This Day In Literary History
On December 31st, 1972, the famous American writer and journalist Pete Hamill quit drinking, winning a 20+ year battle with alcoholism, which he would chronicle in his classic bestselling 1995 memoir, A Drinking Life.
Pete Hamill was the oldest of seven children, the son of Irish immigrants from Belfast. His mother was gentle and fair-minded. His father was a one-legged alcoholic.
In A Drinking Life, Hamill tells of his childhood and adolescence in 1940s Brooklyn. His family lived in an Irish neighborhood where, as he would soon learn, the local tavern was the nucleus of social life.
As a young teenager, Hamill began drinking at the tavern regularly as his father had done before him. Soon, Hamill and his friends were downing pails of beer every night.
Alcohol, he observed, was not a kick, but a way of life and part of his Irish heritage. To be a man, you have to drink - but you also have to be able to hold your liquor and not become a drunk. Unfortunately, most men became drunks.
Hamill continued to drink. Alcohol became a way of life for him. It helped him overcome his sexual shyness and be confident around the neighborhood girls whom he described as "noble defenders of the holy hymen."
As a teenager, Hamill dropped out of school and lived on his own, working at a Brooklyn shipyard, where he would drink with his co-workers. Yearning for a better life, Hamill joined the Navy, then traveled to Mexico.
Alcohol remained a part of his life, and the results were wild nights of drinking and fighting, most of which he can't remember to this day. Hamill switched gears and decided to pursue his artistic interests, studying at the School of Visual Arts, where he met and fell in love with Laura, an exotic nude model.
By 1960, Hamill had begun a career in journalism, becoming a reporter for the New York Post. He was still drinking, and his alcoholism worsened an already turbulent first marriage. Finally, on New Year's Eve, 1972, at the age of 37, Pete Hamill had his last drink - a vodka.
As he looked around the bar and saw all the old drunks passed out, he realized that he was looking at a vision of himself in the future. Terrified at the prospect of becoming a pathetic old drunk, Hamill quit drinking for good and never fell off the wagon.
He was able to quit cold turkey without having to join an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous to help him stay sober. Some readers found it strange that in A Drinking Life, Hamill does not explore the more horrific aspects of alcoholism in detail.
Nor does he sermonize in favor of temperance and prohibition. Instead, he exposes and dissects a culture that has embraced alcohol as part of its identity, indirectly encouraging its people to become alcoholics.
Pete Hamill became one of New York City's best known reporters, writing columns for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and Newsday. As a foreign correspondent, he covered the wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland.
He served as editor-in-chief for the New York Post and the New York Daily News. His work as a journalist landed him on former President Richard M. Nixon's infamous list of enemies.
In addition to his memoir A Drinking Life, Hamill wrote many other nonfiction books (including one about legendary singer-actor Frank Sinatra's contributions to American popular music) and several novels.
He also wrote screenplay and teleplay adaptations of his novels and appeared as a commentator for Ric Burns' documentary series New York and Ric Burns' documentary series Prohibition, which aired on PBS.
Pete Hamill's most recent book, a novel called Tabloid City, was published in 2011. In it, a wealthy socialite and her secretary are found brutally murdered in a posh West Village town house.
The shocking crime becomes front page news, the most famous murder case in the country, and the catalyst that weaves a together a poetic tapestry of stories of life in New York City.
Quote Of The Day
"I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful." - Pete Hamill
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Pete Hamill on University of California Television, giving a lecture on the history of Lower Manhattan and the origins of New York City. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On December 27th, 1904, Peter Pan, the classic play by the legendary Scottish playwright and novelist J.M. Barrie, opened in London at the Duke of York's Theatre.
The play, whose full title was Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a beloved fairy tale which the author would novelize seven years after its stage premiere, actually had its roots in tragedy.
In 1866, when James M. Barrie was six years old, his 13-year-old brother David died suddenly. He was killed in an ice skating accident, leaving their mother devastated, as David had been her favorite son.
To ease his mother's grief, (and finally get some attention from her) James took to wearing David's clothes in her presence and whistling the way David always did. His mother was able to come to terms with her grief.
She took comfort in knowing that David would be a boy forever, and never grow up to leave her. James took similar comfort in dealing with his own grief over his brother's death.
Although the character wasn't named after him, it would be David that Barrie was thinking of when he conceived the character of Peter Pan - another boy who would never grow up. Peter Pan was named after Peter Llewelyn Davies, one of the five Llewelyn Davies boys.
Barrie was a close friend of the Llewelyn Davies family; the boys - Peter, George, John, Michael, and Nicholas - called him Uncle Jim. After the sudden deaths of their parents, Barrie was named one of their guardians in their mother's will.
The play opens with Peter Pan making another of his secret nighttime visits to the Darling family of Kensington, London, to listen to Mrs. Darling tell her children a bedtime story.
Peter is a boy of about twelve years old. He never grew up, and doesn't want to. He has become an immortal child who can fly. He lives in a magical place called Neverland.
On this particular visit, Peter is accidentally spotted. He flees, but loses his shadow. When he returns later to get it back, he wakes Mrs. Darling's oldest child, Wendy - a girl of about Peter's age.
After she reattaches Peter's shadow to him, he invites Wendy and her two brothers, John (about ten years old) and Michael (about five) to Neverland. To get there, he teaches them how to fly. In Neverland, the Darling children have many adventures.
They meet the Lost Boys - whom Peter rescued after they got lost in Kensington Gardens - and Peter's fairy friend, Tinker Bell, who seethes with jealousy when Wendy falls in love with Peter and he begins to have romantic feelings for her.
Soon, however, Peter Pan finds himself once again battling his archenemy, the murderous pirate Captain James Hook, who blames Peter for his hand being bitten off by a crocodile.
First, Peter saves Indian (Native American) princess Tiger Lily from Captain Hook and his pirate crew, then he must save Wendy, John, and Michael when they're captured by Hook.
The most famous scene in the play finds Peter, not realizing she's been kidnapped, deciding to take his medicine to please Wendy. After kidnapping Wendy and her brothers, Captain Hook had poisoned the medicine. Tinker Bell, having no time to warn Peter, drinks the medicine herself.
As she lies near death, Tinker Bell tells Peter that her life could be saved if children believed in fairies. So, Peter turns to the audience and pleads with the children watching to clap their hands if they believe in fairies. This always results in an explosion of applause, and Tinker Bell is saved.
In the end, Peter saves Wendy and her brothers and feeds Captain Hook to the crocodile who bit off his hand. Then he sails Hook's ship back to London. Peter wants Wendy to stay with him in Neverland, but she knows that her place is at her home in London. She, like all children, must grow up.
Not wanting to lose Wendy, Peter decides to trick her into thinking that her mother has forgotten about her, but when he realizes how much Mrs. Darling misses her children, he reconsiders.
In a surprise twist, it's hinted that Mrs. Darling was Peter's friend before she decided to grow up. Peter promises to visit Wendy every spring. The play ends with Wendy looking out her window and calling to him, "You won't forget to come for me, Peter? Please, please don't forget!"
When Peter Pan premiered in London in 1904, Peter was played by a woman - Nina Boucicault, the daughter of playwright Dion Boucicault. When the play opened on Broadway the following year, Maude Adams was cast as Peter Pan. It became a tradition for Peter to be played by a woman.
In 1954, a new Broadway musical version of Peter Pan opened, featuring Mary Martin in the title role. She would become the most famous actress to play Peter Pan on stage. Other notable Peters include Sandy Duncan and Cathy Rigby.
Peter Pan would also be adapted several times as a feature film, including the famous 1953 Disney animated musical, with Peter voiced by Disney's then top child star, Bobby Driscoll, who died of a drug overdose at 18. The film is controversial today for its Native American stereotyping.
Hook, a 1991 adaptation, was an unusual sequel that found Peter Pan (Robin Williams) finally grown up. Now a middle aged husband and father, Peter must return to Neverland to once again battle Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman), who has kidnapped his two children.
In 2003, Peter Pan, a lavish, big budget live action feature film adaptation of the play, was released. The acclaimed film featured Jeremy Sumpter as Peter, Rachel Hurd-Wood as Wendy, and Jason Issacs in a dual role as Captain Hook and Mr. Darling. (It was also traditional for Hook and Mr. Darling to be played by the same actor.)
Twelve years later in 2015, another movie, Pan, was released. A prequel to Barrie's play, Pan tells the story of how Peter Pan (Levi Miller) first came to Neverland and battled another murderous pirate - Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman).
Pan received sharply mixed reviews, as some filmgoers failed to understand that it was intended to be a prequel, and parents complained about the PG rated film's dark tone and violence.
Seven years after his play debuted in London, J.M. Barrie published a novelization of Peter Pan called Peter and Wendy. It would be somewhat different from the original play script, as Barrie would continually revise the play. He would publish another novel, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, in 1906.
Throughout his literary career, J.M. Barrie authored many novels and plays. He died of pneumonia in June of 1937 at the age of 77. In his will, Barrie left all the rights to Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital - England's leading chidren's hospital.
Quote Of The Day
"All the world is made of faith and trust and pixie dust." - J.M. Barrie
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete live performance of J.M. Barrie's classic play, Peter Pan. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On December 26th, 1891, the legendary American writer Henry Miller was born. He was born Heinrich Miller in New York City, the son of German immigrant parents. He had an older sister, Lauretta, whose grim fate would be chronicled in his classic autobiographical novel, Black Spring (1936).
As a young boy, Henry Miller proved to be intellectually gifted and an exceptional student, but he disliked his teachers. He educated himself, reading voraciously from a young age. He tried college, but dropped out after one semester.
Miller came of age in New York City's rough and seedy Bowery. He drifted from job to job and became an active member of the American Socialist Party. By 1917, he had landed a long term job at the Western Union Telegraph Company and married his first wife, Beatrice.
Seven years later, in 1924, Miller quit his job and had left his wife for his mistress, a Broadway dancer named June Smith, who would become his second wife. He had determined to become a writer, and June encouraged his literary endeavors.
His first two novels, Clipped Wings (1922) and Moloch, or This Gentile World (1927) were rejected. The latter would be published posthumously in 1992, creating a controversy over some allegedly anti-Semitic passages that were actually comic jabs at his wife June, who was Jewish.
At the time Miller wrote Moloch, or This Gentile World, his relationship with June had deteriorated due to her mental instability. She would leave him for another woman. In 1930, freed from the burden of marriage, he went to Paris.
There, a penniless but happy Henry Miller found work as a proofreader for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune newspaper, thanks to his friend, Austrian writer Alfred Perles, who recognized his talent and supported him.
The literary scene of early 1930s Paris energized Miller's creative juices. He struck up friendships with other writers, including a young woman who would become his close friend, lover, and muse - a Frenchwoman of Danish and Spanish descent named Anaïs Nin.
She and Henry were both struggling, aspiring writers trying to make ends meet, as France had also fallen victim to the Great Depression. They and some of their writer friends soon discovered that they could make around $1 per page writing pornographic literature for an anonymous private collector.
That was the equivalent of $15 per page in today's money; not much today, but good money back then. At first, they wrote erotica just for their own amusement, but soon it became an important source of income during the dark days of the Depression when work was hard to come by.
Believe it or not, for Henry Miller, writing decent erotica in those days was a struggle. Anaïs Nin, however, was brilliant at it. When she let him read her now famous diaries, they were a revelation to him. Her writing had the poetry and passion that his lacked.
An excited Miller began writing a new novel. The muse seized him by the throat and wouldn't let go; as his fingers flew about the keys of his typewriter, he chain-smoked and listened to the jazz or Beethoven that blared out of his Victrola.
He would write as many as 20, 30, or even 45 pages a day. When he completed the manuscript, he and Anaïs Nin both knew that he had written something special - a novel that would revolutionize literature as the world knew it and probably land its author in jail for obscenity.
Tropic of Cancer was a novel in the form of a memoir. Combining fiction with autobiography, the novel featured a narrative that alternated between conventional and experimental, combining straightforward narrative with dazzling stream of consciousness passages.
Funny, sad, joyous, and mad, passionate and poetic, the novel is rightfully considered a masterpiece. In the opening pages, Miller described the book this way:
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse...
One of Miller's dirty corpses was that of his homeland, America. Predicting the uproar over the novel's graphic sexual content, he said:
America will call me the lowest of the low when they see my Cancer. What a laugh I'll have when they begin to spit and fume. I hope they'll learn something about death and futility, about hope, etc. I won't give them a fucking leg to stand on...
Miller was able to get Tropic of Cancer published unexpurgated in Paris in 1934, which was no easy task, even in the liberal, intellectual City of Lights. In his American homeland, the novel was immediately banned as obscene.
Tropic of Cancer would remain banned in the United States for over 30 years, available to American readers only in pirated editions sold under the counter in certain bookshops or on the black market.
Henry Miller followed his classic debut novel with another great book, Black Spring (1936), an autobiographical novel chronicling his childhood and young adulthood, including the haunting fate of his older sister, Lauretta.
Lauretta, a sweet-natured girl who'd been born mildly retarded, was considered an embarrassment and a burden by her parents. As a child and adolescent, she was mostly cared for by her younger brother Henry, who adored her. But her parents ultimately decided to have her locked up.
Forced to live along with raving lunatics in a grim, brutal asylum, Lauretta deteriorated quickly and died young. Henry never forgave his parents for locking her up. He never spoke to them again.
He followed Black Spring with more great novels, among his numerous works are Tropic of Capricorn (1939), The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), and his classic Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy of novels: Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus (1960).
Miller's classic novella Quiet Days in Clichy (1956), often paired with his classic novella length essay The World of Sex (1940), was an autobiographical comic novel based on the author's adventures in early 1930's Paris.
In Quiet Days in Clichy, the narrator and his best friend Carl are two broke, struggling aspiring writers living hand-to-mouth in Paris. They share an apartment and soon acquire another roommate - Colette, a fifteen-year-old French runaway that Carl brings home.
The young girl becomes their housekeeper and lover - until her parents track her down. Meanwhile, the narrator falls in love with two prostitutes, one of whom reminds him of a woman whom he regrets not marrying.
Henry Miller was no pornographer; he didn't write about sex to arouse his readers, he simply and honestly celebrated his sexual life. In his classic essay The World of Sex (1940), he explained that the sex in his writings was the product of the libertine philosophy that he believed in and based his life on.
He blasted the hypocritical American "values" that condemned sex as sinful. Instead of openly accepting and celebrating something as natural and beautiful as sex, Americans would rather decry it as sinful and suppress it, leaving the only outlet for sexual expression to smut peddlers.
Until a landmark censorship trial in 1961 acquitted Tropic of Cancer of obscenity charges, Henry Miller's novels went unseen in America except in pirated editions. That trial took place in the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court and was fought by legendary publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press.
Three years later, the United States Supreme Court overturned the Ohio State Supreme Court's ruling that Tropic of Cancer was legally obscene, making it possible for all of Henry Miller's novels to be published in America.
Miller would marry three more times. His last great love was Brenda Venus, a young actress and dancer who had once posed for Playboy magazine. During the last four years of his life, he exchanged over 1,500 letters with Brenda. A book containing their correspondence was published in 1986.
Henry Miller died in 1980 at the age of 88.
Quote Of The Day
"A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold." - Henry Miller
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a full length documentary on Henry Miller called The Henry Miller Odyssey. Enjoy!
Happy Holidays!
We at the Internet Writing Workshop would like to wish all of our members and blog readers a happy and safe holiday season. For your holiday reading, I recommend A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, and Old Christmas by Washington Irving.
This Day In Literary History
On December 25th, 1924, the legendary American playwright and screenwriter Rod Serling was born in Syracuse, New York. He grew up in Binghamton, where his elementary school teachers dismissed him as an incorrigible class clown.
As a young boy, Rod would act out scenes from stories he'd read in pulp magazines and from movies he'd seen. When he entered junior high school, his English teacher discovered his talent and encouraged him to get involved in the school's extracurricular activities involving public speaking.
In high school, Rod wrote for the school newspaper. He was known for his scathing articles wherein he voiced his strong liberal convictions. He would become editor of the newspaper, a star tennis player, and class valedictorian.
After graduating high school in 1943, with World War II raging, Rod joined the Army, where he served as a paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division and saw action in the Philippines. During his training, like other men in his unit, he took up boxing. He became a solid flyweight fighter.
Rod would be transferred to his division's demolition unit, which was nicknamed "The Death Squad" because of its high casualty rate. He saw death every day, from the horrors of combat to freak accidents, such as a soldier being decapitated by a food crate that dropped on his head.
During his Army service, Rod Serling would win the Purple Heart, the Bronze Medal, and the Philippine Liberation Medal. His war experiences would affect him deeply, both as a human being and as a writer.
He would later say of his military experience, "I was bitter about everything and at loose ends when I got out of the service. I think I turned to writing to get it off my chest."
After the war ended and he had recovered from his injuries, Rod went to college on the G.I. Bill, where he earned a degree in literature. While in college, he wrote, directed, and acted in radio programs for the college radio station, setting the stage for his career.
In the summer of 1946, after graduating from college, Rod began his career in radio as both an actor and writer. His true passion was writing. He wrote scripts for radio programs and served as a continuity writer.
By 1950, Rod realized that radio was dying as a dramatic medium, so he switched to a fledgling new medium that had lots of potential - television. He got his start in television writing ad copy for the sponsors.
During television's golden age, (the late 1940s through the mid 1950s) most shows were performed live. Some of the most popular programs were "live theater" shows which featured performances of plays. They featured both classic plays and new productions written exclusively for television.
Rod Serling would become one of the finest playwrights of the time, writing original Broadway-quality plays for television. His best known plays were Patterns and Requiem For a Heavyweight.
Patterns is a searing look at the brutal world of big business in the 1950s. Ruthless corporate boss Walter Ramsey wants to put aging executive Andy Sloane, a family man, out to pasture. He's been grooming up and coming young vice president Fred Staples to take Sloane's place in the company.
Ramsey humiliates Sloane at every turn, hoping to pressure him into resigning rather than risk tarnishing the company's reputation by firing him outright. Sloane's replacement, the young Staples, is racked with guilt and believes that Sloane is still valuable to the company.
Ramsey is determined to oust him, and turns up the pressure until Sloane suffers a fatal heart attack in the office. Staples quits in disgust, then takes back his resignation, vowing to take revenge against Ramsey - by going after his job and ousting him from the company.
Patterns won Rod Serling an Emmy Award - his first of six Emmys for dramatic writing - and was so popular that it became the first live TV show to receive a repeat performance. The second performance was recorded on kinescope and is available on DVD.
Requiem For a Heavyweight, written for the famous Playhouse 90 TV series, told the story of Harlan "Mountain" McClintock, a washed up, punch drunk boxer who is in no shape to fight, but is persuaded to fight again by his sleazy manager, Maish.
Deep in debt, Maish has arranged for McClintock to take a fall in a rigged match. During the bout, the boxer's pride kicks in, and he refuses to go down. Maish loses his money and is now indebted to the mob.
McClintock, still loyal to Maish, agrees to take up professional wrestling to earn the money. Maish humiliates him by making him wear a hillbilly costume. Then he finds out that Maish is betting against him again and refuses to wrestle. He walks out on Maish, who finds a naive young boxer he can exploit.
During his tenure as a playwright for TV, Serling often found himself at odds with the shows' sponsors, who at that time produced TV shows and controlled their content. Sometimes he was asked to make inconsequential cuts to scripts, other times he had to do major rewrites because the sponsor didn't like the theme of the story.
The last straw came when he wrote an episode of the United States Steel Hour in 1954 that was based on the infamous murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago who was brutally murdered in Missouri by white racists for flirting with a white woman.
The United States Steel company forced Rod to change the story completely. The murder victim became a Jewish pawnbroker in an unnamed town. By 1959, Rod Serling had earned enough clout to produce his own television series. He retained as much creative control as possible.
The Twilight Zone, which aired from 1959-1964, was more than just an anthology series featuring tales of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. By using fantastic settings and scenarios, Rod was able to write morality plays without his morals being questioned by sponsors.
In the classic episode The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street (1960), Serling offered a blistering satire of the Red Scare - the anti-communist paranoia and witch hunts plaguing America at the time.
When strange happenings suddenly occur in a typical American small town, an imaginative young boy convinces his neighbors that space aliens are behind the events, which are part of their plan to take over the Earth - and that aliens are living in the neighborhood, disguised as humans.
Soon, all the neighbors began to suspect each other of being aliens. Close friends turn on each other as fear and paranoia build to a fever pitch, resulting in an unforgettable climax.
Space aliens were behind the strange happenings after all, conducting an experiment on humans before invading the Earth. The aliens conclude that the best way to conquer humanity is to let the people destroy themselves.
The classic episode Eye of the Beholder (1960), offers more potent social commentary. It opens with a woman, Janet Tyler, about to have the bandages removed from her head following her eleventh plastic surgery. She's filled with anxiety about the results.
We hear her thoughts and learn that she was born with facial deformities that made her an outcast. This is her last chance for a normal life. After the doctor removes her bandages, he breaks the bad news to her in a somber voice - the procedure was a failure.
He hands Janet a mirror and she screams in horror at her reflection. Then the camera reveals that she's actually beautiful - strikingly beautiful. The doctor takes off his surgical mask and we see that he has a hideous, pig-like face. So do the nurses and everyone else.
Serling himself appeared in every episode of The Twilight Zone to introduce the story at the beginning and sum up the moral of the story at the end. He also provided the classic opening narration scored to eerie music:
You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead — your next stop, the Twilight Zone.
Rod Serling personally wrote 92 of the series' 156 episodes. Among the other writers who penned episodes of The Twilight Zone were Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Earl Hamner Jr., and Reginald Rose. The cast of guest stars appearing on the show was a who's who list of great actors and actresses.
During its original TV run, The Twilight Zone had a strong following of fans, but only performed moderately in the ratings. During its syndication runs in the 1970s and 80s, it became a staple of late night television, attracting new generations of fans and becoming a cultural phenomenon.
The series would be revived several times with new episodes, including remakes of the Rod Serling originals, but nothing can equal or eclipse the brilliance of the original Twilight Zone, which is now available in its entirety on DVD, Blu-Ray, and streaming services.
After The Twilight Zone ended, Serling created and wrote a Western series called The Loner, which only lasted for one season, from 1965-1966, due to poor reviews and low ratings.
In 1970, Rod Serling returned to TV with a new series called Night Gallery. A horror anthology series, each episode would open with Serling in a sinister art gallery, unveiling a painting related to the story. The pilot movie was co-directed by a young Steven Spielberg.
Serling wrote over a third of the series' scripts. Despite the solid writing and performances, Night Gallery only ran for three years. The ratings were never good and Serling had tired of the constant battles over his scripts, this time with network executives instead of commercial sponsors.
In between his work on his TV series, Rod Serling taught writing, drama, and film classes at various universities. After Night Gallery ended, he taught at Ithaca College until he died of a heart attack in 1975 at the age of 50.
Quote Of The Day
"Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull." - Rod Serling
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a rare recording of Rod Serling speaking at UCLA in 1966. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On December 24th, 1881, the legendary Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez was born in Moguer, Andalusia, Spain. Although he studied law at the University of Seville, Jiménez never practiced it, choosing to become a writer instead.
Jiménez' first two poetry books were published in 1900; he was eighteen at the time. That same year, his father died. Jiménez was devastated and fell into a severe depression. He was sent to France for psychiatric treatment, where he had an affair with his doctor's wife.
From there, Jiménez would spend time at a sanitarium in Madrid. The sanitarium was run by the nuns who lived at the nearby convent of the Sisters of the Holy Rosary order. He stayed there from 1901 to 1903.
While at the sanitarium, Jiménez supposedly had passionate affairs with three young nuns who cared for him - Sister Pilar, Sister Amalia, and Sister Filomena. The nuns' order still insists that there is no concrete evidence proving that these affairs took place.
There is one concrete fact that the Sisters of the Holy Rosary can't deny - Jiménez was expelled from the sanitarium by the Mother Superior, along with the three young nuns, who were transferred to other convents belonging to their order.
Beginning in 1911, Jiménez would write poems about his affairs with the young nuns. One of the best known of these poems is Three Verses:
Sister! We stripped off our ardent bodies
In endless and senseless profusion….
It was autumn and the sun – don’t you remember?
Added sweet sadness to the white splendor of our abode
Sister Pilar, are your eyes still so black?
And your mouth so fresh and red?
And your breasts? How are they?
Oh, do you recall how you would come into my room late at night,
calling to me like a mother, telling me off like a child?
When she fled, in a flight of deranged wimples,
from the impetuous will of my desire
she would seek shelter in a corner, like a cat…
but her nails were sweeter than my kisses.
In 1913, Jiménez met and fell in love with Zenobia Camprubi, a writer and translator known for her Spanish translation of the works of Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore. Shortly after meeting Zenobia, Jiménez published a book of mildly erotic lyrical poems.
He planned to follow it with a book of more explicitly erotic poetry, but changed his mind after Zenobia reacted with disgust to his previous collection. Nevertheless, he continued writing and publishing collections of poems at a prolific rate.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Jiménez refused to side with the fascists or live in a fascist country. He and Zenobia left Spain on a self-imposed exile, settling first in Cuba, then in the United States, and finally in 1946, Puerto Rico.
He would be hospitalized again for severe depression, this time for eight months. Jiménez later became a professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Maryland, which would name a building on its campus and a writing program after him.
In 1956, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Three days later, his wife died of cancer. He was devastated by the loss, and his health began to deteriorate. He lost the will to live and died in 1958 at the age of 76.
Among the most popular works of Juan Ramón Jiménez were poetry collections such as Spiritual Sonnets 1914-1916 (1916), Stones and Sky (1919), Poetry in Prose and Verse (1932), Voices of My Song (1945), and Animal At Bottom (1947).
He also wrote a popular book-length prose poem, Platero and I (1917), a whimsical tale of a writer and his donkey, which is still read and studied by Spanish schoolchildren.
In 2007, a Spanish publisher released Books of Love, a compilation of Jiménez' erotic poetry. It contained his original book, plus a collection of previously unpublished poems - the more explicitly erotic poetry that he had wanted to publish earlier.
The poems about the author's affairs with the three young nuns were included in the new volume, resulting in a furious letter of protest from the nuns' order, the Sisters of the Holy Rosary.
Juan Ramón Jiménez remains one of the greatest Spanish poets of all time.
Quote Of The Day
"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." - Juan Ramón Jiménez
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a reading of I Am Not I, a poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez. Enjoy!
I am excited to report that my Sportstar magazine column - How should female athletes be portrayed? - was among the Top 30 submissions in the Best Column category in the AIPS (Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive) Sports Media Awards writing contest. The top 3 winners will be announced in early 2020.
I would like to thank our nonfiction group. Their topnotch critiques improved this piece considerably.
This Day In Literary History
On December 20th, 1929, Lady Chatterley's Lover, the classic novel by the legendary English writer D.H. Lawrence, was declared legally obscene and banned in the United States.
Lawrence's novel told the story of Lady Constance Chatterley, whose husband Sir Clifford's war injuries have left him crippled, impotent, and embittered. Lady Chatterley soon finds herself driven to the brink of madness by sexual frustration.
Finally, in desperation, she embarks on a passionate affair with her gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The affair leads her to realize that in order to truly live, she (and all human beings) needs to be alive not only intellectually and emotionally, but sexually as well.
Due to the novel's daring philosophy, explicit and erotic depictions of sexual encounters, and use of language considered obscene, including the words fuck and cunt, Lady Chatterley's Lover was declared legally obscene and banned in the United States.
When he wrote the novel, D.H. Lawrence was hoping to create a breakthrough work of literature that would set the literary world alight - a challenging, thought provoking novel that would open people's eyes and minds. He got his wish, though he wouldn't live to see it granted.
The content of Lady Chatterley's Lover made it impossible to publish in Lawrence's native England. The uncensored first edition was published in Italy in June of 1928, in an initial press run of 1,000 copies, all of them signed by the author. It sold out across Europe.
In early 1929, when British Customs agents learned that copies of the novel were being imported into the UK, they quickly began seizing them. As a result of the UK ban, and bans in other European countries, cheap pirated editions of the novel were produced.
Lawrence and his publisher didn't see a penny from the pirate books, which were sold on the black market and under the counter in certain bookshops.
In response to the pirated editions, Lawrence decided to self-publish a new, authorized uncensored second edition. Printed by a publisher friend of his in Paris, the signed second edition was released in a serialized version and sold via subscription.
The subscriptions were sold and shipped discreetly to countries where Lady Chatterley's Lover had been banned. As was typical for banned books, pirated editions were published and sold under the counter, cheating the author and his official publisher out of money.
Despite the continued presence of pirated editions, Lawrence's new official version of Lady Chatterley's Lover sold well and made him a healthy profit. But soon, Customs agents in various countries caught on to the subscription plan, and the novel was banned yet again.
Lawrence had hoped that in the United States, whose constitution's First Amendment guaranteed freedom of expression, he would have an unrestricted market for his novel.
Unfortunately, at the time, there was a federal law on the books called the Comstock Act which prohibited the shipment of obscene materials through the mail, and the conservative courts had long ruled that the First Amendment didn't cover allegedly obscene material.
The Comstock Act, which would remain in effect in various forms until the Supreme Court struck it down completely in 1965, was named after his creator, Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock.
It had a definition of obscenity so vague that its creator even used it to block the shipment of certain medical textbooks to medical students. Years earlier, Comstock used his law to have James Joyce's classic epic novel Ulysses declared obscene due to one brief but controversial chapter.
By December of 1929, U.S. Customs agents had begun seizing all copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover that came into America. D.H. Lawrence bemoaned the fate of his novel at the hands of "policemen, prudes, and swindlers."
He realized that he may have to do what he dreaded most - prepare a bowdlerized version of his novel: "So I begin to be tempted and start to expurgate. But impossible! I might as well try to clip my own nose into shape with scissors. The book bleeds."
D.H. Lawrence was suffering from tuberculosis before Lady Chatterley's Lover became embroiled in a censorship battle. The stress resulting from the persecution of the novel and his vigorous attempts to defend it caused his frail health to deteriorate quickly. He died in March of 1930 at the age of 44.
The United States government's ban of Lady Chatterley's Lover would remain in effect for thirty years. Then, in 1959, the legendary American publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press decided to publish the original uncensored version of the novel in defiance of the ban.
Rosset wanted to include the novel as part of a republication of the complete works of D.H. Lawrence. He set the stage for a landmark trial where it would be ruled not legally obscene and the ban overturned. The ruling would be upheld by the Second Court of Appeals in March of 1960.
The obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover was a major victory for Barney Rosset. It gave him the legal ammunition to successfully challenge the bans on two other classic novels that he desperately wanted to publish: Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934) and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959).
Around the same time that Lady Chatterley's Lover was being tried for obscenity in the United States, the legendary British publishing house Penguin Books defied the ban on it in the UK and faced a similar trial.
In November of 1960, the novel was ruled not legally obscene by the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. D.H. Lawrence didn't live to see his book vindicated in court. He died of tuberculosis in 1930.
Quote Of The Day
"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." - D.H. Lawrence
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a documentary on literary censorship called Forbidden Reading. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On December 19th, 1732, the first issue of Poor Richard's Almanack, the famous annual publication by the legendary American writer, journalist, philosopher, scientist, and statesman Benjamin Franklin, was published.
Franklin wrote and edited his almanac under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, aka Poor Richard, a tribute to the real Richard Saunders, the 17th century English author of the Apollo Anglicanus, then London's most popular almanac.
The persona of "Poor Richard" was a nod to Isaac Bickerstaff, a pseudonym and persona once used by the legendary Anglo-Irish writer and satirist Jonathan Swift.
Poor Richard's Almanack featured a calendar, long range weather forecasts, astronomical and astrological information, brain teasers, poetry, and Ben Franklin's famous proverbs, aphorisms, and words of advice.
The almanac also included serialized news stories, essays, and other writings. You had to keep buying the almanac every year to find the conclusions to these serialized pieces, and lots of people kept buying it.
At its peak of sales and circulation, ten thousand copies were sold every year to readers around the world - an incredible circulation rate for an 18th century publication. Poor Richard's Almanack would have an amazing 25-year run, from 1732 to 1758.
In 1735, Ben Franklin's brother James died suddenly at the age of 38, leaving his widow destitute. So, Ben gave his sister-in-law 500 free copies of Poor Richard's Almanack that she could sell and keep the money to support herself and her five children.
After Poor Richard's Almanack was translated into French, one of its biggest fans was French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. When Napoleon established the Cisalpine Republic in Northern Italy in 1792, he ordered an Italian language translation of the almanac.
In 1812, Poor Richard's Almanack became the first English language publication to be translated into Slovene, a South Slavic language. It was translated by Janez Nepomuk Primic.
During the American Revolution, the King of France gave a ship to the legendary Scottish-American naval hero John Paul Jones named the Bonhomme Richard after his favorite publication, Poor Richard's Almanack.
In 1792, nearly 25 years after Poor Richard's Almanack ceased publication, a new almanac made its debut. Founded by Robert B. Thomas and inspired by Ben Franklin's classic almanac, it was called The Old Farmer's Almanac. It's still in publication today.
Benjamin Franklin would go on to become a founding father of the United States of America and one of its greatest statesmen. He died in 1790 at the age of 85.
Quote Of The Day
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." - Benjamin Franklin
Vanguard Video
Today's video features readings from various issues of The Old Farmer's Almanack. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On December 18th, 1870, the famous English writer Saki was born. He was born Hector Hugh "H.H." Munro in Akyab, Burma, now known as Sittwe, Myanmar. His father was an inspector-general for the Burmese police. At the time of his birth, Burma was still part of the British Empire.
In 1872, Munro's pregnant mother had gone home to England for a visit. While there, she was charged by a cow, and the shock of it caused her to miscarry. She never recovered from the miscarriage and died shortly afterward.
So, Munro's father sent him and his sister Ethel to England, where they were raised by their aunts and grandmother in a strict Victorian household. Munro received his primary education at Pencarwick School in Exmouth and Bedford Grammar School.
When his father left the Burmese police and retired to England, Munro and his sister traveled with him around Europe, visiting various fashionable spas and tourist resorts.
In 1893, Munro followed in his father's footsteps and joined the Indian Imperial Police. He was posted to Burma. Two years later, he had to resign due to poor health. Munro returned to England, where he began a career as a journalist.
He wrote for newspapers such as The Westminster Gazette, The Daily Express, The Bystander, The Morning Post, and The Outlook.
Munro's first book was published in 1900. It was a nonfiction historical study called The Rise of the Russian Empire. For six years, from 1902-08, Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in the Balkans, Warsaw, Russia, and Paris.
In Russia, he witnessed the infamous Bloody Sunday incident of January 22nd, 1905, where striking workers marched to St. Petersburg, hoping to deliver a petition to the Tsar. Instead, they were met by gunfire from the Tzar's soldiers and massacred.
The organizer of the march, a Russian Orthodox priest named Father Gapon, later revealed himself to be a traitor working for the Tzar's secret police.
By 1908, H.H. Munro gave up his position as a foreign correspondent and settled in London, where he continued his writing career. He took his famous pseudonym, Saki, which had no connection to Japanese culture.
Scholars believe that Munro's use of the name Saki was a tribute to the cup bearer in the famous ancient Persian poetry collection, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
Although he had co-written a play, Saki's specialty was the short story, and he became a master of the form. He often satirized life in Edwardian England, but he was best known for his darkly humorous and macabre tales.
Some of his best dark tales were The Storyteller, The Toys Of Peace, and Tobermory. His most famous story was The Open Window, a masterpiece of dark comedy.
The Open Window told the story of Framton Nuttel, a nervous nebbish who has come to visit Mrs. Sappleton, a friend of his sister's. He finds himself left alone with the woman's young niece, Vera.
Vera tells him a horrifying story: three years ago, her aunt's husband and younger brothers had gone out hunting and drowned in a bog. Their bodies were never found, so Mrs. Sappleton has always left the walk-in window open in case they return.
That night, the men do return, ghoulishly covered in mud. A terrified Nuttel grabs his hat and cane and runs out of the house. Vera explains that Nuttel was most likely frightened by the hunters' dog, as he was once chased into a cemetery by a pack of wild dogs and had to spend the night in a freshly dug grave!
In addition to his short story collections, Saki also wrote two novels, The Unbearable Bassington (1912), and When William Came (1913).
When William Came, published before the outbreak of World War I, was a work of "what if" fiction - a chronicle of life in London under German occupation after the armies of Kaiser Wilhelm II (the William of the title) invade Britain and conquer her.
When World War I broke out in 1914, Saki was 43 years old - too old to join the military, but he enlisted anyway. He joined the Royal Fusiliers regiment of the British Army as an ordinary soldier, refusing a commission.
In November of 1916, Saki was shot and killed by a German sniper while standing in a shell crater. His last words were "Put that bloody cigarette out!"
Quote Of The Day
"We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other married couples, they sometimes live apart." - Saki (H.H. Munro)
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a reading of Saki's classic short story, The Open Window. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On December 17th, 1843, A Christmas Carol, the classic novella by the legendary English writer Charles Dickens, was published in London. (Sometimes the publication date is mistakenly listed as December 19th.)
Dickens began writing the book in October of 1843 and completed it in six weeks, with the final pages written during the first week of December.
After feuding with his publisher over the small amount of money he'd earned for his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens declined a lump-sum payment for A Christmas Carol and chose to take royalties instead.
The novella's first edition run of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve, but because of high production costs, Dickens only earned £230 and not the £1,000 he expected - and needed badly, as his wife had become pregnant again.
Although it didn't earn him as much as he'd hoped, A Christmas Carol proved to be a huge critical success, something Dickens also needed badly, after the failure of Martin Chuzzlewit.
A scathing satire ahead of its time, Martin Chuzzlewit was controversial for its assault on American hypocrisy and barbarity. Dickens, a ferocious abolitionist, had no use for America, having visited the country and witnessed firsthand the atrocities of slavery.
A Christmas Carol continued to sell well, and soon, the author saw more of a profit. In January of 1844, less than a month after its first edition release, it appeared in a pirated edition.
Dickens sued Farley's Illuminated Library, the publishers of the pirate edition, and won. Unfortunately, the company declared bankruptcy to avoid paying him damages, leaving him no compensation and owing £700 in legal expenses.
To fight future piracy, Dickens periodically tweaked his manuscript for A Christmas Carol and republished it in revised editions, something many writers did back when copyright laws were inadequate or nonexistent.
The piracy of A Christmas Carol was still a bitter disappointment for Dickens, as he felt a special affection for the novella's lessons in love and generosity that he wanted to teach the world.
Dickens based A Christmas Carol on both his own experiences and American writer Washington Irving's tales of the traditional old English Christmas and its customs.
In 1824, when Dickens was twelve years old, his prosperous, middle class father's financial mismanagement ruined the family. Unable to pay his creditors, he was arrested for debt. The Dickens family was sent to debtor's prison.
One family member avoided imprisonment - the precocious, intellectual Charles, who was forced to leave school, pawn his collection of books, and go to work in a factory to pay off his father's debts.
In early 1843, Dickens toured the Cornish tin mines and saw children working in appalling conditions. He also visited one of several London schools that had been set up to educate the city's large population of half-starved, illiterate street children.
Remembering his own horrific experiences as a child laborer, Dickens researched the effect of the Industrial Revolution on poor children. He gave a speech at the Manchester Athenaeum urging employers and workers to work together to fight illiteracy.
Dickens wrote and planned to publish a low-cost political pamphlet, An Appeal to the People of England, on Behalf of the Poor Man's Child, but changed his mind and put off the publication.
Instead, he tried to inspire compassion for the poor through his beloved novella, A Christmas Carol. Its main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, had been partly based on Dickens as a child before his family's financial ruin.
As a young boy, he'd had a strong sense of intellectual and class superiority. When he was forced to work alongside other poor children (and adults), his initial humiliation and anger were transformed into a deep, lifelong compassion for the poor.
A Christmas Carol opens on Christmas Eve, seven years after the death of Ebenezer Scrooge's business partner, Jacob Marley. Scrooge is a greedy and heartless moneylender and landlord who overworks and grossly underpays his loyal, hardworking clerk, Bob Cratchit.
Scrooge hates Christmas, and famously dismisses the holiday as humbug. After grudgingly allowing Cratchit to take Christmas Day off, Scrooge leaves for home, where he is haunted by the ghost of Jacob Marley.
Tormented and wrapped in heavy chains built link by link by his sins, Marley warns Scrooge that he will suffer the same fate if he doesn't change his ways. He tells Scrooge that three more spirits will haunt him.
The Ghost of Christmas Past brings Scrooge back to his past, a time when he cared about people and loved Christmas - before tragedy broke his heart and greed warped his soul. The Ghost of Christmas Present exposes Scrooge to the plight of the poor.
The ghost takes Scrooge to observe Bob Cratchit and his family, who are struggling to survive on the slave wages that Scrooge pays him. He also shows Scrooge how his nephew Fred - the son of his beloved sister who died in childbirth - still loves him despite the fact that Scrooge disowned him.
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come proves to be the scariest spirit, tormenting Scrooge with a vision of the death of Tiny Tim - Bob Cratchit's crippled and sick little son - which could have been prevented.
He also shows Scrooge a vision of his own death, where nobody mourns him. Scrooge repents, awakening on Christmas morning with joy in his heart, vowing to be kind and keep the spirit of the holiday with him always.
Needless to say, A Christmas Carol became hugely popular, a classic reread every year at Christmastime. Dickens' readers begged him to write another holiday story, so from 1844-48, he published some Christmas-themed short stories.
They sold well, but the critics trashed them. By 1849, Dickens decided that he was done writing Christmas stories, but he wanted to reach out to people with his "Carol philosophy." So, he began performing public readings of A Christmas Carol during the holiday season.
Dickens' first public reading of A Christmas Carol took place in 1853. It was an unabridged reading; for later performances, Dickens prepared an abridged text to read. He would perform 127 public readings of his holiday novella.
His last performance was in 1870 - the year of his death. In 1867, while on his first and only public reading tour of America, Dickens performed a reading in Boston on Christmas Eve.
One of the spectators, a factory owner named Fairbanks, was so moved by the story that he experienced a Scrooge-like transformation and sent every one of his employees a turkey.
A Christmas Carol would be adapted numerous times for the stage, screen, radio, and television. The first stage play adaptation opened on February 5th, 1844 - less than two months after the novella was published - and became a hit.
The novella would be adapted for the screen numerous times. The best known and best loved film version is the 1951 British production starring Alistair Sim as Scrooge.
In 2009, Disney released a 3D animated adaptation starring the voice of Jim Carrey as Scrooge, whose name would enter the English lexicon as a synonym for the word miser.
A Christmas Carol remains one of the all-time greatest works of English literature and a treasured holiday classic.
Quote Of The Day "It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection and disease in sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour." - Charles Dickens
Vanguard Video Today's video features a complete reading of Charles Dickens' classic novella, A Christmas Carol. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On December 13th, 1915, the famous Canadian writer Kenneth Millar, best known by his pseudonym Ross Macdonald, was born in Los Gatos, California, to Canadian parents who then moved back to their hometown of Kitchener, Ontario.
When Millar was a boy, his father suddenly walked out on the family. Millar found himself moving frequently, shuffled between his mother and various relatives. Years later, the themes of broken homes and domestic discord would feature prominently in his fiction.
In 1938, while living in Canada, the 23-year-old Kenneth Millar met and married his wife, Margaret Sturm, who would become a successful mystery writer under her married name, Margaret Millar. She bore him a daughter, Linda. Kenneth Millar began his literary career writing short stories for pulp magazines.
To avoid being confused with his wife, Kenneth Millar took the pen name John Macdonald. Then he learned that there was a famous writer called John D. Macdonald. To avoid confusion again, Millar changed his pseudonym to John Ross Macadonald before settling on Ross Macdonald as his permanent pen name.
For his college education, Kenneth Millar attended the University of Michigan in the United States, where he earned a degree in literature. In 1944, while doing his graduate work, his first novel was published.
The Dark Tunnel, aka I Die Slowly, published under his first pseudonym John Macdonald, was a spy thriller. In it, college professor Robert Branch ridicules his best friend for suspecting that a Nazi spy may be lurking in their sleepy Midwestern town.
Branch is more interested in the fact that his German ex-girlfriend has accepted a position at the university where he teaches. Trouble lands a one-two punch when first Branch's ex is suddenly engaged to marry the son of the university's German professor.
Then, Branch witnesses his suspicious best friend fall to his death from his office window. Branch is the only one who doesn't believe that his friend's death was a suicide. When the professor tries to solve the crime, he finds himself marked for death.
The same year that Kenneth Millar's first novel was published, he joined the Navy, as World War II was still raging. He served for two years as a communications officer. After his discharge in 1946, he returned to Michigan, earned his Ph.D., and continued with his literary career.
Millar's third novel, Blue City (1947), marked his transition to hard-boiled detective fiction. It told the story of Johnny Weather, a young soldier who returns from the war to find that his estranged father is dead.
His father, a nightclub owner, was a prominent figure involved in the corruption of the town, and the police are more than happy to let his murder remain unsolved.
As Johnny Weather tries to solve the crime, he finds that more people than just the cops prefer that his father's murder remains unsolved, even the man's ex-wife, who attempts to seduce Johnny. The novel would be adapted as a feature film in 1986.
In 1949, Kenneth Millar published The Moving Target, his first novel featuring a detective character who had been the subject of a short story series.
Lew Archer, named after writer Lew Wallace and Philip Marlowe's partner Miles Archer, was not your typical detective. We learn a lot about him in his first novel.
Big (6'2") and tough, yet intelligent and compassionate, Lew Archer possessed far greater depth and humanity than the average hard-boiled detective.
A troubled child (he claimed that he once "took the strap away from my old man") turned petty thief, Archer was befriended and reformed by a kindhearted older policeman.
Archer became a cop himself, training with the Long Beach (California) Police Department. When he finds that the department is a cesspool of corruption, he won't go along with it, and is kicked off the force.
With the war on, Archer joins the Army and serves in military intelligence. After the war ends, he returns home and becomes a private detective. While he solves crimes, Archer pines for his ex-wife Sue and drinks too much.
In his first novel, he's hired by the dispassionate wife of an eccentric oil tycoon who has mysteriously vanished. His attempts to solve the crime lead him to a strange cast of characters and numerous other crimes that must be solved before he can solve the one that he was hired to investigate.
What makes the Lew Archer novels so memorable is that they're more than just detective novels. Using incredibly complex plots and adding a great deal of psychological depth and insights to his characters' motivations, Millar's detective novels were essentially part whodunit and part psychological thriller.
A huge hit with genre fans and literary critics alike, Lew Archer's adventures would be adapted for the radio, screen, and television. The most famous film adaptations were Harper (1966) and The Drowning Pool (1975), which starred Paul Newman as the iconic detective.
In these films, Lew Archer's last name was changed to Harper. Some say it was because Paul Newman believed that the letter H was lucky for him, having previously starred in the classic films The Hustler (1961) and Hud (1963).
However, others, including Harper screenwriter William Goldman, claimed that the producers changed the name to save money, as they hadn't bought the rights to the entire Lew Archer series, only a couple of novels.
Kenneth Millar, aka Ross Macdonald, wrote eighteen Lew Archer novels. His last, The Blue Hammer, was published in 1976. He died of Alzheimer's disease in 1983 at the age of 67.
Quote Of The Day
"There's nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure." - Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar)
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Ross Macdonald's classic first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On December 12th, 1821, the legendary French writer Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen, France. His father, Achille-Cléophas, was a surgeon. According to some sources, the young Gustave began writing stories at the age of eight.
After being educated at Lycée Pierre-Corneille, Flaubert went to Paris to study law. He didn't care much for law and preferred his hometown in Normandy to the City of Lights. He did make some friends in Paris, including fellow writer Victor Hugo.
In 1846, at the age of 25, Flaubert suffered an epileptic attack and left Paris. He settled in Croisset, near Rouen, where he would live with his mother for the rest of his life.
Flaubert was openly bisexual, but preferred women. His one and only great love was the poet Louise Colet. When their passionate affair came to an end, he lost interest in romance and never married.
He wasn't lonely. He caroused with prostitutes of both sexes, (often suffering from venereal disease as a result) he was close to his niece Caroline, and enjoyed the company of other writers, including Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, George Sand, and Ivan Turgenev.
Gustave Flaubert's first published work of fiction was a semi-autobiographical novella called November (1842). The narrator is a schoolboy who meditates on his life, including his determination to become a man both physically and sexually.
The narrator ultimately loses his virginity to Marie, a worldly-wise courtesan who enthralls him with stories of her erotic experiences. Later, the narrator decides to see her again, only to find that she and her brothel have vanished.
Flaubert's first full length novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, written in 1849 but not published in its final version until 1874, was based on St. Anthony the Great's alleged temptation by supernatural forces in the Libyan Desert.
After completing his first draft, Flaubert read the novel aloud to his friends, writers Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp, over a period of four days, after which, he asked for their opinions on it. They encouraged him to burn the manuscript.
In 1857, Flaubert published what is considered his masterpiece, the classic, controversial novel Madame Bovary. It first appeared in a serialized form in the French literary magazine Le Revue de Paris, published from October 1st through December 15th, 1856.
The novel was considered scandalous and attacked for its alleged obscenity and immorality; Flaubert was accused of glorifying adultery. In January of 1857, the novel went on trial for obscenity. On February 7th, it was acquitted - found not legally obscene.
Flaubert's novel told the unforgettable story of Emma Rouault, a young woman who falls in love with a country doctor, Charles Bovary. Although a decent man, he turns out to be awkward, weak, and an insufferable bore. Emma becomes disillusioned and despondent.
When wealthy libertine landowner Rodolphe Boulanger seduces her, Emma finds the passionate romance she'd been craving. She risks exposing her affair with her indiscreet love letters and visits to her lover.
Emma plans to elope with Rodolphe, but he has no intention of marrying her. He dumps her, ending the relationship with a dear john letter enclosed in a basket of apricots. Her romantic fantasy world suddenly shattered, Emma falls severely ill.
After recovering her health, Emma seeks happiness in material possessions. The crafty merchant Monsieur Lheureux manipulates Emma into buying lots of luxury items from him on credit, and she quickly accrues a crushing amount of debt.
Lheureux arranges for Emma to get power of attorney over her husband's estate, then calls in her debt. Desperate for money, she tries prostituting herself to Rodolphe Boulanger. When that fails, she swallows arsenic. The romance of suicide even fails her; she dies an agonizing death.
As a writer, Flaubert's prose combined romanticism with realism. A perfectionist, he strictly avoided cliches and determined to find le mot juste - the right word. He worked in solitude and could spend a whole week writing and rewriting a single page.
With the publication of Madame Bovary, scandal would follow Flaubert for most of his life, but he continued to write great novels. Salammbô (1862) was a historical novel set in 3rd century Carthage amid the Mercenary Revolt, which took place shortly after the First Punic War broke out.
At the time Flaubert wrote his novel, this was a rarely studied period in history. The author went to Carthage to do his research; his primary source was book one of The Histories by the legendary ancient Greek historian Polybius.
Salammbô proved to be a masterpiece that restored the reputation of Flaubert as one of France's greatest writers. He had been denounced by the conservative establishment and the Church as a mere pornographer.
Gustave Flaubert's last great novel, Sentimental Education (1869) was set amid the French revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire - the regime of Napoleon III, which would rule from 1852 to 1870 - as seen through the eyes of a young man named Frederic Moreau.
Flaubert died of a stroke in 1880 at the age of 58.
Quote Of The Day
"Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living." - Gustave Flaubert
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a reading of three short stories by Gustave Flaubert. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On December 11th, 1918, the famous Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Stavropol Krai, in the North Caucasian region of Russia.
Shortly after his mother Taisia discovered that she was pregnant with him, his father Isaakiy, an Army officer and World War I veteran, was killed in a hunting accident.
With his father dead, Alexander was raised by his mother and aunt. Poor but educated, his mother encouraged his interests in literature and science and brought him up in her extremely devout Russian Orthodox faith.
He began writing in 1936, at the age of eighteen. He also studied mathematics at Rostov State University and took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History.
In April of 1940, while at university, Solzhenitsyn married his classmate, Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya, a chemistry major. They would divorce in 1952, remarry in 1957, then divorce again in 1972.
The following year, he married his second wife, mathematician Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, who was 21 years younger. She would bear him three sons.
During World War II, Solzhenitsyn served in the Red Army as commander of a sound-ranging battery, saw major action at the front, and was decorated twice.
His early, unfinished novel Love The Revolution! chronicled his wartime experiences and his growing disillusionment with the Soviet regime.
Around this time, in February of 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for making derogatory comments about the regime in general and Josef Stalin in particular - comments included in letters to his friend, Nikolai Vitkevich.
(At the time, it was a common practice for Soviet authorities to read citizens' private mail in search of subversive statements.)
Accused of distributing anti-Soviet propaganda, Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was beaten and interrogated. On July 7th, 1945, he was sentenced to eight years of hard labor in a brutal gulag - a Soviet labor camp.
He served his time at several different work camps, including one in Ekibastuz, Kazakhstan, where his experiences would form the basis for his first published book, a novella that would bring him international fame.
One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich (1962) told the story of the title character, an innocent Russian soldier and prisoner of war who, after returning home, finds himself arrested by Soviet authorities and charged with being a spy.
He is sent to a work camp in the Soviet gulag system - a brutally cold, filthy, and degrading labor camp designed to dehumanize the prisoners. Ivan Denisovich's spirit can't be broken.
He makes friends with his fellow inmates and they all try to survive the inhumane conditions as best they can. When Denisovich falls ill, he is forced to continue working.
While serving his time in Ekibastuz, Alexander Solzhenitsyn himself fell ill and had a tumor removed, although the doctors failed to diagnose his cancer. In 1953, after he finished serving his sentence, he was exiled for life in Kazakhstan, a common fate for political prisoners.
Solzhenitsyn's cancer spread. Close to death, he was allowed to be treated at a hospital in Tashkent. The treatments worked and his cancer went into remission. He would base his 1967 novel, Cancer Ward, on his experiences fighting the disease.
After Nikita Khrushchev gave his famous Secret Speech in 1956, where he denounced the crimes of the Stalin regime in an attempt to bring the Soviet Union out of the dark ages and closer to Lenin's original vision, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was exonerated and freed from exile.
He returned to Russia, where he taught school during the day and wrote at night. He kept his writings a secret, but somehow, while he was working on his next book, the KGB found out that he was a writer.
The manuscript he'd been working on - his famous nonfiction expose, The Gulag Archipelago - wouldn't be published until 1973, and not officially in the Soviet Union until 1989.
In 1962, Solzhenitsyn approached Alexander Tvardovsky, poet and editor-in-chief of the Noviy Mir magazine, with his final draft of One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich.
Amazingly, the novella was published in an edited form with the explicit approval of Soviet Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who publicly defended it at a Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication.
In his defense of the book, Khrushchev famously declared, "There is a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil."
Solzhenitsyn's novella became a huge hit throughout Russia. It was studied in Soviet schools. It also became a hit around the world, bringing the Soviet gulag system to the attention of the West.
Unfortunately, two years later, Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from power, and books exposing the horrors of Stalinism began to disappear. In 1965, the KGB confiscated most of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's papers and manuscripts.
The manuscript for his nonfiction book The Gulag Archipelago was spared, hidden from the KGB by Solzhenitsyn's friends in Estonia. They helped him finish typing it up.
In 1970, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He couldn't go to Stockholm to receive it, for fear of not being allowed back in the Soviet Union. A compromise was proposed.
The deal was that Solzhenitsyn would receive his prize at a ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow, but the Swedish government rejected the proposal, fearing that the ensuing media coverage would damage its relations with the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West in 1973. Not long afterward, the KGB found a copy of the first part of the manuscript. On Februrary 12th, 1974, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was arrested. He would be deported to Frankfurt, West Germany, and stripped of his Soviet citizenship.
A few days later, the legendary Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko suffered reprisals for his support of Solzhenitsyn. U.S. military attache William Odom managed to smuggle most of Solzhenitsyn's archive out of Russia.
Solzhenitsyn lived in Cologne and Zurich, Switzerland, before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States. He lived in the Hoover Tower, then settled in Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976.
In 1978, Harvard University awarded him an honorary literary degree, and he delivered the commencement address - where he condemned materialism in modern Western culture. He began work on The Red Wheel, a cycle of novels set amidst the Russian Revolution of 1917.
In the 1980s, Solzhenitsyn found himself becoming a media star, the darling of the right and a hero to the Reagan administration, which had whipped up anti-communist hysteria and paranoia to levels not seen since the 1950s.
Liberals and secularists criticized Solzhenitsyn for his strong support of the Vietnam War, his reactionary patriotism, and his devout espousal of Russian Orthodox Christianity, which was tinged with anti-Semitism.
His two volume essay on Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years Together, was denounced as anti-Semitic. He had also vocally opposed allowing foreign Catholic and Protestant clergy into Russia in order to protect the country's Russian Orthodox Christian identity.
In 1990, Solzhenitsyn's Russian citizenship was restored. Four years later, having tired of the West, he and his wife moved to Troitse-Lykovo, West Moscow, where he lived until his death in 2008 at the age of 89.
On the first anniversary of Solzhenitsyn's death, in an interview on Radio Liberty, Russian dissident writer Vladimir Voynovich confirmed that Solzhenitsyn had been a lifelong, virulent anti-Semite.
Solzhenitsyn kept his anti-Semitism a closely guarded secret because he knew that it would prevent him from receiving the Nobel Prize. His notorious essay, Two Hundred Years Together, would not be published until 2001.
Quote Of The Day
"Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time of threatening moral and social dangers - such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its public works are used as wastepaper instead of being read." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Vanguard Video
Today's video features the 1970 British film adaptation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic novella, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On December 10th, 1830, the legendary American poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was treasurer of Amherst College; his father, Samuel Dickinson, co-founded the school.
Edward was also a state legislator who served numerous terms of office over a 40-year period. Emily described him as warm and loving, while her mother was cold and distant. Emily had an older brother, Austin, and a younger sister, Lavinia.
As a child, Emily Dickinson was well-behaved and displayed a gift for music, showing a particular talent for playing the piano. From the age of nine, she studied botany and tended the family garden with her sister.
Emily collected pressed plants, and throughout her lifetime, assembled them in a 66-page leather bound herbarium, which would contain almost 425 specimens.At the age of ten, Emily, along with her sister, enrolled at Amherst Academy, a former boys' school that had begun accepting female students two years earlier.
Edward Dickinson bought a new home and moved the family in. Whenever their parents were absent, Emily and her brother Austin would pretend to be Lord and Lady Dickinson, the owners and rulers of the home.
Since she was so distant from her mother, Emily turned to her brother for comfort whenever something befell her. "He was an awful mother," she quipped, "but I liked him better than none."From a young age, Emily was troubled by the "deepening menace" of death, especially when she lost people close to her.
When she was 14, the death of her second cousin and close friend Sophia Holland from typhus traumatized her. A year later, a religious revival took place in Amherst, with many townspeople becoming born again Christians.
Emily too became one of the faithful, but it didn't last. She ended her church-going a few years later, after which, she wrote a poem opining that "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church - / I keep it, staying at Home."
After graduating from Amherst Academy in 1847, Emily Dickinson enrolled at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which would later become Mount Holyoke College. She remained at the Seminary for only ten months.
Some say that she had become ill and was homesick, others have suggested that she disliked the teachers and rebelled against the school's evangelical fervor. Whatever the reason, her brother Austin brought her home, where she took over the household, keeping house and cooking for the family.
She enjoyed attending activities and events in town;at this time, a young attorney named Benjamin Franklin Newton became a Dickinson family friend and a mentor to the 18-year-old Emily. He introduced her to the works of William Wordsworth and gifted her with a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson's first poetry collection.
Newton held Emily in high regard and recognized her talent as a poet, but their relationship was most likely platonic. Sadly, he contracted tuberculosis, and as he lay dying of the disease, he wrote to Emily.
He told her that he would like to live long enough to see her become a literary success. He didn't. Emily would say of Newton, "When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me immortality - but venturing too near himself, he never returned."
A few years later, in 1850, Emily was devastated again by the death of a close friend. Leonard Humphrey, her former principal at Amherst Academy, died suddenly of "brain congestion" at a young age. Emily had other friends, including Susan Gilbert, her best girlfriend, who had been a classmate of hers at Amherst.
Emily would write her over three hundred letters, more than she had written to anyone else. Their friendship was tempestuous, as Susan was often aloof and disagreeable, but she also acted as Emily's muse and literary adviser. She would later marry Emily's brother Austin, but the marriage would not be a happy one.
From the mid-1850s, Emily's mother became bedridden, suffering from various chronic illnesses. She demanded that one of her daughters remain with her, so Emily assumed the responsibility.
The strain of having to care for her cold and distant mother and keep up with the household chores took a huge toll on Emily psychologically. She began to withdraw more and more from the outside world, and became a recluse.
When she wasn't caring for her mother or keeping house, Emily wrote poetry and organized her large collection of manuscripts, rewriting, editing, and making clean copies of her poems. Over a seven-year period, from 1858-65, she assembled 40 volumes containing nearly 800 poems.
When Samuel Bowles, owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican newspaper, became a friend of the Dickinson family, Emily sent him over three dozen letters and nearly fifty poems. Their friendship brought out some of her most intense writing.
Around 1872, Otis Phillips Lord, a judge on the Massachusetts State Supreme Court, became an acquaintance of Emily's, and then, her friend. In Lord, she found a soul mate and kindred spirit who possessed similar literary interests and admired her poetry.
After his wife died in 1877, scholars believe that Lord's relationship with Emily became a late-life romance, but this can't be proven because their letters were destroyed.
More deaths of loved ones would traumatize Emily. In 1874, her father died of a stroke. Nearly a year to the day in 1875, her mother suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed. The increased demands her care required took a tremendous toll on Emily's mental and physical health.
She continued to write, but stopped organizing her manuscripts. Her mother would live for seven more years. She died in 1882. The following year, Emily lost her favorite nephew, Gilbert, her brother's youngest child, when the boy died of typhus. Judge Lord fell ill and died in March of 1884.
Devastated and drained both mentally and physically, her health began to deteriorate. Emily Dickinson died on May 15th, 1886, at the age of 55. Her doctor listed the cause of death as Bright's disease, now known as chronic nephritis or inflammation of the kidneys.
After Emily's death, her sister Lavinia kept the promise she made and destroyed all of Emily's letters. However, Emily did not request that her poems be destroyed. Although less than a dozen of them had been published during Emily's lifetime, Lavinia was shocked to find that her sister had written nearly 1,800 poems.
When Emily's poems were published anonymously by Samuel Bowles in the Springfield Republican, he had edited them considerably, and she complained that the edits changed the meanings of her poems.
Emily wrote poetry in an experimental style, with unconventional capitalization and punctuation, extensive use of dashes, slant rhyme schemes, and idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery.
Bowles thought her style was too unconventional for Victorian readers. Her work would not be published in its original, unaltered format until 1955, when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Today, Emily Dickinson is rightfully considered one of the greatest American poets of all time, and she remains a major influence on American poetical voice.
Quote Of The Day "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry." - Emily Dickinson
Vanguard Video Today's video features a collection of poems by Emily Dickinson. Enjoy!
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