This Day In Literary History
On September 27th, 1929, A Farewell To Arms, the classic novel by the legendary American writer Ernest Hemingway, was published. The autobiographical novel was based on the author's own experiences during the first world war.
After graduating high school, Hemingway decided not to go to college. Instead, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star.
Six months later, against his father's wishes, he quit to join the Army and fight in World War I. Unfortunately, he failed his physical due to his poor eyesight.
Rejected for military service, he joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps instead and served as an ambulance driver. On his way to the Italian front, he stopped in Paris, which was being bombarded by German artillery. He tried to get as close to the combat zone as possible.
When he arrived in Italy, Hemingway witnessed firsthand the horrors of war when an ammunition factory near Milan exploded, and he was tasked with picking up the human remains. He wrote about the experience in his first short story, A Natural History Of The Dead. Having never witnessed such horrors before, it left him badly shaken.
In July of 1918, Hemingway's career as an ambulance driver ended when he was badly injured while delivering supplies to soldiers. He was shot in the knee and caught shrapnel from an Austrian trench mortar shell in both legs.
While recovering in a Milan hospital, he fell in love with the nurse who tended him - an American woman named Agnes von Kurowski. She was six years his senior. They planned to return to America together.
However, when the time came, Agnes jilted Hemingway and ran off with an Italian officer. The end of their relationship would deeply affect both Hemingway the writer and Hemingway the man.
In her Dear John letter, Agnes addressed him as "Ernie, dear boy." At first, she scolded him for his immaturity and blamed the breakup on their age difference, but then she dropped the real bombshell:
Believe me when I say this is sudden for me, too - I expect to be married soon. And I hope & pray that after you have thought things out, you'll be able to forgive me & start a wonderful career & show what a man you really are.
A Farewell To Arms tells the story of Hemingway's protagonist and alter ego, Frederic Henry, an American soldier serving during World War I.
Henry is wounded in Italy and recovers in a Milan hospital. There, he falls in love with Catherine Barkley, the British nurse who tends to him.
By the time Henry has recovered, Catherine is three months pregnant with his child. They are separated by the war, then reunited later.
They flee to Switzerland by rowboat where, after a long and painful labor, Catherine gives birth to a stillborn baby, then bleeds to death.
A Farewell To Arms was originally published by Scribner's Magazine in a serialized format. Hemingway revised the manuscript before the novel was published in book form.
When his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald asked to read it, he sent him a draft copy of the manuscript. Fitzgerald wrote him back with nine pages of suggested revisions. At the bottom of the last page, Hemingway wrote "Kiss my ass."
Rightfully considered a classic work of American literature, A Farewell To Arms demonstrates Ernest Hemingway's power as a storyteller and the style that would mark him as one of the all time great writers.
He never got to say goodbye to Agnes von Kurowski, a fate that befalls Frederic Henry in the novel, which ends with this poignant passage:
"You can't come in now," one of the nurses said.
"Yes I can," I said.
"You can't come in yet."
"You get out," I said. "The other one too."
But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
A Farewell To Arms had two noted film adaptations. The first, released in 1932, starred Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes as Frederic and Catherine. It received good reviews, but Ernest Hemingway hated it, calling it overly romantic. Still, he became friends with Gary Cooper.
The second adaptation, released in 1957, starred Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones. A critical and commercial failure that saw original director John Huston fired and replaced, Hemingway also hated this version, especially producer David O. Selznick's casting choices.
Selznick cast his 38-year-old wife Jennifer Jones to play the 21-year-old Catherine. Rock Hudson called his starring role the worst mistake of his career, as he'd turned down leads in such classic films as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Ben-Hur (1959) to appear in it.
Quote Of The Day
"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened."
- Ernest Hemingway
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Ernest Hemingway's classic novel, A Farewell To Arms. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 26th, 1957, West Side Story, an acclaimed musical adaptation of William Shakespeare's classic play Romeo and Juliet, opened on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre.
Eight years earlier in 1949, the legendary Broadway producer Jerome Robbins met with legendary composer Leonard Bernstein and playwright Arthur Laurents to discuss his idea for a new musical that they would collaborate on.
The musical Robbins had in mind was an adaptation and modernization of William Shakespeare's classic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. Set in New York City, the musical would address the disturbing postwar rise of anti-Semitism in America.
Laurents, eager to write his first musical, penned a first draft of the proposed play. Set in New York's East Side, it was called East Side Story and dealt specifically with Irish Catholic prejudice against Jews.
It told the story of two feuding families, one Irish-Catholic, the other Jewish. The daughter of the Jewish family, a Holocaust survivor, falls in love with the son of the Irish Catholic family - a forbidden romance that provokes mutual hate and results in tragedy.
When the group met to discuss Laurents' first draft, they ultimately decided not to do a story about Irish Catholic anti-Semitism, as it had been done before on the Broadway stage and done well in plays like Anne Nichols' Abie's Irish Rose.
Laurents then dropped out to work on other projects and the musical was shelved for nearly five years. In 1955, at the opening of a new Ugo Betti play, Laurents ran into Stephen Sondheim, a young composer and lyricist whom he'd worked with on another shelved musical, Seranade.
Sondheim told Laurents that the East Side Story project was back on. Leonard Bernstein had asked Sondheim to write the lyrics, as he wanted to concentrate exclusively on writing the music.
The new musical had been retitled West Side Story and would focus on a different form of racism - white prejudice against New York City's burgeoning Puerto Rican population.
The musical also dealt with juvenile delinquency, then a recent phenomenon that was reaching epic proportions and making headlines nationwide. Instead of feuding families, the conflict is between feuding teenage street gangs, one white, the other Puerto Rican.
Arthur Laurents wrote a new script and served as a creative consultant for Leonard Bernstein's music and Stephen Sondheim's lyrics, offering suggestions during the development of the score.
In writing the new script, Laurents was faced with the problem of the language used by the two gangs. While strong profanity could be heard in more daring off-Broadway plays, at that time, it was unheard of on the Broadway stage.
Laurents didn't want to use clean current slang, either, for fear of dating the play. So, he invented a new slang dialect for the gang members that sounded profane but wasn't. The new slang would also avoid dating the play with obsolete slang.
Producer Jerome Robbins wanted to maintain an atmosphere of gritty realism, so the harrowing fight scenes were not choreographed like the musical numbers. Stage blood was used effectively to enhance the realism of the fight scenes and the tragic story.
The play opens with the Jets, a white street gang, involved in a turf war with the Sharks, a Puerto Rican gang. Riff, the leader of the Jets, plans to challenge Sharks leader Bernardo to a rumble (gang fight) to settle their differences once and for all.
At the neighborhood dance, Tony, the ex-leader of the Jets, shows up. Tony has gone straight and wants nothing more to do with gang life, but is still loyal to his old friend Riff, who now leads the Jets. The gang questions that loyalty.
Meanwhile, Bernardo's sister Maria also goes to the dance. Ignoring the brewing tensions between the Jets and Sharks members in attendance, Maria dances with Tony, and it's love at first sight for both of them.
When both gangs meet on neutral ground to discuss a rumble, Tony convinces both Riff and Bernardo to engage in a "fair fight" - to use only their fists during the rumble instead of weapons. Overruling the protests of their respective gang members, the two leaders agree.
The next day, Tony meets Maria and they dream about their wedding - despite the fact that Maria's family has decided that she will marry her brother's best friend, Chino. Maria begs Tony to stop the rumble, fearful for Bernardo's safety.
Tony tries to stop the rumble, but fails. During the fight, he tries to stop Riff from stabbing Bernardo, but Riff shakes him off and gets back in the fight. When Bernardo accidentally kills Riff, Tony, blaming himself for Riff's death, kills Bernardo in a rage.
A shocked Tony returns to Maria and confesses to killing her brother. She attacks him at first, but recognizing his remorse and realizing that she still loves him, she decides to run away with him.
Later, Bernardo's girlfriend Anita, after being nearly raped by the Jets, tells them that a jealous Chino has killed Maria. It's a lie, but it gets back to Tony, who vows to kill Chino. When Tony and Chino finally meet, Chino pulls out a gun and shoots Tony. He dies in Maria's arms.
The Jets and Sharks members gather around Tony's body, and a distraught Maria grabs Chino's gun and points it at them, blaming their hatred for Tony and Bernardo's deaths. She says she's now filled with hate and can kill, but instead, she breaks down and cries.
Moved by Maria's grief for Tony, the Jets and Sharks end their feud and form a funeral procession. They carry Tony's body away, with Maria in tow.
West Side Story opened in September of 1957 to excellent reviews. Featuring classic songs such as Jet Song, Maria, America, and Tonight, the musical became a huge hit. It ran at the Winter Garden Theatre for nearly 1,000 performances.
Most critics praised the musical for its grittiness and stark violence, which enhanced the tragic story. Some accused writer Arthur Laurents of glamorizing gang violence and juvenile delinquency at a time when juvenile delinquency rates were skyrocketing.
In 1961, West Side Story was adapted as a classic musical feature film directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. Though the film took liberties with the play and Leonard Bernstein hated its orchestration, it would become a hit and win big at the Academy Awards.
Legendary rock singer Elvis Presley was the original choice to play Tony, but his manager Col. Tom Parker made him decline the role. He didn't want Elvis to be associated with gang warfare and juvenile delinquency.
Richard Beymer was cast as Tony, Natalie Wood as Maria. During production, it was discovered that neither Wood nor Beymer could sing well enough for the film, so their vocals were dubbed by singers Marni Nixon and Jimmy Bryant.
The film's only weakness is the toned-down violence, required by the stifling Production Code that was still in effect at the time. To tone down the violence, the gang warfare is depicted via dance numbers, which the stage play deliberately avoided.
Nevertheless, the musical film adaptation of West Side Story is rightfully considered an all-time classic. So much so that people were shocked when it was remade nearly sixty years later.
Featuring Ansel Elgort as Tony and Rachel Zegler as Maria, the film, directed by Steven Spielberg from a script by legendary playwright / screenwriter Tony Kushner, was originally scheduled for a Christmastime release on December 18th, 2020.
Postponed for a year due to the Covid pandemic, the film premiered on December 10th, 2021 - the sixtieth anniversary of the original film's release. The remake got great reviews from critics, but bombed hard at the box office, grossing only $76 million on a $100 million budget.
The film's failure was blamed on many factors - the long wait for release, the ongoing pandemic, high ticket prices to make up for theaters' losses, competetion from streaming services, poor marketing, and no star power.
Despite the remake being a financial flop, it was widely praised by those who did go to see it. Tony Kushner's screenplay was far more faithful to the Broadway musical script than the original film, and the music, arranged by composer David Newman and conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, did justice to Leonard Bernstein's score.
Quote Of The Day
"Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget."
- Arthur Laurents
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 96-minute documentary on the making of the recent film adaptation of West Side Story. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 25th, 1897, the legendary American writer William Faulkner was born. He was born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi, named after his great-grandfather, a colonel in the Confederate Army and an important figure in Northern Mississippi.
A town in nearby Tippah County had also been named after him. When Faulkner was four years old, the family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he would live on and off for the rest of his life.
Oxford became the model for the town of Jefferson in Faulkner's writings. It was located in Lafayette County, which served as the model for Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
As a teenager, Faulkner planned to marry his girlfriend Estelle Oldham, but another suitor, Cornell Franklin, proposed first, and Estelle's parents demanded that she marry him because he came from a respectable family.
Ten years later, her marriage fell apart and she divorced Cornell in April of 1929. Two months after Estelle's divorce was finalized, William Faulkner married her.
During the last year of World War I, Faulkner tried to enlist in the Army but was deemed unfit for service due to his height, or rather, his lack of it: he only stood about 5'5" tall.
Undaunted, Faulkner joined first the Canadian then the British Royal Air Force, but saw no action. When he joined the Royal Air Force, he changed the spelling of his last name from Falkner to Faulkner.
Legend has it that the change had been made by a careless typesetter during the printing of his first novel. When asked about the misspelling of his name, Faulkner allegedly replied, "Either way suits me."
Although he would always be associated with Mississippi, Faulkner wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1925), while living in New Orleans. He had been encouraged to write by his friend, writer Sherwood Anderson.
The small house in New Orleans where Faulkner lived and wrote, located at 645 Pirate's Alley, just around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral, now serves as the premises of Faulkner House Books and the headquarters of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society.
Soldiers' Pay told the story of a World War I pilot who returns to his home town in Georgia after suffering a severe head injury in combat, from which he is dying.
Throughout the late 1920s, Faulkner honed his craft and published more novels. His fourth novel, The Sound And The Fury, (1929) while not a commercial success at the time of its publication, has since been regarded as his first masterpiece.
Making bold and brilliant use of experimental techniques in narration and non-linear plotting, the novel told the story of the once great Compson family, formerly respected Old Southern aristocrats. Now the family teeters on dissolution and its reputation is tarnished.
The novel is divided into four sections. The first three sections feature first person narration, each section narrated by one of the grown Compson sons. The fourth section is told in third-person narration.
This section follows Dilsey Gibson, the matriarch of the servant family that works for the Compsons, as she observes the slow destruction of the Compson family.
The four sections are not in chronological order. The first section is narrated by 33-year-old Benjy Compson, the youngest son, who is an embarrassment to the family because he is retarded.
The only ones who care for him are his beloved older sister, Candace "Caddy" Compson and the matriarchal servant woman, Dilsey Gibson. In Benjy's narration, Faulkner makes use of dazzling impressionistic language to convey his retardation.
As the novel progresses, the reader is drawn into the self-destructive web that has ensnared the Compsons, which includes nihilism, racism, sexual frustration, sexual promiscuity, suicide, mental illness, and financial crisis.
The Sound And The Fury is rightfully considered one of the greatest American novels ever written. Today, it still appears frequently on required reading lists for high school and college English classes.
Faulkner's next novel, As I Lay Dying, (1930) is also considered a classic and expands on the techniques Faulkner used in The Sound And The Fury.
The narration is still in the stream-of-consciouness style, but this time, the story is narrated by 15 different people - including the late family matriarch who provides narration while she lies dead in her coffin.
Her name is Addie Bundren, and the novel deals with her family's quest to honor her last wish, which is to be buried in Jefferson Mississippi. As the story unfolds, we learn all about the Bundren family, including how one of Addie's children is illegitimate, conceived as the result of her affair with a preacher.
In 1931, William Faulkner would publish the novel that first made him famous - or some would say, infamous. Sanctuary not only proved to be a shocker for 1930s readers, it also made Faulkner's name as a writer and awakened interest in his brilliant earlier works.
Ironically, Sanctuary, a Southern Gothic potboiler, was deliberately written to be shocking; Faulkner was in serious financial straits and needed to write something that would make him some fast money. There were no artistic intentions behind it.
Set in 1929 Mississippi, Sanctuary told the story of Temple Drake, an attractive young woman from a wealthy, respected Southern family - her father is a well-known and powerful judge.
Though a college student at the University of Mississippi, Temple Drake is shallow and vapid. A wild, promiscuous party girl, she loves to go drinking and carousing with boys, and they love to drink and carouse with her.
During one night of partying, Temple gets involved in a drunk driving accident. She and her bootlegger boyfriend Gowan Stevens are hidden from the police by his bootlegging crew members, Tommy and Popeye.
Tommy is good-natured, but Popeye is an impotent, degenerate psychopathic criminal. After Popeye catches Temple and Tommy making love, he kills Tommy and rapes Temple with a corncob. He eventually kidnaps her and forces her to live and work at a brothel he owns.
The story climaxes with a sensational murder trial where Temple, who enjoyed her degradation at Popeye's hands, falsely accuses Lee Godwin, another bootlegger, of raping her and killing Tommy - crimes for which Godwin is wrongly convicted and lynched.
Believe it or not, Sanctuary was adapted as a feature film in 1933. The novel was heavily sanitized for the screen, with no references to corncobs. The character of Popeye was renamed Trigger to avoid confusion with the popular comic strip character.
Retitled The Story Of Temple Drake, the resulting film still caused a furor and helped bring about the Production Code crackdown the following year, resulting in fiercely strict censorship of American films for over thirty years.
Twenty years after the publication of Sanctuary, Faulkner would publish a sequel called Requiem For A Nun, which follows Temple Drake, now a wife and mother, as she struggles to deal with her violent, troubled past.
The sequel is no simple potboiler - it's written in Faulkner's experimental literary style. In fact, the book is part novel and part play. The entire book would be adapted for the stage by the legendary French novelist and playwright Albert Camus in 1956.
William Faulkner would continue to write more great novels, including Light In August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), and Intruder In The Dust (1948).
He was also a prolific short story writer; A Rose For Emily, Red Leaves, That Evening Sun, and Dry September were among his most acclaimed and popular stories, and often published in anthologies.
In 1949, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He donated a portion of his prize money "to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers."
This donation resulted in the establishment of the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction. He donated another portion of his prize money to set up a scholarship fund for black students at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
In the early 1940s, legendary film director Howard Hawks invited Faulkner to come to Hollywood and work on screenplays for his movies. Faulkner gladly accepted the offer, as he needed the money and the pay was good.
He would contribute to the scripts of Hawks' classic films such as his adaptations of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Ernest Hemingway's To Have And Have Not. Faulkner's work as a screenwriter led him to become friends with Hawks, actors Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and other Hollywood illuminati.
Faulkner suffered from a lifelong drinking problem, though he would often tell friends, family, and the press that he drank while he wrote because he believed that alcohol helped fuel the creative process.
Many believe that he drank to escape the pressures of his life, including his frequent financial problems. In 1959, Faulkner was seriously injured in a horse-riding accident. His injuries and the ravages of alcoholism led to the deterioration of his health.
He died of a heart attack in 1962 at the age of 64. Before he died, Faulkner completed his last novel, The Reivers, which was supposedly the book he intended to end his writing career with.
The brilliant coming-of-age story, set in early 20th century Memphis, won Faulkner the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which was awarded to him posthumously in 1963. The novel would be adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1969, directed by Mark Rydell and starring Steve McQueen, Mitch Vogel, and Burgess Meredith.
Quote Of The Day "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."
- William Faulkner
Vanguard Video Today's video features a rare recording of William Faulkner giving his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Faulkner claimed that he was so drunk, he didn't remember giving the speech. Is that a humorous exaggeration or the truth? Listen and decide for yourself!
This Day In Literary History
On September 24th, 1896, the legendary American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald was born. He was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald in St. Paul, Minnesota, named after his famous distant relative, poet Francis Scott Key, who had written the poem that would become the national anthem.
Scott, as he was called by family and friends, spent most of his childhood in upstate New York, but returned to Minnesota in 1908 after his father was fired from his job at Procter & Gamble. His first short story, a detective story, was published in a school newspaper when he was 12.
After returning to Minnesota, Fitzgerald spent three years at St. Paul Academy, but was expelled at the age of 16 for neglecting his studies. However, not long afterward, when he attended Newman School in Hackensack, he buckled down and excelled at academics.
In 1913, at the age of 17, Fitzgerald entered Princeton University, where he met and became friends with future writers and literary critics Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. He became involved with and wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club.
The Triangle Club is a student theater troupe that puts on an original, student-written musical comedy every year, then takes the show on tour over the winter holiday season. Fitzgerald's experience writing for the Club inspired him to write his first novel.
His first novel was called The Great Egoist. He submitted it for publication to Charles Scribner's Sons. The editor praised Fitzgerald's writing talent, but rejected his novel. It would not discourage him from writing.
During World War I, Fitzgerald left Princeton to join the Navy, but the war ended shortly after he enlisted. He was stationed at Camp Sheridan, where he met a girl named Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama State Supreme Court judge.
They fell in love and became engaged. In 1919, Fitzgerald moved into an apartment in New York City, where he took a job at an advertising firm and wrote short stories on the side. He was unable to convince Zelda that he could support her, so the engagement was called off.
Fitzgerald moved back in with his parents in St. Paul and began revising his previously rejected novel. Practically re-written and retitled This Side Of Paradise, the novel was accepted by Scribner's for publication and published on March 26th, 1920.
It became one of the most popular novels of the year. A classic of the flapper generation, the novel told the story of Amory Blaine, a handsome young Princeton University student and aspiring writer who learns a bitter lesson about status seeking and greed via two doomed romances with wealthy debutantes.
The success of Fitzgerald's novel, which also helped raise the prices of his short stories, enabled him to make a decent living, so he and Zelda got back together and were married at St. Patrick's Cathedral. They had only one child, a daughter, Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald.
The 1920s proved to be an influential decade in F. Scott Fitzgerald's development as a writer. His second novel, The Beautiful And Damned (1922) was the semi-autobiographical story of a wealthy heir, Anthony Patch, his relationship with his wife Gloria, and his struggle with alcoholism.
The Beautiful And Damned was a brilliantly written character study, but Fitzgerald's third novel would prove to be his masterpiece. The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, was an unforgettable chronicle of the Jazz Age - a term Fitzgerald coined.
Taking place from 1919 to 1929, the Jazz Age was the post World War I era of unbridled prosperity, Prohibition, organized crime, uncontrolled drinking, sexual experimentation, jazz music, flappers, and other rowdy, disaffected youth.
Set during the summer of 1922, the novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner and World War I veteran who moves to New York City to seek his fortune. At a lavish party, he meets the host - a mysterious wealthy man named Jay Gatsby, who claims to know Nick from his Army days during the Great War.
Nick and Gatsby strike up an odd, yet close friendship. Nick is bemused when Gatsby introduces him to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish underworld figure. Gatsby is also a former suitor of Nick's cousin, Daisy Buchanan, now the selfish, spoiled wife of millionaire Tom Buchanan.
Nick arranges a meeting between Gatsby and Daisy. The two begin an affair which angers Tom, even though he has a mistress on the side. Nick stands by his friend Gatsby and soon finds himself caught in a web of adultery, decadence, and ultimately, murder.
Within a year of its initial publication, The Great Gatsby was adapted as a Broadway play and a feature film, but the novel was not popular and sold less than 25,000 copies during Fitzgerald's lifetime. Upon its republication in 1945 and 1953, the novel became a classic.
It quickly gained a huge readership and a deserved reputation as one of the greatest American novels of all time. It would be adapted again as a feature film, the most acclaimed version released in 1974 and starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby.
During the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald made several visits to Europe, most notably Paris, where he became friends with many of the American expatriate writers living there, including Ernest Hemingway, who became his best friend.
They would spend lots of time drinking, talking, and exchanging manuscripts. Fitzgerald helped boost Hemingway's career. Unfortunately, Hemingway and Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, couldn't stand each other.
Hemingway accused Zelda of being insane (which she was) and encouraging Fitzgerald to drink heavily in order to distract him from writing novels. That way, he could devote his attention to cranking out short stories strictly for money to keep Zelda in the life of luxury to which she was accustomed.
Zelda accused Hemingway of using Fitzgerald to further his own career. She called him a fairy and accused him of having a homosexual affair with her husband. There is no evidence to support this accusation, most likely a product of Zelda's paranoia, but some scholars claim that Hemingway's aggressive hypermasculinity was the result of him being a repressed, self-loathing homosexual.
To punish his wife for questioning his masculinity, Fitzgerald slept with a female prostitute and flaunted it. The conflict between Hemingway and Zelda resulted in the ending of Fitzgerald's friendship with him and a lifelong animosity between the two men.
At first, the Fitzgeralds' marriage had been productive. Zelda's diaries and large collection of correspondence would inspire Scott's writings; sometimes he even quoted passages from her writings. But their alcoholism and Zelda's worsening schizophrenia took a toll on him.
In 1934, Fitzgerald finally published his long awaited fourth novel, Tender Is The Night. He started writing the novel in 1932, while Zelda was hospitalized. It received glowing reviews and briefly made the bestseller list.
But its reception was nowhere near as big as that of The Great Gatsby. In deep financial trouble, Fitzgerald spent the remainder of his life writing commercial short stories for money and working for Hollywood movie studio MGM.
He became a screenwriter for hire, which he found degrading. He worked on many scripts and even wrote some unfilmed scenes for Gone With The Wind. There was no artistic intent behind his work as a screenwriter - he did it for the money.
Fitzgerald would mock himself in a series of 17 short stories known as the Pat Hobby Stories, which would later be republished as a collection.
Pat Hobby, a once great screenwriter of the silent film era, is now a broken down, drunken hack. He haunts studio lots looking to write for a few dollars, or better yet, an on-screen credit. His schemes usually backfire and result in more humiliation.
By the late 1930s, years of heavy drinking had taken a toll on F. Scott Fitzgerald's health. In late 1940, he suffered two heart attacks. On December 21st, 1940, the day after he suffered his second heart attack, he suffered a third, massive heart attack and died at the age of 44.
Among the mourners at his wake was legendary writer Dorothy Parker, who reportedly wept and murmured, "The poor son of a bitch." - a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in The Great Gatsby.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's last novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously in 1942.
Quote Of The Day
"An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel, The Great Gatsby. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 20th, 1878, the legendary American writer Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was a liquor salesman whose alcoholism haunted his son's childhood. When Upton was ten, the Sinclairs moved to New York City.
He would often stay with his wealthy grandparents, and his observations of the differences between the rich and the poor in late 19th century America would influence both his writings and his political convictions. He became a staunch socialist.
When he was thirteen, Upton enrolled at a prep school in the Bronx now known as the City College of New York. To help pay for his tuition, the intellectually gifted young writer sold magazine articles and wrote dime novels. After he graduated, he studied briefly at Columbia University.
In 1904, Upton planned to write his first novel, the subject being the corruption of the American meatpacking industry and the hardships faced by poor immigrants who come to America hoping to better their lot in life.
Instead, the poor people find the American Dream to be a nightmare of cruelty, corruption, and despair. To research the conditions he would write about, Upton went undercover, working in Chicago's meatpacking plants for seven weeks.
His classic debut novel, The Jungle, was published two years later, in 1906. It told the story of Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who decides to emigrate to America after hearing about all the freedom and opportunity the country allegedly offered.
He moves himself and his extended family to America. Although Rudkus is strong, hardworking, and honest, he's also naive and illiterate. The family falls deep into debt, then falls victim to predatory moneylenders who end up taking their home and meager savings.
When Rudkus and his family find jobs at a meatpacking plant, they're paid slave wages and find that government inspectors, policemen, and judges must all be paid off in order for them to keep their jobs and their freedom.
The family witnesses deaths occur on the job that could have been prevented if it weren't for the horrific working conditions. Rudkus loses all his hope for achieving the American Dream. When his pregnant wife dies because the family cannot afford a doctor, then his son drowns, Rudkus flees Chicago in despair.
Later, he returns and works at various jobs to support himself and his family - some of which require him to sacrifice his integrity. He is haunted by the prospect of turning to crime to support his family.
One night, while looking for a warm and dry place to stay, Rudkus walks in on a lecture being given by a socialist orator. Among the socialists, he finds a sense of community and purpose.
He realizes that socialism and strong labor unions are the keys to overcoming the evils that he, his family, and other workers have suffered. A fellow socialist employs Rudkus, and he is able to support his family, but some of his loved ones are damaged beyond repair.
Although Upton Sinclair had intended to expose the exploitation of workers with his novel, the greatest uproar over The Jungle had nothing to do with working conditions.
The real furor the novel caused was over its exposure of the incredibly unsanitary practices employed by the meatpacking industry to maximize profit. Food safety became more of a concern than worker safety.
Then President Theodore Roosevelt, a fiercely conservative Republican, publicly dismissed the concerns raised by Sinclair's novel and derided the author, calling him "a crackpot." Roosevelt also said:
I have an utter contempt for [Upton Sinclair.] He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth.
Privately, however, Roosevelt feared there was far more truth to Sinclair's novel than just "a basis." So, he sent two trusted men to investigate, Labor Commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds.
The two men were ordered to make surprise visits to Chicago's meatpacking plants and determine whether or not the conditions described in Sinclair's novel were true. They were revolted by both the working and sanitary conditions they witnessed.
Neill and Reynolds wrote a comprehensive report of all their findings and submitted it to President Roosevelt, who, loath to regulate American business, suppressed it. He was, however, disturbed enough to do something about the issues raised by the report.
Roosevelt dropped hints about the terrible conditions in the meatpacking plants and the inadequacy of government inspections. These hints, Neill's testimony before Congress, and public pressure resulted in the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
Upton Sinclair used the money he made from The Jungle to found the Helicon Home Colony in Englewood, New Jersey. It was an experimental commune for "authors, artists, and musicians, editors and teachers and professional men." It was also a farming commune which would produce its own fruits, vegetables, meats, and milk.
While the commune was not intended to be a socialist project per se, those who wished to live there "would have to be in sympathy with the spirit of socialism." The Helicon Home Colony would last for about a year before it burned down in a fire that was ruled suspicious.
Another one of Sinclair's classic novels, Oil! (1927), was also based on a true story - the Teapot Dome Scandal of 1922-23, where the notoriously corrupt administration of then President Warren G. Harding was exposed.
The Republican President and his administration had been bribed by oil companies to allow them to acquire valuable government owned oil fields (used to supply the Navy in case of emergency) for peanuts, bypassing the competitive bidding process required by law.
Oil! told the story of James Arnold Ross, a self-made millionaire oilman who becomes a conspirator in the Teapot Dome Scandal. The wealthier and more powerful Ross becomes, the more immoral he becomes.
His son, Bunny, ultimately breaks ties with him and becomes a socialist. Oil! would be adapted as an acclaimed 2007 feature film, There Must Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Unfortunately, the film took liberties with the story.
In the 1920s, Upton Sinclair moved his family to California, where he founded that state's chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. He got involved in politics and twice ran for office on the Socialist ticket - once for Congress, once for the Senate. He lost both elections.
When he spoke at a rally in San Pedro to support the Industrial Workers of the World union, whose right to free speech was under attack, he read from the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights. He was immediately arrested, along with hundreds of others. Sinclair's arresting officer proclaimed, "we'll have none of that Constitution stuff."
In 1934, Sinclair became the Democratic candidate for Governor of California. A popular candidate, he ultimately lost the election by only 200,000 votes, thanks in part to propaganda shorts produced by Hollywood studios - fake newsreels featuring actors pretending to be real people being interviewed on the street.
One of them said, "Upton Sinclair is the author of the Russian government, and [communism] worked out well there, and I think it would do so here." Sinclair was not a communist and both the Soviet Union and the American Communist Party publicly denounced him.
The worst of the fake newsreels featured a cast of actors playing transients who have come to California hoping for a handout should Sinclair be elected governor. The propaganda campaign was conceived by Will Hays, head of Hollywood's infamous film censorship office, the Production Code Administration.
Hays was a former U.S. Postmaster General and a former member of ex President Warren G. Harding's corrupt administration, which Sinclair had written about in Oil!. Hays was more than happy to help his fellow Republican, Sinclair's opponent Frank Merriam.
The studios Hays worked for were determined to destroy Sinclair because part of his plan for economic recovery in California called for increased taxes on Hollywood studios and the creation of independent public studios where struggling filmmakers could make movies free of Hollywood's influence.
The Hollywood film studios' propaganda smear campaign worked. Sinclair lost the election and Hays, the studios, and the Republican Party got away with mounting one of the dirtiest political campaigns in American history.
Ironically, years before his failed campaign for governor of California, which he would write about in his memoir I, Candidate for Governor - and How I Got Licked (1935), Sinclair worked as a screenwriter and movie producer after being recruited by the legendary actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin.
Throughout his amazing career, Upton Sinclair wrote nearly a hundred books, most of which were novels. He also wrote plays and nonfiction books on various subjects including politics, a scathing criticism of organized religion, and an autobiography.
Sinclair also wrote books on psychic phenomena, which interested him greatly because his wife was a psychic. He died in 1968 at the age of 90.
Quote Of The Day
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
- Upton Sinclair
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Upton Sinclair's classic debut novel, The Jungle. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 19th, 2000, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the classic, Pulitzer Prize winning novel by the famous American writer Michael Chabon, was published.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay opens in 1939. Josef "Joe" Kavalier, a 19-year-old Jewish Czech refugee, arrives in New York City to live with relatives, including his seventeen-year-old cousin, Sammy Klayman.
Joe is a talented artist, Sammy an aspiring writer. Both have an interest in magic and connections to the legendary magician Harry Houdini, whose real name was Ehrich Weiss. Sammy's father used to be a vaudeville strongman called the Mighty Molecule.
When Joe gets a job as an illustrator for a novelty company, the job takes him in a different direction: the company wants to get into the comic book business after the huge success of Superman ushered in the golden age of comics.
Joe and Sammy, who has taken the pen name Sammy Clay, form a team where Sammy writes adventure stories and Joe illustrates them. The pair creates an antifascist superhero called The Escapist, and the company they work for reluctantly agrees to publish their comics.
The Escapist becomes a hit, but the cousins' contract only pays them a minimal royalty. They are slow to realize that they're being screwed because they're both caught up in personal problems.
While Joe is desperate to get his family out of Nazi-occupied Prague, Sammy grapples with his sexual identity, struggling to come to terms with the fact that he might be gay. Meanwhile, Joe falls in love with a bohemian artist named Rosa Saks.
Distraught over his failure to save his family from the Nazis, Joe runs off to join the Navy. Instead of fighting the Nazis, he's stationed at a remote naval base in Antarctica. He doesn't know that he left Rosa pregnant with his child.
After the war ends, Joe is discharged from the Navy and returns to New York, but is unable to face Rosa and Sammy, so he hides out in the Empire State Building. Meanwhile, Sammy married Rosa to save her from scandal.
When Sammy's not helping Rosa raise their son Tommy, he's involved in a gay affair with actor Tracy Bacon, who plays his superhero, The Escapist, on the radio. The two men go to a dinner party with their gay friends and other couples, and the party is raided.
Local police and two off-duty FBI agents round up everyone except for Sammy and another man who managed to hide under the table. The FBI agents ultimately catch them and offer them their freedom in exchange for sexual favors.
After that close call, Sammy concentrates on helping Rosa raise Tommy and trying to appear as a traditional family, but they can't hide their secrets from the precocious boy who loves them both.
Tommy is reunited with his long lost father Joe at the Empire State Building and takes magic lessons from him. The boy determines to reunite the legendary team of Kavalier & Clay, and he does.
Happy to see each other again, the cousins decide to make their comeback in comics. Joe moves in with Sammy, Rosa, and Tommy, and just when it seems like their lives are finally getting back on track, Sammy is publicly outed - on television - when he appears before then Senator Estes Kefauver's notorious Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency (SSJD).
(In 1954, in response to skyrocketing juvenile delinquency rates in the U.S., since it's never good politics to blame parents and teachers or examine the lack of mental health services and social programs, the SSJD held hearings where comic books were blamed for juvenile delinquency. This resulted in the imposition of the Comics Code and decades of stifling censorship of comics.)
That's just a threadbare outline of this epic novel, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel was supposed to be adapted as a feature film, but the project keeps slipping through the Hollywood cracks.
A screenplay was completed in 2002 and an excerpt from it was published in Entertainment Weekly, but the film never got past the preproduction stage. Two years later, Michael Chabon pronounced the project dead.
Then, in 2005, director Stephen Daldry announced that he was going to make the film. With Tobey Maguire and Jamie Bell cast as Sammy and Joe, and Natalie Portman as Rosa, it seemed a done deal.
This time, the film didn't even get to preproduction. In April of 2007, Chabon said that the project "just completely went south for studio-politics kinds of reasons that I'm not privy to... right now, as far as I know, there's not a lot going on."
In an interview conducted in December of 2011, Stephen Daldry stated that he hadn't given up on adapting The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and was looking to adapt the novel as a TV miniseries, preferably for HBO.
In 2019, Michael Chabon signed a deal with CBS TV to adapt it as a Showtime miniseries. The following year, he and his wife Ayelet Waldman began writing the script for what he believes will be a two season, sixteen-episode miniseries, but it hasn't been produced yet.
Quote Of The Day
"You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two."
- Michael Chabon
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Michael Chabon discussing his classic novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay at the Dominican University of California in 2010. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 18th, 1987, Hellraiser, a feature film adaptation of the classic horror novella The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker, was released to theaters.
The movie was written and directed by Clive Barker himself - the first time that the popular English horror novelist ventured into filmmaking. It was not the first time that Barker's writings were adapted for the screen.
His short stories Transmutations and Rawhead Rex were adapted as feature films in 1985 and 1986, respectively. Barker hated both movies, which is why he decided to write and direct the next film adaptation himself.
Hellraiser opens with Frank (Sean Chapman), a hedonistic adventurer always in search of new sexual thrills, buying a mysterious antique Chinese puzzle box in an unnamed third world country. It's not really Chinese; it's a diabolical object called the Lament Configuration that opens a door to another dimension.
Back home in England, Frank solves the puzzle. Chains with small hooks on them fly out of the box and tear into Frank's flesh, then tear him apart as three demonic beings called Cenobites cross over from their hellish dimension and into ours.
The Cenobites examine Frank's remains, after which, the leader, Pinhead, (Doug Bradley) picks up the puzzle box and closes it. The room returns to normal. Later, Frank's brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) moves into Frank's house, along with his wife, Julia (Clare Higgins).
They don't know what happened to Frank - they think he's off on another one of his adventures. When Larry enters the upstairs room where Frank was killed, he cuts his hand and some of his blood drips onto the floor - and mysteriously disappears into the floorboards.
This allows Frank's tortured soul to partially regenerate his body. He appears to Julia, with whom he once had an affair, and convinces her to help him complete the regeneration of his body so he can escape from the Cenobites, breaking the deal he made with them.
Soon, Julia is luring men up to the attic on the pretense of sex, where Frank drains them of their blood, which he uses to regenerate his body. He tells Julia about the Lament Configuration and how it allows the Cenobites to cross over from their world into ours.
Soon, Frank, Julia, and Frank's teenage niece Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) all run afoul of the demonic Cenobites, who believe that the extremes of pleasure and pain are inseparable - and are more than happy to introduce the trio to the pleasures of pain.
When Hellraiser was completed, in order to avoid an X rating, the MPAA ratings panel required Clive Barker to trim some of the gore and tone down the overall sadomasochistic theme of the movie.
Some of the cuts would later be restored without resulting in the loss of the film's R rating. The movie's first working title was Sadomasochists From Beyond The Grave.
Hellraiser became a huge box office hit, grossing twenty times its budget. Rightfully considered one of the great cult classic horror films, it inspired numerous sequels and made English actor Doug Bradley, who plays Pinhead, a cult film icon.
The Cenobite leader was not called Pinhead in the novella or in the screenplay. In the book, he's referred to as "the Hell Priest." In the screenplay, he has no name. He was nicknamed Pinhead by the crew and fans because his head and face were pierced by metal pins. The nickname stuck and was used in the sequels.
Clive Barker would write and direct more film adaptations of his works, including Nightbreed (1990) and Lord of Illusions (1995).
In 2011, Barker was supposed to write and direct a remake of Hellraiser for Dimension Films, which owned the film rights to the Hellraiser franchise. Unfortunately, the project fell through.
When Dimension Films realized that their contract with Clive Barker stipulated that they would lose the rights to the Hellraiser franchise if they didn't produce the movie, they rushed a film into production on a tiny budget of $300,000.
Barker wanted nothing to do with the film, Hellraiser: Revelations, a sequel to Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005). After the advertising claimed it was "from the mind of Clive Barker," the angry writer referred to it as "no child of mine" in a profanity laced tweet.
Hellraiser: Revelations was the first film to not star Doug Bradley as the iconic Pinhead. Bradley tweeted that he backed out because the script read like an unrevised first draft (it was, and there would be no revisions) and his salary would be about, in his words, "the price of a fridge."
Stephan Smith Collins was cast as Pinhead in Hellraiser: Revelations, which is considered by many to be the worst film in the popular series. Despite backlash from fans and critics, another installment of the series was released seven years later so Dimension could keep the film rights.
The role of Pinhead in Hellraiser: Judgement (2018) was again offered to Doug Bradley, but he turned it down when he learned that he would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement just to read the script, to prevent him from publicly expressing any displeasure he might have with it.
This time, Bradley was replaced by a newcomer, Paul T. Taylor, who had impressed writer-director Gary J. Tunnicliffe. Together, they decided to give Pinhead a new look and a new interpretation. Here, he works for Hell as a harvester of condemned souls.
The movie opens with Pinhead and the Auditor of the Stygian Inquisition discussing updating their methods in the age of advanced human technology. Meanwhile on Earth, three police detectives - Sean Carter, his brother David, and Christine Egerton - are investigating a brutal serial killer.
The killer is called The Preceptor because he murders his victims based on the Ten Commandments. As the body count continues, David Carter follows the clues and is stunned to discover that Sean, his brother and fellow detective, is the Preceptor.
Sean is caught by Pinhead first, and finds himself in Hell. He escapes, stealing the Lament Configuration, which he plans to use to sic the Cenobites on his wife and his brother in retribution for their affair...
Despite the studio toning down some of the gore and sexual content, Hellraiser: Judgement was surprisingly well received by fans and critics, with Dread Central horror film critic Steve Barton saying:
Hellraiser: Judgment's biggest accomplishment is that it's actually good. All of the acting is solid, as is the story. Pinhead is omnipresent, and Taylor delivers a worthy performance and is every bit as majestic as you'd hope he'd be... while not perfect nor as good as the classic Hellraiser films, [it] delivers a rather striking vision that feels as new as it does familiar.
In April of 2020, preproduction was finally set to begin on a Hellraiser reboot. By December, Clive Barker had regained the U.S. rights to the franchise. The film, produced by the Hulu streaming service, began shooting in Serbia the following year and was released on Hulu in October of 2022.
More faithful to Barker's novella than its predecessors, here Pinhead is referred to as The Priest and played by a woman, Jamie Clayton - a nod to the Cenobite leader's androgyny in the book. The main character, Riley McKendry, is a recovering drug addict struggling to stay clean. She's living with her estranged brother David, his boyfriend Colin, and their roommate, Nora.
Riley and her boyfriend Trevor find the Lament Configuration in an abandoned warehouse. After a fight with David, who accuses her of relapsing, Riley runs off and solves the puzzle box. David tracks her down, cuts himself on the box, and is abducted by the Cenobites.
After discovering that the Lament Configuration was previously owned by hedonistic millionaire Roland Voight, Riley and Trevor visit Voight's abandoned mansion and find his journals. Riley learns the horrifying truth about the puzzle box and the Cenobites - and what she'll have to do to save her brother from eternal torment in Hell...
Stylish and gruesome, the Hellraiser reboot received mostly good reviews from critics and fans and was the most watched movie on all streaming platforms during its first week of release.
Quote Of The Day
"My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that."
- Clive Barker
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a documentary on Hellraiser and the film franchise it spawned. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 17th, 1935, the legendary American writer Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado. His parents, who were dairy farmers, moved the family to Springfield, Oregon, when he was eleven. Kesey attended Springfield High School, where he excelled at academics and became a champion wrestler.
In 1956, while attending the University of Oregon in Eugene, (where he also won wrestling championships) Kesey married his high school sweetheart, Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom he had first met in seventh grade. She would bear him three children.
A year after they married, Kesey received a degree in speech and communication from the University of Oregon's School of Journalism. In 1958, he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship grant to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University, which he did.
During his time at Stanford, Kesey volunteered to participate in Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hopital. Funded by the CIA, the project was a study of the effects of psychoactive drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline on the human mind.
(The study of hallucinogens was actually just one part of Project MKULTRA, a collaboration between the CIA and the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories. The main goal of the notorious project was to study and develop methods of mind control during the Cold War.)
Kesey would later write many accounts of his experiences with psychoactive drugs, both during Project MKULTRA and in private experimentation. His role as a guinea pig for the government project and his interaction with the patients at the veterans' hospital would serve as the inspiration for his classic debut novel.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, published in 1962, was narrated by a mental patient - a docile half-Indian giant known as Chief, who pretends to be a deaf-mute. He tells the story of Randle Patrick McMurphy, an amiable transferee from a prison work farm.
Convicted on a battery charge, McMurphy feigns insanity in order to serve out the remainder of his sentence in a mental hospital. With no real medical authority in charge, the ward is run by "the Big Nurse," Nurse Ratched - a sadistic tyrant who rules with an iron fist and three strong young orderlies.
McMurphy constantly antagonizes Nurse Ratched with his rebellious attitude and disruptive behavior, which includes running poker games, making comments about her figure, and inciting his fellow patients to exercise their rights by voting to watch the World Series on TV.
McMurphy inspires Chief to open up to him and the big Indian reveals that he can hear and talk. The two men team up to challenge Nurse Ratched's authority and are later forced to endure electroshock therapy.
The horrific treatments do nothing to temper McMurphy's rebellious nature, as he smuggles in liquor and prostitutes for his fellow patients. After Nurse Ratched's mental cruelty provokes a young patient to commit suicide, McMurphy attacks her and tries to strangle her. He is sent to the Disturbed Ward.
Nurse Ratched recovers from her injuries but loses her voice - her most effective weapon for keeping the patients in line. McMurphy is lobotomized and left in a vegetative state, a condition that will surely frighten and demoralize the patients.
Not wanting his friend to serve as a horrifying example of what happens when you challenge authority, Chief smothers McMurphy with a pillow so he can die with dignity, robbing Nurse Ratched of her victory. Then he escapes from the hospital and returns to his tribal land.
Time magazine would include One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in its list of the 100 Best English Language Novels From 1925 To 2005. It was adapted as a Broadway play by Dale Wasserman in 1963 and as an acclaimed feature film in 1975.
Directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy, Will Sampson as Chief, and Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched, the movie swept the Oscars, winning Academy Awards for Best Actor, (Nicholson) Best Actress, (Fletcher) Best Director (Forman), Best Picture, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Ken Kesey's second novel, Sometimes A Great Notion, published in 1964, has been compared to William Faulkner's novel, Absalom, Absalom! Set in the fictional Pacific Northwest logging town of Wakonda, Oregon, the novel tells the story of the Stampers.
The Stampers are an irascible family that owns and operates a logging company. After the invention and introduction of the chainsaw to the logging industry, the union loggers in Wakonda go on strike, demanding the same pay for shorter working hours due to a decreasing need for labor.
Since the Stamper family's logging company is non-union, they decide to keep working and supply the local mill with all the lumber that the union workers would have supplied, had they not gone out on strike.
The novel explores the details and ramifications of this fateful decision, no doubt the result of half-crazed old patriarch Henry Stamper's philosophy of "never give a inch," which has defined the Stamper family and its relationship with the town.
While more steeped in realism than Kesey's first novel, Sometimes A Great Notion is also more experimental, with alternating first-person narratives. A masterpiece of Northwestern American literature, it was adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1970, directed by Paul Newman, who also starred as Henry Stamper.
Following the publication of Sometimes A Great Notion in 1964, Ken Kesey had to go to New York City for a promotional appearance. So, he planned a cross country road trip with some friends, including poet Allen Ginsberg.
Also along for the ride were counterculture icon Wavy Gravy (in his trademark jester's cap), Stewart Brand, Paul Krassner, and others. Calling themselves the Merry Pranksters, they drove to New York in an old school bus (with Beat icon Neal Cassady at the wheel) painted with psychedelic colors that they nicknamed Furthur.
When he returned to California, Kesey gave a series of famous psychedelic parties he called Acid Tests. Held in venues decorated with fluorescent paint, the Acid Tests featured light shows, music, and plenty of LSD.
The main house band for these events was a then little known jam band called The Grateful Dead. Tom Wolfe wrote about the Acid Tests in his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, so called because the LSD would be dispensed in sugar cubes added to cups of Kool-Aid.
In 1965, after being arrested for possession of marijuana, Kesey faked his own death to trick the police, then fled to Mexico. When he came back to the United States eight months later, he was caught and sentenced to five months at the San Mateo County Jail.
After serving his time, Kesey moved back to his family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, where he stayed for the rest of his life and continued to write. He published three more novels, Caverns (1989), Sailor Song (1992), and Last Go Round (1994). He also published a short story collection, Demon Box (1986), and two collections of essays.
Ken Kesey's last major work was an essay published in Rolling Stone magazine, where he called for peace following the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. He died of complications from liver cancer surgery in November of 2001 at the age of 66.
Quote Of The Day
"Listen, wait, and be patient. Every shaman knows you have to deal with the fire that's in your audience's eye."
- Ken Kesey
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Ken Kesey speaking at the University of Virginia. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 13th, 1916, the legendary English writer Roald Dahl was born in Cardiff, Wales. He and his three sisters were the children of Norwegian immigrants who spoke Norwegian at home and English in public.
They named their son after Roald Amundsen, the famous Norwegian explorer who had become a national hero at the time. He was the first explorer to discover the South Pole and reach the North Pole.
When Roald Dahl was three years old, he lost first his seven-year-old sister Astri to appendicitis, then his father to pneumonia. His mother considered moving her children back to Norway. She changed her mind, as her husband had wanted the children to be educated in British schools, which he believed were the best.
Roald began his education at The Cathedral School in his hometown of Llandaff. When he was eight years old, he and four of his classmates planted a dead mouse in a jar of hard candies at a sweet shop.
The kids considered the proprietress, Mrs. Pratchett, to be a "mean and loathsome" old woman and wanted to teach her a lesson. Unfortunately, they were caught and caned by their headmaster.
From there, Roald transferred to St. Peter's, a boarding school in Weston-super-Mare, England. He hated it, but he never told his mother in the weekly letters he wrote to her. He knew that the school screened students' mail and prohibited any complaints to their parents.
In 1929, Roald, then thirteen, began attending Repton School in Derbyshire. It was there that he had a life changing experience; one of his friends was savagely beaten by the school's headmaster.
When the headmaster, Geoffrey Fisher, was later ordained Archbishop of Canterbury, Roald lost what little respect he had for religion and began to doubt the existence of God.
As a teenager, Roald Dahl developed passions for photography and literature. His English teachers didn't think much of him; one of them wrote "I have never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended."
Being tall and well-built for his age, Roald excelled at sports, playing for his school's fives and squash (English racquet sports) teams and its soccer team.
After graduating school in 1934, the 18-year-old Roald Dahl took a job with the Shell Petroleum Company, which sent him to Tanzania. He and the other Shell employees lived at the luxurious Shell House near Dar-es-Salaam, but when World War II broke out in 1939, he joined the Royal Air Force.
Roald became a fighter pilot for the RAF, flying daring combat missions over Africa. In September of 1940, after refueling in Libya, he was supposed to fly to his squadron's airstrip, located 30 miles South of Mersa Matruh, Egypt.
Unable to find the airstrip and running low on fuel, Roald was forced to make an emergency landing in a desert. Unfortunately, the undercarriage of his plane clipped a boulder and he crashed.
Despite sustaining a fractured skull and a shattered nose, Roald managed to crawl away from the flaming wreckage of his plane. He regained consciousness while being treated in Mersa Matruh and found that he was temporarily blinded.
He was taken to an RAF hospital in Alexandria for further treatment. The RAF investigated the crash and found that Roald had been given the wrong coordinates for the airstrip, which sent him instead to a no man's land between Allied and Italian lines.
Amazingly, by February of 1941, Road Dahl had completely recovered from his injuries, regained his eyesight, and was deemed fit to resume his flying duties. This time, he flew combat missions across the Mediterranean.
In April, he saw action in the Battle of Athens, where he and several other RAF pilots shot down over 20 German planes. Though he would be promoted to officer, he was ultimately relieved of duty after he'd begun suffering chronic severe headaches that sometimes caused him to black out.
Roald continued to serve during World War II. His work for the British Information Service introduced him to espionage; he acted as an information courier for British Security Coordination, a division of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service.
Ian Fleming, legendary author of the classic James Bond spy thriller novels, was a fellow agent. Dahl would later write the screenplay for the 1967 feature film adaptation of Fleming's James Bond novel You Only Live Twice.
It was during the war that Road Dahl's first published short story appeared. Inspired after meeting fellow writer C.S. Forster, Dahl wrote A Piece of Cake, a story based on his adventures as a World War II flying ace.
The story was published by the Saturday Evening Post in August of 1942. They paid Dahl $1,000 for it, which was a huge amount at the time - the equivalent of $18,000 in today's money.
Through he did write occasionally for adults, Roald Dahl was best known as a children's writer who delighted his young readers with his caustic wit, imagination, dark humor, and taste for the macabre.
The Gremlins, his first children's book, was published in 1943. It was based on RAF folklore about mischievous little creatures with a fetish for sabotaging planes.
Dahl had children of his own - five in fact - with his wife, the famous American actress Patricia Neal, whom he married in 1953. In December of 1960, his son Theo, then four months old, was severely injured when his baby carriage was hit by a taxicab.
Theo suffered from hydrocephalus (a buildup of water on the brain) for a time, so Dahl co-invented the "Wade-Dahl Till," a cerebral shunt used to drain the excess water, alleviating the patient's pain and preventing brain damage.
Two years later, in 1962, when Dahl lost his seven-year-old daughter Olivia to measles-related encephalitis, he became an early, vocal proponent of immunization.
After the war ended, Roald Dahl began writing and publishing collections of short stories, mostly for adults. In 1961, he returned to children's writing with his classic novel, James and the Giant Peach.
In it, four-year-old James finds his life turned upside down when his parents are devoured by a rhinoceros that escaped from the zoo. James is sent to live with his repulsive aunts Spiker and Sponge, who abuse him verbally and physically and imprison him in their home.
James meets a strange little man who gives him a sack containing the ingredients for a magic potion that can bring happiness and great adventure, but the boy accidentally spills these ingredients - and the water he was supposed to add to them - onto the barren peach tree outside his aunts' home.
The tree begins to blossom and it grows a giant peach the size of a house. James's evil aunts make money off the peach, but one night, James ventures inside the giant peach and befriends the insects and other creatures who live there. They had been waiting for him, so they could all escape together...
Due to its macabre nature and frightening scenes, James and the Giant Peach still raises the ire of disgruntled parents and pressure groups in America. The American Library Association ranked it #56 on their list of the 100 most banned or challenged books.
Amazingly, James and the Giant Peach was adapted by Disney as an animated feature film in 1996. As expected, the screenplay took great liberties with the story. Dahl followed it with another classic children's novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964).
In this surreal fantasy, reclusive candy maker Willy Wonka, owner of the world's largest chocolate factory, holds a contest where five lucky children will win a tour of his factory. One of the winners turns out to be Charlie Bucket, a nice, humble boy from a very poor family.
The other winners are enormously fat little glutton Augustus Gloop, spoiled, selfish rich girl Veruca Salt, television-addicted Mike Teavee, and Violet Beauregarde, a rude little girl who's always chomping on gum.
As the children take their tour, they find Willy Wonka's chocolate factory staffed by small, pygmy like men called Oompa-Loompas. They explore the surreal workings of the factory, not knowing that Willy Wonka has a secret plan: he wants to retire and pass his factory on to one of the children.
The children's bad behavior eliminates them one by one from contention and results in a nasty twist of fate. Augustus falls into a chocolate river and is sucked into the works of a fudge making machine. Veruca is dumped into a garbage chute.
Mike is shrunk, then stretched tall by a taffy puller, and Violet is turned into a giant blueberry. Charlie Bucket, the child whom Willy Wonka liked the best, is the last one left and inherits the chocolate factory.
In 1971, a feature film adaptation, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was released, starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. Originally, Roald Dahl was supposed to write the screenplay, but he backed out of the project.
Dahl objected when the film's corporate sponsor, Breaker Confections, now known as The Wonka Candy Company, demanded extensive changes, including the promotion of its products within the film.
The title was changed to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl hated the film, which bombed at the box office, but has since become a beloved cult classic, thanks to its frequent showings on TV over the years. The film is also available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and streaming services.
In 2005, a new feature film adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was released, directed by legendary filmmaker Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka.
This film was a huge hit, and grossed over $400 million worldwide. Roald Dahl would publish a sequel to his novel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, in 1972.
Dahl continued to write great children's novels, including The Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970) and The Witches (1983), which were also adapted as films. In 1988, Dahl published one of his most beloved novels, Matilda.
Five-year-old Matilda Wormwood is a sweet-natured, super intelligent little girl who was born into an ignorant, sleazy family. Her father is a crooked used car salesman who cheats his customers. Neither of Matilda's parents have much use for her, and they place no value on education.
After selling a lemon of a car to Agatha Trunchbull, the headmistress of Crunchem Hall Primary School, Matilda's father arranges for her to attend the school. Matilda finds that Miss Trunchbull is a sadistic tyrant.
Trunchbull delights in meting out incredibly cruel punishments for the least offenses. However, Matilda's teacher, Miss Honey, is kindhearted. Impressed by Matilda's brilliance, Miss Honey befriends her.
When Matilda is blamed for an offense committed by a classmate, the evil Miss Trunchbull incites her to such an emotional frenzy that she unleashes telekinetic powers - the ability to move objects with her mind.
Miss Honey reveals to Matilda that Miss Trunchbull is actually her aunt. After the suspicious death of her father, Miss Trunchbull took over his home and school and began abusing her the way she abuses the children.
Miss Honey is too frightened of her evil aunt to stand up to her tyranny, so Matilda uses her telekinetic powers to teach Miss Trunchbull a lesson she'll never forget.
Matilda was adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1996, produced, directed, and narrated by Danny DeVito, who also co-starred as Matilda's sleazy father, Harry Wormwood. Some disgruntled parents complained about the film's dark humor and violence.
In 2009, the Royal Shakespeare Company produced a big budget rock musical adaptation of Matilda for the London stage, with music and lyrics by Australian comedian-singer-actor Tim Minchin. The popular musical made its Broadway debut in 2013 and became a hit there as well. It was adapted as a feature film in 2022.
Roald Dahl died in 1990 after a battle with myelodysplastic syndrome, a leukemia-like blood disease. He was 74 years old. His last children's novel, The Minipins, was published posthumously in 1991. His hometown in Wales renamed one of its landmarks The Roald Dahl Plass in his honor.
Quote Of The Day
"I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage."
- Roald Dahl
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a rare radio interview with Roald Dahl. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 12th, 1846, the legendary English poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning eloped. They were forced to elope because Barrett's father disliked Browning and believed him to be a good-for-nothing looking to marry her for her money.
Elizabeth Barrett was born to a wealthy, aristocratic English family. The Barretts lived in a lavish 20-room mansion near Durham, England. A sickly child with weak lungs, Elizabeth was in chronically poor health and spent most of her time in her room.
When her beloved brother died in 1840, Elizabeth became even more of a recluse, but maintained a connection to the outside world via her extensive correspondence. She also took up writing poetry.
Elizabeth Barrett's first poetry collection, The Seraphim and Other Poems, was published in 1838. Her second collection, Poems by Elizabeth Barrett, appeared in 1844.
In addition to being a respected poet, Barrett also established herself as a literary critic. When most other critics trashed Dramatic Lyrics (1842), a poetry collection by an up and coming poet named Robert Browning, Barrett publicly defended it in a glowing review.
Touched by Elizabeth's praise, Robert Browning wrote to thank her. In his letter, he also asked to meet her in person. The reclusive Elizabeth Barrett turned him down at first, but he kept writing and begging to meet her. She finally relented.
When Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett met, it was love at first sight. They courted and determined to marry, but her father denied her permission. Browning came from a working class family and didn't have much money, so Elizabeth's father assumed he was after hers.
There was another reason that Elizabeth's father forbade her and his other children from ever marrying, and it had to do with the lineage of the Barretts, an aristocratic family that came from a long line of plantation owners.
Elizabeth Barrett's grandfather, who owned sugar plantations and other businesses in the West Indies, was known for his humane treatment of his slaves. He was also known to take slave women as his mistresses.
Her father, Edward Barrett, believed that his father may have adopted the light skinned babies of his slave mistresses, and that he may have been one of them. Politically conservative and a virulent racist, Edward was repulsed by the idea that Negro blood may be running through his family's veins.
All of his children were white, but he feared that they might one day produce dark skinned offspring. That's the real reason he forbade them all from marrying under the threat of being disowned and disinherited.
The fiercely liberal Elizabeth Barrett didn't share her father's racism and wasn't about to let his ignorance and intolerance stand in the way of her marrying her true love.
So, on September 12th, 1846, a day when she was left home alone, she sneaked off to meet Robert Browning at St. Marylebone Parish Church. The couple was married, and Elizabeth kept it a secret, returning home for a week before fleeing with her husband.
For marrying without his permission, Elizabeth's father angrily disowned and disinherited her, but she still had her own money, which she'd earned from her writings. Her surviving brothers cut all ties with her.
The Brownings settled in Italy, where they lived for fifteen years and remained happily married. In 1849, after suffering four miscarriages, they had their first and only child, a son whom they nicknamed Pen. They continued their writing careers and published more classic poetry collections.
Although Robert Browning's works were overshadowed by his wife's at first - critics snidely referred to him as "Mrs. Browning's husband" - later, he began to receive the recognition he deserved.
Sadly, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning's great love affair would come to an end. Though she had regained her health at the time she gave birth to her son, nearly ten years later, her lungs grew weak again and began to fail.
In 1860, Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her last great poetry collection, Poems before Congress, a political work which resulted in British conservative magazines labeling her a fanatic. She had sided with Italy during the Second Italian War of Independence - and against England.
A year later, she died in her husband's arms at the age of 55. Robert Browning and his son would return to England after her death. Scholars speculate that her death was caused by both her chronic pulmonary issues and the opiates she used to relieve the pain.
Quote Of The Day
"What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?"
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's classic poem, If Thou Must Love Me. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 11th, 1885, the legendary English writer D.H. Lawrence was born. He was born David Herbert Lawrence in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England. His father was a barely literate coal miner, his mother a former schoolmistress.
His working class town, (which he called "the country of my heart") background, and his parents' rocky marriage would be reflected in his writings. As a boy, Lawrence became the first student to win a City Council Scholarship to the nearby Nottingham High School.
In 1901, Lawrence left school to take a job as junior clerk for a surgical appliance factory, but a severe case of pneumonia cut his employment short. After he recovered, from 1902-06, he served as a student teacher at the British School in Eastwood.
From there, he became a full-time student and received a teaching certificate from University College, Nottingham, in 1908. During university, Lawrence began to write poetry and short stories, and started work on the first draft of a novel.
Near the end of 1907, he won a short story contest held by the Nottingham Guardian. It was the first time he received recognition for his writing talent.
In the fall of 1908, D.H. Lawrence moved to London, where he taught at Davidson Road School and continued to write. By 1910, just as his first novel The White Peacock was about to be published, Lawrence's mother died of cancer. He was devastated, as he had always been close to her.
The following year, he met Edward Garnett, a publisher's reader who became his literary mentor. Before Lawrence's second novel The Trespasser was published, Garnett helped him revise the manuscript that would become his third novel, Sons And Lovers (1913).
Considered to be Lawrence's first masterwork, Sons And Lovers, originally titled Paul Morel, is an autobiographical novel about Paul Morel, a young aspiring artist whose mother, to whom he is close, suffers from both mental illness and a miserable marriage.
It would later be adapted for the screen and TV, first as an acclaimed 1960 feature film directed by Jack Cardiff and starring Dean Stockwell and Trevor Howard, then as a British TV serial in 1981 and 2003.
In March of 1912, Lawrence met Frieda Weekley, a married mother of three and relative of future World War I flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, the "Red Baron." Though Frieda was six years older than Lawrence, they fell madly in love with each other.
They ran away to Frieda's parent's house in Metz, a town near a disputed border between Germany and France. Lawrence soon found himself arrested and accused of being a British spy. He was released following the intervention of Frieda's father.
This strange and frightening encounter instilled in Lawrence a lifelong hatred of militarism. He and Frieda moved to a small town south of Munich. From there, they walked through the Alps to Italy, a trek that Lawrence would write about in one of his travel books.
In 1913, Lawrence and Frieda went to England for a visit, during which, Lawrence met and befriended critic John Middleton Murry and writer Katherine Mansfield. When they returned to Italy, Lawrence and Frieda stayed at a cottage in Fiascherino on the Gulf of Spezia.
Lawrence began work on a piece of fiction that would become two of his best known novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women In Love (1920). After Frieda finally obtained her divorce, she and Lawrence returned to England and were married on July 13th, 1914.
World War I had broken out, and because his wife was German and he had openly expressed contempt for militarism, Lawrence's countrymen immediately suspected that he was a traitor.
When Lawrence's classic novel, The Rainbow was published in 1915, it created a furor and resulted in more antagonism of the author by the British government.
The Rainbow, which dealt with the personal and sexual dynamics of the relationships of three generations of the Brangwen family, was considered one of the finest English novels of the 20th century.
The Rainbow was groundbreaking in both its depictions of sex and in its treatment of sex as both a natural part of life and a kind of spiritual life force. After an obscenity trial, the novel was banned by the British government, with all currently available copies seized and burned. The ban would last for eleven years.
In late 1917, after seeing his novel banned and burned, and being constantly harassed by the British military, D.H. Lawrence was forced to leave England under the Defence of the Realm Act.
He and his wife Frieda began traveling around the world, wandering through Italy, the South of France, Sri Lanka, Australia, Mexico, and finally, in 1922, the United States, where Lawrence decided to emigrate.
They settled on a ranch near Taos, New Mexico, which would later be renamed the D.H. Lawrence Ranch. There, Lawrence was visited by legendary writer Aldous Huxley, who would become a lifelong friend.
During the 1920s, Lawrence continued to publish quality novels. Women In Love (1920), a sequel to The Rainbow, also caused a furor with its sexual content, and was equally groundbreaking in its depiction of a homosexual attraction between two male characters.
Kangaroo (1923) and The Boy In The Bush (1924) were both semi autobiographical novels based on Lawrence's experiences living in Australia. The Plumed Serpent (1926) was inspired by Lawrence's visit to Mexico.
In this novel set during the Mexican Revolution, Kate Leslie, a member of a tourist group watching a bullfight, leaves the event in disgust. She then meets Don Cipriano and his intellectual, landowner friend, Don Ramon.
When she discovers that Cipriano and Ramon have revived the old pre-Christian Aztec religious cult of Quetzalcoatl, she finds herself drawn to it. Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec sky god, is depicted as a flying serpent with feathers.
D.H. Lawrence's last full-length novel would prove to be his masterpiece. Lady Chattlerley's Lover, first published in Italy in 1928, was not only brilliant and beautifully written, but also extremely daring, both in content and philosophy.
After Lady Constance Chatterley's husband Sir Clifford's war injuries leave him crippled and impotent, she finds herself driven to the brink of madness by sexual frustration.
In desperation, she has a passionate affair with the 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.
Because of it sexual philosophy, vivid and erotic depictions of sex, and use of certain words considered obscene, such as fuck and cunt, in 1928, Lady Chatterley's Lover could only be published in Italy.
It would not be published in the UK until 1960, and its publication would result in yet another obscenity trial, as the novel ran afoul of England's Obscene Publications Act of 1959.
During the trial, various academic critics were brought in as witnesses. As a result, on November 2nd, 1960, a jury found that the novel was not legally obscene, a victory that led to far more freedom for publishers in the UK.
The decision also led to bans on the novel being overturned in Australia and the United States. Sadly, Lawrence wouldn't live to see his novel vindicated in court and become a celebrated classic and cultural icon.
In 1965, the great American singer, songwriter, and satirist Tom Lehrer wrote Smut, one of his most popular songs, whose lyrics stated:
Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?
I've got a hobby - rereading Lady Chatterley!
Lady Chatterley's Lover would be adapted as a feature film, first in 1955, directed by Marc Allegret and starring Danielle Darrieux as Lady Chatterley, then in 1981, which was the most famous adaptation.
The 1981 version was directed by Just Jaeckin and starred Sylvia Kristel in the title role. The novel would also inspire numerous softcore and hardcore pornographic adaptations, or should I say, imitations.
D.H. Lawrence died in 1930 of complications from tuberculosis. He was 44 years old. In addition to his novels, his body of work included short story collections, over a dozen poetry collections, several plays, and works of nonfiction. He is rightfully considered one of the greatest English writers of all time.
Quote Of The Day
"When genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."
- D.H. Lawrence
Vanguard Video
Today's video features complete a reading of D.H. Lawrence's classic novel, Sons and Lovers. Enjoy!
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