at Home network about starting a freelance writing business.
Mira Desai
I'm glad to announce that the Spring 2011 issue of The Massachusetts Review features my translated story, "Lines on the Wall." The original story in Gujarati, "Bhoosavu," was written by Pravinsinh Chavda.
Grateful to Practice group, IWW as always.
Lynne Hinkey
My review of Raising Elijah is up at the Internet Review of Books. Fans of horror novels - this is for you! One of the best written, most balanced (yes, this IS the balanced perspective) reviews of the environmental issues threatening our children I've read.
Thanks to everyone at IRB for herding all the reviewer-cats!
My essay, "Kingfisher," recently critiqued on the Nonfiction list, has been accepted by Bluestem magazine (formerly known as Karamu). I wrote "Kingfisher" a couple of years ago. It's had a number of rewrites, and it took a bit to find the thread, but now it has a home and I'm very happy.
By the way, the editor at Bluestem, Lania Knight, has been great to work with. No changes requested, and I'm now trying to record a reading of the piece. It will go live in their June online issue.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all those on NF who read it and made suggestions. IWW rocks!
Behlor Santi
Healthy U, the magazine that accepted my kidney bean article, has just accepted another one of my pieces! In fact, I will publish articles back to back, in April 2011 and May 2011. My article this time is about the joys of Greek yogurt... Chobani or Fage, take your pick.
Anita Saran
I feature in a nationally distributed newspaper today. The subject is e-publishing. It's quite the rage in India, too.
A new site, Eric's Hysterics, featuring humor, has accepted my nonfiction piece, "My Left Foot," which I wrote with the Practice group. No word when the story will be published.
My story, "Harold's Eulogy," is up at Every Day Fiction. Thanks to Fiction for help with this one.
This is a different Yahoo than usual. IWW's Mona, (Montana Scribbler), has featured me on her website. Amazingly, she's collected my Yahoos through the years. I'm genuinely flattered. (See March 21.)
Apollo's Lyre has accepted three of my stories, "Waiting," "The Winter Coat" and "The Photograph," for their Bouquet of shorts section. Each story is under 250 words. The stories will appear in the June issue.
Birmingham Arts Review, a print publication, has accepted my story, "The Marriage Counselor," for their April issue.
Jack Shakely
This is a modified, mini-yahoo. Call it my 50-word nonfiction sports piece.
My letter praising Duke Snyder and his fans appears in this week's issue of Sports Illustrated.
This Day In Writing History
On March 25th, 1925, the famous American writer Flannery O'Connor was born. She was born Mary Flannery O' Connor in Savannah, Georgia. O'Connor 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.
O'Connor 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.
A master in the arts of foreshadowing and irony, O'Connor was best known for her short stories. 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 of them is a shirtless, bespectacled man with a gun. He seems to be a good Samaritan, but the old woman realizes that he's actually 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 The Misfit 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. They both painted dark portraits of religion and faith. Wise Blood (1952) was a dark comedy about an American soldier, Hazel Motes, who returns home from Korea. After carousing with a prostitute, Motes embarks on a new career path - after meeting some religious hucksters, he decides to become one himself. Motes' war experiences convinced him that the only way to escape sin is to have no soul. So, he founds the "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ." 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' 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 gave 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. 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. More than forty years after her death, she remains one of America's most celebrated writers.
Quote Of The Day
"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
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a unusual student short film adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's classic short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find. Enjoy!
This Day In Writing History
On March 24th, 1955, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the famous play by legendary American playwright Tennessee Williams, opened on Broadway. The play focused on a Southern family in crisis - the affluent Pollitt family, which hides its dark secrets under a cloak of respectability. The extended family has gathered to celebrate the 65th birthday of patriarch Big Daddy Pollitt, the richest cotton grower in the Mississippi Delta.
The family knows that Big Daddy is dying of cancer and won't live to see another birthday, but have conspired to keep him (and his wife, Big Mama) from finding out about his terminal condition. All of Big Daddy's kin ingratiate themselves to him, hoping to receive the lion's share of his huge estate when he dies - all of them except indifferent son Brick Pollitt, who, along with his wife Maggie (the Cat), are having serious marital problems.
Brick is an aging, injured, detached alcoholic ex-football hero who neglects his wife and spends most of his time drinking and railing against mendacity. A desperate Maggie reveals to Brick that she had an affair with his best friend Skipper, even though she knew that Skipper was secretly gay.
Suspecting that her husband might also be gay, Maggie seduced Skipper to prevent anything from happening between the two men. The affair drove Skipper to drink and suicide. A disgusted Big Daddy has similar suspicions. He accuses Brick of drinking to escape his guilt over not saving Skipper from suicide - because he and Skipper were more than just best friends.
Furious, Brick reveals that Big Daddy is dying. Maggie, knowing that the old man never made out a will, panics and fears that he'll disinherit Brick. She escaped a miserable childhood of grinding poverty and despair when she married into the rich Pollitt family, and the prospect of being poor again terrifies her. So, she falsely claims to be pregnant to win her father in-law's sympathy.
Later, Maggie throws away Brick's liquor, telling him “We can make that lie come true. And then I'll bring you liquor, and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into!”
The original Broadway production was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Ben Gazzara as Brick, Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie, and legendary folksinger-actor Burl Ives as Big Daddy. Gazzara's understudy was a young actor named Cliff Robertson, who would go on to become a star of stage, screen, and television. But when Gazzara left the play, Jack Lord replaced him.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won Tennessee Williams a Pulitzer Prize - his second. He won his first Pulitzer for his famous play, A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1958, three years after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway, a feature film adaptation was released. Directed by Richard Brooks, it starred Paul Newman as Brick and Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie, with Burl Ives and Madeleine Sherwood reprising their Broadway roles as Big Daddy and Big Mama.
Unfortunately, due to the stifling Hollywood Production Code in effect at the time, the screenplay toned down Tennessee Williams' play considerably, removing all the sexual elements of the story. Richard Brooks was not the studio's first choice to direct the film; it had been offered to George Cukor, but he turned it down in disgust after reading the bowdlerized screenplay.
As for Tennessee Williams' reaction, he hated the movie so much that he told people on line for the premiere not to see it, saying "This movie will set the industry back 50 years. Go home!" Quote Of The Day
"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory." - Tennessee Williams
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a clip from a performance of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - the scene in Act 1 where Maggie confronts Brick. Enjoy!
This Day In Writing History
On March 23rd, 1999, the famous American horror novelist Thomas Harris delivered his completed manuscript for Hannibal to his publishers. It was the third in a series of four novels featuring his most famous character - Dr. Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist, classical music enthusiast, wine connoisseur, and gourmet turned cannibalistic serial killer - who had been terrifying readers for nearly 20 years.
Lecter made his debut in Red Dragon (1981), where he was called on by Will Graham - the FBI agent who captured him - to help profile a new serial killer, Francis Dolarhyde, aka the Red Dragon. The sequel, The Silence of the Lambs (1988) found Lecter called on again, this time by trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling, to help her gain insight into the mind of Buffalo Bill, aka Jame Gumb, a depraved serial killer who has abducted a Senator's daughter.
Although Red Dragon was filmed first in 1986 as Manhunter, (featuring British actor Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecter) it would be the film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 that made Hannibal Lecter a pop culture icon. Stylishly directed by Jonathan Demme and featuring stellar performances by Anthony Hopkins as Lecter, Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, and Ted Levine as Jame Gumb, the film swept the Academy Awards, becoming only the third movie in history to win all five major Oscars - Best Actor (Hopkins), Actress (Foster), Director (Demme), Best Picture, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
After the huge success of The Silence of the Lambs, fans were clamoring for a sequel. It took some ten years for Thomas Harris to deliver. Hannibal was the result. In this novel, Lecter himself is Agent Starling's quarry, as he escaped from custody in The Silence of the Lambs. What Starling doesn't know is that someone else is hunting Lecter.
Mason Verger is a victim of Lecter's who survived. Verger, the wealthy heir to a meat packing empire, was a depraved, sadistic pedophile whose long list of victims included his own little sister. When his father established a Christian summer camp for children, Verger used it to prey on more young victims. When he was finally caught and arrested, Verger avoided jail time because of his family's wealth and power. He was ordered to perform community service and receive therapy. His psychiatrist? Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
The good doctor's idea of therapy was to have Verger take hallucinogenic drugs, manipulate him into demonstrating his technique of autoerotic asphyxiation via hanging, then make him slash his own face to ribbons with a shard of broken glass. Lecter then hanged Verger with his noose, breaking his neck. Verger survived, but was left a quadriplegic with a horribly mangled face. He wants to catch Lecter before Agent Starling does and take revenge. The revenge Verger has planned is a fate worse than death, and he has FBI agents on his payroll - including Starling's superior, Paul Krendler.
Hannibal received mixed reviews because of the ending, which I won't give away. I will say that it does make sense after all that happens to Clarice Starling throughout the novel, and fits in well with the dark surrealism of the story. I for one enjoyed Hannibal immensely. I believe it's the best book Harris has written so far, second only to The Silence of the Lambs. Horror master Stephen King, a big fan of the Hannibal Lecter series, proclaimed Hannibal, along with William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971), to be the two greatest modern horror novels of all time.
Hannibal would be adapted as a feature film in 2001, with Anthony Hopkins returning as Lecter and Julianne Moore taking over the role of Clarice Starling. Directed by Ridley Scott, it received mixed reviews from fans because the screenplay (written by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian) omitted a major character (Mason Verger's sister) and changed the ending of the novel.
To placate fans, the screenwriters did include part of the novel's ending - the famous Grand Guignol scene where Dr. Lecter lobotomizes corrupt FBI agent Paul Krendler and... well... serves him a most unusual dinner. Unfortunately, the most shocking part of the novel's ending - the fate of Clarice Starling - was omitted from the screenplay, which featured a completely different outcome.
Thomas Harris followed Hannibal with a a fourth novel, a prequel called Hannibal Rising (2006), which was published seven years later. Expanding on flashbacks that appeared in Hannibal, it told the dark and chilling story of how a frighteningly intelligent little Lithuanian boy named Hannibal Lecter grew up to be the monster we know and love.
Quote Of The Day
"Problem solving is hunting. It is savage pleasure and we are born to it." - Thomas Harris
Vanguard Video
Today's video features the original theatrical trailer for the 2001 feature film adaptation of Thomas Harris' 1999 novel, Hannibal. Enjoy!
This Day In Writing History
On March 22nd, 1947, the legendary American suspense novelist James Patterson was born in Newburgh, New York. He earned his Master's Degree from Vanderbilt University. In 1985, at the age of 38, Patterson retired from his successful advertising career to write full time.
Before he retired from advertising, Patterson had written three novels. His first, a mystery novel called The Thomas Berryman Number (1976), won him an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. His fifth novel, the first in a classic series of suspense thrillers, was a huge bestseller and established him as one of the greatest suspense novelists of all time.
Along Came a Spider (1993) introduced Patterson's most famous character, Alex Cross, an African-American homicide detective for the Washington, D.C. police. He's also a brilliant forensic psychologist. The novel opens with Cross suddenly pulled off the case he's been working on - the bizarre and savage murder of two black prostitutes - and reassigned to investigate the kidnapping of two students from an exclusive private school.
Cross is angered at being pulled off his double murder case, and feels that the department cares more about rich white children that poor black women. What he doesn't know is that both cases are linked. They are the work of Gary Soneji, a math teacher at the private school the children attended. After a standoff at a McDonald's restaurant, Soneji is captured.
Now, Cross must figure out what he did with the children. Using his skills as a psychologist, Cross hypnotizes Soneji several times and pieces together the horrifying truth. Soneji is a split personality. He is both Gary Murphy, a gentle teacher and loving family man, and Gary Soneji, a vicious, bloodthirsty psychopathic serial killer.
The kidnapping of the children was part of a ransom plot. In order to save the children, Cross must track down Soneji's partners in crime - a task that is complicated when Soneji escapes from prison. He wants to get to his partners - and the ransom money - before Cross does.
Along Came a Spider was adapted as a feature film in 2001, featuring Morgan Freeman as Alex Cross. There are seventeen novels in the Alex Cross series so far, with the 18th, Kill Alex Cross, due for release this year. Another of James Patterson's popular suspense novel series is the Women's Murder Club series.
The first Women's Murder Club novel, 1st To Die, was published in 2001. In it, San Francisco police detective Lindsay Boxer, suffering from severe depression and a life threatening blood disease, is called to the scene of a horrific crime - a young newlywed couple has been viciously murdered in their hotel room on their wedding night, the bride still in her wedding gown.
Covering the story of the crime is Cindy Thomas, a rookie investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Lindsay and Cindy form an unlikely friendship as Lindsay begins tracking down a brutal, twisted serial killer. Soon, two new friends join in - city medical examiner Claire Washburn and Assistant District Attorney Jill Bernhardt. The four ladies decide to pool their talents and resources to help catch the serial killer. The Women's Murder Club is born. So far, there are nine Women's Murder Club novels, with the tenth, 10th Anniversary, due for release this year.
In 2005, James Patterson began a new series of novels in a new genre - young adult fantasy. The series was called Maximum Ride and the first book, The Angel Experiment, introduced the heroine, Maximum "Max" Ride. 14-year-old Max is the leader of The Flock, a group of children ages 6-14 who are winged human-bird hybrids (98% human, 2% bird) created by genetic engineering. In addition to being able to fly, the Flock possesses other powers.
The Flock, which also includes Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gazzy, and Angel, are on the run from the scientists who created them. The scientists have dispatched superhuman assassins called Erasers to kill off The Flock in order to keep their creations a secret. A feature film adaptation of The Angel Experiment is in pre-production and tentatively scheduled for a 2013 release.
In addition to his series novels, James Patterson has written many stand-alone novels. Most of his novels are huge bestsellers. In recent years, he has outsold Stephen King, John Grisham, and Dan Brown - combined. One in 17 hardcover novels sold in the United States is by James Patterson.
Patterson's philanthropic endeavors are geared toward promoting literacy. In 2005, he established the James Patterson Page Turner Awards, which awarded nearly a million dollars a year to schools, institutions, companies, and individuals who encourage people to read. In 2008, Patterson put the Page Turner Awards on hold and began a new initiative, ReadKiddoRead.com, which is for parents, teachers, librarians, and others who want to encourage children to read. The site helps them find the best books for kids and provides information such as lesson plans for teachers and social networking.
James Patterson lives in Palm Beach, Florida, with his wife and son.
Quote Of The Day
"When I write I pretend I'm telling a story to someone in the room and I don't want them to get up until I'm finished." - James Patterson
Vanguard Video
Today's video features James Patterson's appearance at the 2009 National Book Festival. Enjoy!
Congratulations to all our Internet Writing Workshop members who found publishing success this past week!
A great writing week to all.
Jody
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Barry Basden
"The General Will Have His Flowers" has been published in WTF PWM, Issue 3.1.
Thanks to all who helped or commented.
Sue Ellis
I have a new book review at Internet Review of Books, "The Jamestown Experiment," by Tony Williams. The book was a great read and for me, at least, didn't bog down as some historical works can do. Thank you to the great editors at IWW.
Also, "Joey" -- a short story critiqued very recently at Fiction -- is up at The Camel Saloon. Scroll down the page and look in the left-hand column. Wayne is there, too, right above my story.
Thanks again, Fiction, for the great critiques.
I also have a poem, "Misplaced," up at Mused, the Bella Online Literary Journal. I'm in great company with Joanna Weston and Stacey Dye.
My flash piece, "Yard Sale," has been accepted at Apollo's Lyre and is now online.
This was originally for the practice list, so thanks to that group for the feedback. I also wanted to mention that the flash editor at Apollo's Lyre, Jim Harrington, is super nice & was very cool to work with & this story was improved on a bit as a result.
Behlor Santi
My article on the fun and health benefits of kidney beans will appear in the May 2011 edition of Healthy U, a local health magazine from sunny LasCruces, New Mexico.
Read an interview with me about my first novel 'Circe' here.
Wayne Scheer
My short story, "Family Man," is up at Fiction 365. This is a good site with a helpful editor. They publish a different story under 4000 words every day.
I have Sue Ellis to thank for this Yahoo. After reading about her acceptance in The Camel Saloon earlier today, I sent the editor three flashes and he accepted two of them a few hours later. "Haunted by Jack Kerouac's Ghost" is now up, and "The Complexity of Love" will appear in a future issue.
Pill Hill Press has accepted my comic horror flash, "ElectrixLuv Love," for their Everyday Frights 2012 Edition. They are looking for 366 flash horror stories (special leap year edition) for a print anthology.
Jack Shakely
My latest review for ForeWord Review magazine appears in the March/April issue. I hope you enjoy it.
Exercise: In 400 words or less, write a story that uses foreshadowing as a plot device to hint that something is going to happen, then fulfill that hint by the end of the story.
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Foreshadowing is a tool we can use to build interest and suspense, plant a seed in the reader's mind, provide a clue that will keep the reader turning the pages. Foreshadowing can be presented in dialogue, action, or description. It could be an omen or prophecy--a mirror breaking on the first page could presage bad luck, a prediction of a bad end for someone could come true. Foreshadowing might be one small detail or action, or a larger event, as long as it echoes through the plot or a character's development and fulfills itself.
Want to know more about this literary device? In his satiric essay on writing in the journal The Onion, John Grisham gives some good basic advice on foreshadowing. Follow this link to learn and laugh.
So, construct a story of 400 words or less that makes use of foreshadowing to advance the plot or develop a character, or both. Be sure that the foreshadowing comes early in the story and is seen to resolve itself in the end.
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Exercise: In 400 words or less, write a story that uses foreshadowing as a plot device to hint that something is going to happen, then fulfill that hint by the end of the story.
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In critiquing, point out the foreshadowing, tell us whether it was easy to see and whether its promise or threat was carried out. Did the writer use the device skillfully? Was it obvious or was it subtle?
These exercises were written by IWW members and administrators to provide structured practice opportunities for its members. You are welcome to use them for practice as well. Please mention that you found them at the Internet Writing Workshop.
This Day In Writing HistoryOn March 18th, 1932, the legendary American novelist John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. As a young boy, Updike 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 graduated high school as valedictorian and class president. 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.
Rabbit, Run (1960) told the story of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a 26-year-old kitchen gadget salesman desperate to escape the confines of an unhappy marriage and an unfulfilling middle class life. A former high school basketball player, Rabbit impulsively decides to visit his old coach, Marty Tothero. Rabbit 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, Rabbit 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 Rabbit, Run 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 TheWidows of Eastwick (2008). He also wrote over a dozen solo novels, over a dozen short story collections, poetry collections, and non-fiction works.
His last novel, Terrorist (2006), 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 has 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.
Amad's truck driving skills and religious extremism lead to his recruitment by a terrorist cell. He 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 Amad 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 who was beheaded by the other terrorists 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. His works have won him over two dozen awards, including his two Pulitzer Prizes. He died of lung cancer in January 2009 at the age of 76.
Quote Of The Day
"To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client." - John Updike
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 2008 interview with John Updike on the craft of fiction. Enjoy!
This Day In Writing History
On March 17th, 1948, the legendary American science fiction writer William Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina. Though he spent most of his childhood in Wytheville, Virginia - his parents' hometown - Gibson's family moved frequently due to his father's position as a manager for a large construction company.
While his family lived in Norfolk, Virginia, Gibson attended Pines Elementary School, where his teachers never encouraged him to read, much to the chagrin of his parents. Around this time, his father died suddenly, choking to death in a restaurant while on a business trip. The family returned to Wytheville, which was a small Appalachian town, a place that Gibson described as "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent, but was deeply distrusted." He hated it.
Living in such a disturbing and surreal atmosphere led William Gibson to become a shy, withdrawn adolescent who kept to himself. When he was twelve, he "wanted nothing more than to become a science fiction writer." A year later, without his mother's knowledge or permission, he bought an anthology featuring works by the Beat generation's greatest writers - William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs would become Gibson's favorite writer and a major influence on his work.
As a teenager, Gibson rejected his religion and read voraciously, with the works of Burroughs and Henry Miller being his favorites. However, at school, his grades were poor. His mother threatened to send him to a boarding school; to her surprise, he was enthusiastic about going to boarding school. So, she sent him to the Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson.
Gibson hated the structure of the school, but he was glad to escape from Wytheville and his "chronically anxious and depressive" mother. He was also glad that the school forced him to come out of his shell and develop social skills. His academic performance was strangely uneven. When he took the SAT (Standard Achievement Test) exams, his teachers were baffled by his scores - in mathematics, he scored near zero, but his score on the written test was nearly perfect.
When Gibson was eighteen, his mother died. He left school without graduating and drifted through the United States and Europe, choosing a mostly solitary life and becoming part of the late 1960s counterculture. In 1967, he was called to appear at a draft hearing, and honestly told the interviewers that his goal in life was to indulge in every mind-altering substance known to man. He was never drafted, but moved to Canada anyway. He would later quip that he avoided the draft not out of conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, but to remain free to "sleep with hippie chicks" and smoke hashish.
After he arrived in Canada, Gibson met a girl in Vancouver and spent the rest of the 1960s traveling with her, as he couldn't stand living amongst the community of his fellow American expatriates, which was was rife with depression, suicide, and hardcore drug abuse. He financed most of his travels with the $500 he was paid for appearing in a CBC newsreel story about the hippie subculture in Yorkville, Toronto. During their travels, Gibson and and his girlfriend spent time in countries such as Greece and Turkey.
In 1972, Gibson and his girlfriend returned to Canada. They settled in Vancouver and married. Gibson earned most of his living by scouring thrift stores for rare items priced well below their value, which he would resell to collectors at a huge profit. When he realized that instead of working, he could receive generous financial aid from the government by going to college, he enrolled at the University of British Columbia, (UBC) from which he graduated in 1977 with a degree in English.
Gibson considered entering a Master's degree program with the topic of his thesis being hard science fiction novels as a form of fascist literature, but he changed his mind and worked at various jobs including a three-year stint as a teaching assistant in a film history course at UBC. He also indulged in his passion for punk rock music. Around 1980, he attended a science fiction convention in Vancouver, which turned him off the genre, even though he had already written several early works of science fiction.
Around this time, Gibson met John Shirley, who would become his lifelong friend. Shirley was a punk rock musician turned sci-fi / horror writer. He encouraged Gibson to submit his stories for publication and introduced him to fellow sci-fi writers Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner. When they read Gibson's stories, they proclaimed them to be "breakthrough material." So, Gibson began submitting his work, and soon, his short stories were appearing regularly in magazines such as Omni and Universe 11.
William Gibson's stories were indeed breakthrough material, far outside the mainstream of science fiction. They were in the cyberpunk tradition, akin to the legendary "cut-up" novels of Gibson's idol, William S. Burroughs. Gibson's stories dealt with concepts such as cyberspace - a term coined by Gibson which refers to a computer-simulated reality - and were written in the style of the pulp novels and noir films of the 1940s and 50s.
In 1984, Gibson's first novel was published. Neuromancer wasn't a commercial success, but word of mouth spread quickly and made the novel an overnight underground hit - a cult classic that sold over 6,500,000 copies worldwide. It became the first novel to win all three major science fiction awards - the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award.
Neuromancer was the first novel in Gibson's classic Sprawl trilogy. It eerily predicts the development of the Internet and its World Wide Web. Set in a futuristic, dystopic Chiba, Japan, the novel tells the story of Henry Dorsett Case, a low-level hustler who was once a talented computer hacker. Then his employer caught him stealing, and as punishment, damaged his central nervous system with a mycotoxin, leaving him unable to access the global computer network with his brain-computer interface. Now, Case is an unemployable, suicidal drug addict.
While searching for a cure for his damaged nervous system in Chiba's "black clinics," Case is saved by Molly Millions, a "street samurai" and mercenary who works for Armitage, a shadowy ex-Green Beret officer. Armitage offers to cure Case in exchange for his services as a hacker. Armitage fixes Case's nervous system but installs in his body sacs of mycotoxin that will burst if he fails to complete his work in time.
So, Case and Molly work together and form a close relationship. They don't know what Armitage really has planned, but they investigate and eventually discover the truth - he plans to join two AI (Artificial Intelligence) entities, Wintermute and Neuromancer, to become one all-powerful, godlike being.
William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy would include the novels Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). The trilogy brought the author out of obscurity and established him as one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. He would write more great novels, including the Bridge trilogy, Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999) as well as other novels and short stories.
As a short story writer, Gibson was famous for stories such as Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977), and Johnny Mnemonic (1981), which he would adapt himself as a feature film in 1995. In 1993, he wrote his first major non-fiction work, an article for Wired magazine called Disneyland with the Death Penalty, which was a stinging critique of life in modern Singapore.
Gibson describes Singapore as having a government that functions like a mega-corporation and is fixated on constraint and conformity, with a marked lack of creativity and humor. Life in Singapore is a "relentlessly G-rated experience," a conservative Republican wet dream of meticulously clean streets, practically nonexistent crime, (thanks to a harsh capital punishment system where one can be executed for seemingly minor offenses such as drug smuggling) government enforced morality, and a culture of mindless, vapid materialism where shopping becomes a nearly religious experience.
And yet, there are also no slums in Singapore, and instead of a visible sex trade, there are government sanctioned "health centers" which are really massage parlors where one can get far more than a massage. The government places great value on marriage and procreation, and both organizes and enforces mandatory dating policies.
In his 1993 essay, Gibson predicted the explosion of online pornography and cast doubt on the resilience of Singapore's controlled, conservative society in the face of the mass exposure of its citizenry to the coming "wilds of X-rated cyberspace," speculating that "Singapore's destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable weirdness."
Creative Review hailed Gibson's essay as "fabulously damning." Singapore reacted to it with outrage, banning the sale of Wired magazine there. "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" became a famous catch phrase used to describe Singapore - especially by Singaporeans opposed to their country's authoritarian nature and policies.
William Gibson's latest novel, Zero History, was published in September, 2010. It's the third in his Bigend series of novels, which includes Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007).
Quote of the Day
"The deadliest bullshit is odorless and transparent." - William Gibson
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 1980s interview with William Gibson. Enjoy!
This Day In Writing History
On March 16th, 1850, The Scarlet Letter, the legendary novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, was published in the United States.
Set in a Puritan village in 17th century Boston, The Scarlet Letter told the story of Hester Prynne, a married woman whose much older husband had sent her ahead to America while he settled some business affairs. He never came to join her in Boston and is presumed dead, lost at sea. In the meantime, the lonely Hester had an affair and became pregnant as a result.
The novel opens with Hester being led from the town prison with her baby daughter Pearl in her arms and a piece of scarlet cloth in the shape of the capital letter A pinned to the breast of her dress - a penalty for her adultery. It's a badge of shame that she must wear for all to see. Hester is led to the town scaffold, where she is forced to endure the verbal abuse of the town fathers.
An elderly spectator asks what's going on, and a man in the crowd tells him. The elderly spectator is actually Hester's missing husband, who is now a doctor living under the assumed name of Roger Chillingworth. He wants to take revenge on the man who seduced his wife. He reveals his true identity to Hester, but she won't reveal the identity of her lover.
Several years pass, and Pearl has become a willful and impish little girl. Hester supports herself and her daughter by working as a seamstress. Still scorned by the community, they live in a small cottage on the outskirts of Boston. When town officials try to take Pearl away from her mother, the young, eloquent minister Arthur Dimmesdale intervenes to thwart their plans.
Dimmesdale appears to be dying, wasting away from a mysterious heart condition. Chillingworth takes him on as a patient, later moving in with him to provide round-the-clock medical care. The doctor believes that Dimmesdale's condition is psychosomatic, perhaps caused by guilt. He begins to suspect that the minister is his wife's lover. One day, while Dimmesdale sleeps, Chillingworth discovers something that convinces him that his suspicions are correct - supposedly the capital letter A burned into the minister's chest.
Meanwhile, Hester Prynne's kindness, charity, and quiet humility finally earn her a reprieve from public scorn. When she and Pearl return home one night, they find Dimmesdale atop the town scaffold, trying to punish himself for his sins. They join him on the scaffold. The three hold hands, and Pearl asks the minister to publicly acknowledge that she is his daughter. He refuses. A streaking meteor forms a dull letter A in the night sky. Dimmesdale believes it's the sign of adultery, but the townspeople think that it means "angel," as a prominent member of the community died that night.
When Chillingworth refuses to abandon his plan for revenge, Hester tells Dimmesdale that Chillingworth is really her missing husband. The lovers decide to flee with Pearl to Europe, where they can live as a family. They both feel a great sense of release and relief. Hester removes her scarlet letter and lets down her hair. In one of the novel's most striking metaphors, sunlight immediately breaks through the clouds and trees to illuminate Hester's joyous release.
The day before their ship is to sail, Dimmesdale gives his most eloquent sermon ever. Hester finds out that her husband has found out about her plans and booked passage on her ship. When Dimmesdale leaves the church, he sees Hester and Pearl standing before the town scaffold. He impulsively takes them to the top and publicly confesses to being Hester's lover and the father of her child, exposing the mark supposedly seared into his chest. Pearl kisses him. Relieved of his burden, Dimmesdale collapses and dies.
Frustrated over being denied his revenge, a bitter Chillingworth dies a year later, and Hester and Pearl leave Boston. Although she is not his daughter, Pearl inherits all of Chillingworth's money. Many years later, Hester Prynne returns to her old cottage alone and resumes her charity work. She receives letters from Pearl, now married to a European aristocrat and with children of her own. The townspeople finally forgive Hester for her indiscretion, and she - and the other women in town - feel a strong sense of liberation.
The Scarlet Letter is rightfully considered one of the greatest works of 19th century literature, and is still widely read and appreciated. It would be adapted numerous times for the radio, stage, screen, and television. The most famous feature film adaptations were the brilliant 1973 version directed by legendary German filmmaker Wim Wenders, and the dreadful 1995 Hollywood version starring Demi Moore as Hester Prynne - which took great liberties with the novel and was widely - and rightfully - panned by critics.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the greatest writers of his generation. His other great works include the novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and the short story collections Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Tanglewood Tales (1853). He died in 1864 at the age of 59.
Quote Of The Day
"It is beautiful, admirable, extraordinary; it has in the highest degree that merit which I have spoken of as the mark of Hawthorne's best things - an indefinable purity and lightness of conception... one can often return to it; it supports familiarity and has the inexhaustible charm and mystery of great works of art." - Henry James on Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel, The Scarlet Letter.
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a clip from the rare 1926 silent film adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, starring Lillian Gish as Hester Prynne and Lars Hanson as Arthur Dimmesdale. Enjoy!
This Day In Writing History
On March 15th, 1956, My Fair Lady, the acclaimed hit musical based on the play Pygmalion by legendary Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, opened on Broadway. It premiered at the Mark Hellinger Theatre in New York City. The production then moved to the Broadhurst Theatre, and finally, to the Broadway Theatre, where it closed in 1962 after 2,717 performances.
Set in Edwardian London, My Fair Lady told the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics who meets a young flower seller named Eliza Dolittle when she tells off a young man named Freddy Eynsford-Hill for spilling her violets. The ill-mannered Eliza speaks with an ear-torturing Cockney accent, her words filled with slang expressions and colloquialisms.
Professor Higgins makes a wager with his linguist friend Colonel Pickering, betting that Eliza could be taught to speak and act like a proper lady, after which, he will introduce her at the Embassy Ball. Pickering doesn't believe that Higgins can make a lady out of such a vulgar girl.
Eliza moves into Higgins' house and begins taking lessons from him. Her father soon pays a visit, concerned that the Professor is compromising her virtue. Higgins buys him off with five pounds. As Eliza's lessons progress, she grows frustrated and fantasizes about killing Higgins. But soon, the flower seller begins to bloom.
Eliza's first public presentation, at the Ascot Racecourse, proves successful, but then she suffers a relapse, returning to her Cockney vulgarity. This charms Freddy Eynsford-Hill, the young man she had met and scolded earlier. He falls in love with her.
Higgins continues with Eliza's lessons. She faces her final test at the Embassy Ball and passes with flying colors. Afterward, Colonel Pickering praises Higgins for his triumph in making a lady out of Eliza. When she learns of their bet, she feels that Higgins used her and is now abandoning her. Their relationship ends in a huff when Higgins insults Eliza and she storms off.
Soon, even Colonel Pickering becomes annoyed with Higgins, who has always been a self-absorbed misogynist. When Eliza plans to marry Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Higgins realizes that he loves her, but can't bring himself to confess his true feelings to her. The musical ends on an ambiguous note, suggesting a possible reconciliation between Higgins and Eliza.
My Fair Lady became a huge hit, one of Broadway's most famous and popular musicals. It was written by the legendary team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe. The original cast featured Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins, and a young, virtually unknown British actress named Julie Andrews as Eliza. The Original Cast Recording became the best selling album of 1957 and 1958.
George Bernard Shaw died in 1950; he never lived to see the Broadway musical adaptation of his play, Pygmalion. If he had, there wouldn't have been a musical for him to see. In 1908, Shaw's classic play The Chocolate Soldier was adapted as an operetta, and he hated it so much that he vowed that none of his plays would ever be set to music again. He kept that vow for the rest of his life.
In 1964, eight years after the musical debuted on Broadway, My Fair Lady was adapted as a feature film, directed by George Cukor. Rex Harrison reprised his role as Professor Higgins, but producer and studio boss Jack Warner decided to cast Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Dolittle instead of Julie Andrews.
This decision angered fans of the musical, but Warner was concerned that casting Andrews would be risky because she had no film experience. Then he found that Audrey Hepburn couldn't sing, so her vocals had to be dubbed by Marni Nixon. To make matters worse, that same year, Julie Andrews gave an Oscar winning performance in the classic Disney movie musical Mary Poppins - beating Hepburn for the Academy Award!
Quote Of The Day
"All great truths begin as blasphemies." - George Bernard Shaw
Vanguard Video
Today's video features the original theatrical trailer for the 1964 feature film adaptation of My Fair Lady. Enjoy!
This Day In Writing History
On March 11th, 1916, the famous American children's book writer and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was born Jacob Ezra Katz; his poor Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Benjamin and Augusta Katz, called him Jack. As a little boy, it became evident that he was artistically gifted. In 1924, when he was eight years old, he painted a sign for a local storekeeper and was paid twenty-five cents for it.
Jack soon developed a passion for fine arts, and his dream was to become an artist. His mother was delighted, but his father was strongly opposed to him becoming an artist and constantly discouraged him, telling him that he would never make it as an artist, even though he excelled in art in elementary school and won a medal for it in junior high.
While he attended Thomas Jefferson High School, one of Jack Katz's oil paintings, which depicted unemployed men warming themselves by a fire, was selected by the Scholastic Publishing Company as the winner of its national contest. The medal he was awarded meant a lot to Jack, and was a major source of encouragement for him.
Nevertheless, his father kept discouraging him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional artist. It was the Great Depression, and Benjamin Katz didn't believe his son could earn a living as an artist. He wanted him to aim for something practical and become a professional sign painter. Once, he brought Jack some tubes of paint and told him, "If you don’t think artists starve, well, let me tell you. One man came in the other day and swapped me a tube of paint for a bowl of soup.”
At school, Jack Katz continued to excel in art. When he graduated high school, he was awarded the senior class medal for excellence in art. Not long afterward, his father collapsed on the street and died of a heart attack. The police called Jack in to identify the body. He did, and was stunned to discover that in his wallet, his father, who had derided his dream so relentlessly, kept a collection of newspaper clippings that reported on his son's artistic achievements.
Jack later told his friend, poet Lee Bennett Hopkins, that “I found myself staring deep into [my father’s] secret feelings. There in his wallet were worn and tattered newspaper clippings of the notices of the awards I had won. My silent admirer and supplier, he had been torn between his dread of my leading a life of hardship and his real pride in my work."
After his father's death, Jack won three scholarships to art school, but he couldn't go because he had to work to help support his family. So, during the day, he worked for the WPA (Works Progress Administration) and by night, he took art classes when he could. He would leave the WPA three years later to work as a comic book illustrator. By 1942, he was drawing the backgrounds for the popular Captain America comic strip.
In April of 1943, Jack Katz enlisted in the Army, which took advantage of his artistic talent and trained him to design camouflage patterns. After the war ended, he returned home to New York, then left again to spend a year studying art in Paris. When he came back, he resumed his career as a professional artist. He painted covers for Reader's Digest and drew illustrations for The New York Times Book Review and magazines such as Playboy and Colliers. His oil paintings were sold via Fifth Avenue shop window displays.
Jack made good money, but he was haunted by the specter of anti-Semitism that ran rampant in America during the late 1940s and early 1950s. So, Jacob Ezra "Jack" Katz legally changed his name to Ezra Jack Keats. In 1954, he embarked on a new phase of his art career when he was hired to illustrate a children's book called Jubilant For Sure, written by Elisabeth Hubbard Lansing.
"I didn't even ask to get into children's books," Keats later observed. He fell into it through a contract job. His memorable illustrations were a hit, and he would be hired to illustrate many more children's books. By 1960, he had decided to write and illustrate his own. His first book, My Dog is Lost (1960), set the stage for his future works. It told the poignant story of Juanito, a little Puerto Rican boy who just arrived in New York City. He doesn't speak English, and he has lost his dog.
Two years later, Keats completed his next book, which established him as one of the greatest children's book writers of all time. The Snowy Day (1963) featured a 4-year-old black boy named Peter as its hero, as he explores his neighborhood one winter day. The progressive children's book, with its beautiful illustrations (using Keats' trademark technique that blended gouache with collage) won that year's prestigious Caldecott Award for the most distinguished picture book for children.
Keats described the genesis of The Snowy Day as follows: “Then began an experience that turned my life around—working on a book with a black kid as hero. None of the manuscripts I’d been illustrating featured any black kids—except for token blacks in the background. My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along. Years before I had cut from a magazine a strip of photos of a little black boy. I often put them on my studio walls before I’d begun to illustrate children’s books. I just loved looking at him. This was the child who would be the hero of my book.”
Keats' hero, Peter, would return for six more books. The last one, A Letter To Amy (1968) finds the now preteen Peter nervous about inviting a girl - his friend Amy, whom he has a crush on - to his birthday party. So, he writes her a special letter of invitation and rushes out to mail it, braving a thunderstorm. On the way, he runs into Amy - literally - and accidentally knocks her down. Will she come to his party now? And if she does, how will the other boys react when they find out that Peter invited a girl?
Keats would write and illustrate many more classic children's books, including Whistle for Willie (1964), Jennie's Hat (1966), Apt. 3 (1971), Dreams (1974), and The Trip (1978). All together, he would write and /or illustrate over 85 children's books. The books he wrote would be translated into nineteen languages, including Japanese. Hugely popular in Japan, the city of Tokyo honored Keats with a parade. An ice skating rink in Japan was named after him to commemorate the publication of his book Skates!
Ezra Jack Keats died of a heart attack in 1983 at the age of 67. Though he loved children and they loved him just as much, he never married and had any of his own.
Quote Of The Day
"I wanted to show an ordinary human situation, about a boy who has a crush on a girl, and the magic of what it's like in the city when it rains... I wanted to reflect the quality of magic which transforms the city in so many ways." - Ezra Jack Keats on his children's book, A Letter To Amy (1968).
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a short documentary film about Ezra Jack Keats. Enjoy!
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