Notes For October 15th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 15th, 1844, the legendary German writer and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Rocken bei Lutzen, Prussia, the son of a Lutheran pastor and teacher.

The oldest of three children, Nietzsche's brother Ludwig died at the age of two, a year after their father died of a brain ailment at the age of 33. Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth would later figure in the controversy that still surrounds his philosophy and writings.

As a boy, Friedrich Nietzsche attended a boys' school, then a private school. In 1858, the 14-year-old Nietzsche displayed particular talent for both music and language, so the world famous school at Schulpforta accepted him as a student.

While studying there, he received his first important introduction to literature, especially ancient Greek and Roman literature. After graduating in 1864, Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn, where he studied theology and classical philology.

After his first semester, he lost his faith and ended his theological studies. Around this time, he had read David Strauss' famous book, The Life of Jesus, a debunking of the Bible as mythology.

However, two years earlier, in an essay titled Fate and History, Nietzsche had already argued that the central beliefs of Christianity had been discredited by historical research.

Deciding to become a classical philologist, Nietzsche followed his favorite professor to the University of Leipzig. At this time, he began delving into philosophy, studying the works of the thinkers of the day, such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Albert Lange.

In 1869, although he was only 24 years old and had neither a doctorate nor a teaching certificate, Nietzsche was offered a professorship in classical philology by the University of Basel in Switzerland. He accepted the offer and served for ten years. He remains one of their youngest tenured Classics professors on record.

During this time, Nietzsche struck up a close friendship with legendary composer Richard Wagner and his wife, Cosima. He had met Richard first in 1868. Nietzsche admired the Wagners greatly, and they introduced him to their inner circle of friends.

His friendship with the Wagners would sour after Richard began to champion German culture, which Nietzsche considered to be a contradiction in terms. He would later blast Wagner in his 1888 book, The Case Of Wagner.

In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, where he argued that ancient Greek tragedy was the highest form of art. This was because its blending of Apollonian and Dionysian elements into a whole allowed the viewer to experience the full spectrum of the human condition.

The Apollonian impulse is detached, rational, sober, and emphasizes superficial appearance, whereas the Dionysian impulse is immersion in the whole of nature, intoxication, irrationality, and inhumanity.

Nietzsche argues that it's not healthy for the individual or society to be ruled by either impulse. Instead, they should be combined to create a healthy whole.

His 1878 book, Human, All Too Human, was a reaction to the pessimism of Wagner and Schopenhauer. It was a book of aphorisms on subjects including metaphysics, religion, the sexes, and morality.

It was the first of Nietzsche's writings that would be taken out of context by the Nazis to build the foundation of their own philosophy - despite the fact that Nietzsche had also said "Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins."

In 1879, Nietzsche resigned his professorship due to a severe decline in his health. While serving as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War, he contracted several diseases, including diphtheria and dysentery.

Some believe that he also contracted syphilis, which would eventually cause his mental illness and death. After leaving the university, he continued to write, and in 1881 he began using a typewriter, as his eyesight was failing.

In his 1881 book Daybreak, Nietzsche began his "campaign against morality," criticizing the moral schemes of such institutions as Christianity and utilitarianism. His aim was not to destroy morality, but to replace the moral schemes of the aforementioned institutions with a new moral code.

There is no such thing as one-size-fits-all morality, and exceptional people should no longer be ashamed of their uniqueness. The old style of morality is for unexceptional people who are satisfied with their mediocrity. Thus, Nietzsche's credo is "become what you are."

The Gay Science (1882), a mixture of philosophy and poetry, contained this famous passage:

The madman jumped into their minds and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions. Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as though an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Had it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."

Nietzsche's most famous book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, published in four parts between 1883 and 1885, was a philosophical novel that incorporated all of his ideas into a prose narrative that cleverly parodied the Bible.

It told the story of Zarathustra, a wandering prophet who seeks to teach people how to live a fulfilling life in a world without meaning. Although Zarathustra was based on the Persian prophet Zoroaster, he seems more like Jesus Christ - or rather, an anti-Christ.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not a traditional novel by any means. It's a very dense and complex treatise on philosophy and morality. It explores Nietzsche's concept of the ubermensch, or overman, better known in English as the superman - another concept bastardized by the Nazis after Nietzsche's death.

Whereas Hitler's idea of a superman was a physically strong Aryan warrior, Nietzsche's ubermensch was mentally as well as physically strong - a well-rounded superman - and could be of any race.

On January 3rd, 1889, Nietzsche collapsed after witnessing the whipping of a horse and throwing his arms around the animal's neck to protect it. This event triggered in Nietzsche a severe psychotic episode from which he would not recover, as it was believed that he was in the final stages of syphilis.

He started sending incoherent letters to friends. Claiming to have been crucified by German doctors, he called for the abolishment of anti-Semitism, the execution of the German emperor, and for all European powers to declare war on Germany.

Nietzsche's mother had him committed to a psychiatric hospital. Later, his sister Elisabeth returned from Paraguay following the suicide of her husband, a notorious anti-Semite. While she cared for her brother, Elisabeth studied his works and read through all of his unpublished manuscripts.

She hired writer and philosopher Rudolf Steiner to tutor her so she could understand her brother's writings. After a few months, Steiner gave up, declaring that it was impossible to teach her anything about philosophy.

Following a series of strokes and a bout with pneumonia, Friedrich Nietzsche died on August 25th, 1900 at the age of 55. His sister Elisabeth took control of his literary legacy. The following year, she had his last book published posthumously.

The Will to Power (1901) was actually a patchwork quilt of bits and pieces of previously unpublished manuscripts cobbled together by Elisabeth Nietzsche, who took great liberties with the material, and most of it out of context.

The final product was a hodgepodge of Nietzschean philosophy distorted and slanted to suit Elisabeth's anti-Semitic, nationalistic convictions. When Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s, the eightysomething year old Elisabeth Nietzsche became enamored with the dictator.

Hitler was equally enamored with Elisabeth's bastardization of her brother's work. He made Friedrich Nietzsche the official philosopher of the Third Reich. In life, Nietzsche was no anti-Semite; he broke ties with his editor, Ernst Schmeitzner, because he was disgusted by Schmeitzner's anti-Semitism.

Nietzche's relationship with his sister was a rollercoaster ride of conflict and reconciliation, as Nietzsche was also disgusted by her anti-Semitism and that of her husband. And, as previously mentioned, Neitzche had a low opinion of German culture. He also despised nationalism.

Today, over a hundred years after his death, Friedrich Nietzsche still remains one of the world's most influential and controversial philosophers.

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Quote Of The Day

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"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's classic philosophical novel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Enjoy!

Notes For October 11th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 11th, 1925, the famous American writer Elmore Leonard was born. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, but due to his father's position as a site locator for General Motors, the family moved frequently. In 1934, the Leonards finally took up permanent residence, settling in Detroit, Michigan.

Growing up during the Great Depression, Elmore Leonard became fascinated with gangsters - the folk heroes of the time. He read sensational newspaper accounts of the exploits of famous gangsters such as Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. He was most interested in their guns.

Leonard's writings would become famous for their incredibly accurate depictions of the mechanics of all sorts of firearms, yet throughout his entire life, he never had any interest in owning a gun.

With his father rarely home, he found father figures in the heroes of the big screen. Movies were his passion, and fortunately for him, they were an affordable pastime, even during the Depression.

It was in the movie theater that his pitch perfect ear for dialogue and his knack for creating memorable characters began to develop. He would entertain his friends by telling them stories – vivid accounts of the movies he'd seen, including actual dialogue.

For his fifth grade class project, he wrote and directed the class play, recreating a grim scene from Lewis Milestone's classic 1930 film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's classic antiwar novel All Quiet On the Western Front (1929).

Leonard also became an avid baseball fan, his favorite team being, of course, the Detroit Tigers, who won their first World Series championship in 1935. His friends gave him the nickname Dutch, after the famous pitcher Dutch Leonard, (no relation) a right-handed knuckleballer.

After graduating high school in 1943, Elmore joined the Navy and served with the Seabees in the Pacific. In 1946, he enrolled at the University of Detroit. He determined to make his dream of becoming a writer a reality.

He supported himself by working as an advertising copywriter - a position he took while a senior at university, where he would graduate with a degree in English and philosophy.

Though he originally wanted to write crime fiction, Leonard began his literary career writing pulp Westerns, which were the most popular and biggest selling stories at the time. In 1951, he sold his first short story, a Western called Trail of the Apaches, to the famous pulp fiction magazine Argosy.

He would publish some 30 pulp Western short stories, two of which, The Tall T and 3:10 to Yuma, would be adapted as feature films. His first published novel, The Bounty Hunters (1953) was a Western, and he would write four more Western novels.

By the 1960s, the popularity of Western novels had begun to decline rapidly, so Elmore Leonard switched genres and started writing the kind of novels he would become famous for - quirky crime thrillers. His first, The Big Bounce, was published in 1969.

The Big Bounce told the story of Jack Ryan, an aspiring baseball player turned petty crook who gets a chance to go straight when he's hired by Walter Majestyk, (no relation to the title character of Leonard's 1974 novel) a justice of the peace, to work at his beach resort.

Jack falls for Nancy, a psychotic young siren who gets her kicks by seducing married men, taking them for what she can get, then breaking their hearts - and their windows. When Nancy learns about Jack's shady past, she manipulates him into stealing $50,000 from her current patsy, a married millionaire.

The Big Bounce would introduce Elmore Leonard's trademark literary style - gritty realism and razor sharp dialogue. He is rightfully considered one of all time greatest writers of dialogue.

His skill with dialogue would bring him success as a Hollywood screenwriter. He adapted his own novels for the screen and wrote original screenplays. His best known original screenplay was for the acclaimed 1973 Western feature film, Joe Kidd.

Joe Kidd starred Clint Eastwood as the title character, a gunfighter and ex-bounty hunter hired by rich landowner Frank Harlan to be part of his posse, who are hunting Luis Chama, a fugitive Mexican revolutionary-bandito.

As he partakes in the mission, Joe Kidd begins to understand who the real bad guys are. Chama's major crime turns out to be organizing a peasant revolt against the wealthy landowners, who are evicting the poor people from land that is rightfully theirs.

Elmore Leonard's most popular feature film screenplay adaptations of his own novels include Mr. Majestyk and 52 Pick-Up, both of which were published in 1974. Mr. Majestyk is Vince Majestyk, a Vietnam veteran now living a quiet life in Arizona.

Majestyk owns and operates a melon farm. When a two-bit hood tries to coerce him into paying protection money, Majestyk drives the punk off his land with a punch in the face and a shotgun.

The hood files assault charges and Majestyk is taken to a local jail. He later finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time - aboard a prison transfer bus with Frank Renda, a notorious mafia hit man.

The mobsters attack the bus to break Renda out, but Majestyk drives off in the bus, with the hit man still in handcuffs. He plans on trading Renda to the police in exchange for his freedom.

Renda vows revenge and orders his men to destroy Majestyk. What Renda and his mafia cohorts don't know is that Mr. Majestyk is a highly trained soldier - a former Army Ranger - and is about to take them to war.

In 52 Pick-Up, Harry Mitchell is a wealthy businessman whose wife, Barbara, is running for office. He becomes the target of blackmailers who claim to possess evidence of him cheating on Barbara.

Knowing that he can't go to the police, Harry decides to handle the situation his own way - by trying to turn the blackmailers against each other. But these psychopathic criminals are smarter than he thinks. And much more dangerous...

More of Leonard's novels would be adapted as memorable feature films, including Rum Punch, (as Jackie Brown) and Get Shorty, and its sequel, Be Cool, both of which feature one of his most popular characters, Chili Palmer - an amiable gangster who wants out of the loan sharking business.

In Get Shorty, Chili has his heart set on becoming a movie producer. In Be Cool, having tired of the movie business, Chili decides to return to loansharking, only to get mixed up with the music industry.

Leonard's final novel, Raylan, was published in January of 2012. It features U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, the iconic character and star of the TV series Justified, in a new adventure.

This time, Raylan is on the trail of drug trafficking brothers Dickie and Coover Crowe. What the marshal doesn't know is that the Crowe brothers are trafficking a new cash crop - human organs for transplant operations harvested from unwilling donors.

Elmore Leonard died in August of 2013 at the age of 87.

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Quote Of The Day

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"My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip."

- Elmore Leonard

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a rare 60-minute documentary on Elmore Leonard. Enjoy!

Notes For October 10th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 10th, 1930, the legendary English playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, East London, England. At the age of ten, Pinter found himself caught up in the terror and chaos of the Blitz. It affected him deeply as both a human being and as a writer.

When he wasn't caught up in the war, Pinter attended Hackney Downs School, a grammar school in London, where he discovered his talents for writing and acting. He wrote for the school magazine and played Macbeth and Romeo in school productions of the Shakespeare plays.

Pinter excelled in athletics as well. He was an avid cricket player and runner. As a runner, he broke his school's sprinting record, but his passion was cricket. He would serve as chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club.

In 1948, at the age of eighteen, Pinter began studying drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. A year later, he was drafted for military service but declared himself a conscientious objector.

He did this not because he was a pacifist, but because he loathed the Cold War and believed that the governments of England and the United States were just as corrupt and immoral as the Soviet Union. After being tried twice as a draft evader, he was given a fine.

Disliking the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Pinter transferred to the Central School of Speech and Drama. By 1951, he had joined the Anew McMaster repertory company and begun his career as an actor.

a For the next five years, taking the stage name David Baron, Pinter played over twenty roles in the company's productions. To supplement his income, he worked at various jobs including that of a waiter, a postman, and a pub bouncer.

Though he was making a name for himself as an actor, Harold Pinter's real ambition was to be a writer. The actor Henry Woolf, a close childhood friend, encouraged Pinter to write his first play and then starred in it - as part of his postgraduate work.

The play, The Room (1957), caught the attention of a young producer named Michael Codron, who would stage a production of Pinter's next play, a breakout work that made Pinter's name as a playwright.

In The Birthday Party (1958), a surreal dark comedy, Stanley Webber, a disheveled piano player in his late thirties, lives in a seaside boarding house run by Meg and Petey, a couple in their sixties.

Meg exhibits strange affection for Stanley; sometimes she flirts with him, sometimes she acts like his mother. One morning, Meg wishes Stanley a happy birthday and gives him a present - a toy drum.

Stanley tries to convince her that it's not his birthday, but she won't listen. She has planned a party which includes some unusual guests - McCann and Goldberg, two strangers to Stanley who may be dangerously psychotic - or maybe it's Stanley who's mad...

Although it's now considered Pinter's first masterwork, The Birthday Party was trashed by most critics when it debuted in 1958. The famous drama critic Irving Wardle gave it a glowing review in which he called it a "comedy of menace." Unfortunately, the review was published just after the play closed.

Undaunted, Harold Pinter kept writing. His next play, The Dumb Waiter (1959), opened in Germany before it hit the London stage. It was a two character play. The characters are Ben and Gus, two hit men waiting in a basement room to receive their orders for their next hit.

While they wait, Ben and Gus make tea and engage in conversations where they argue semantics and discuss the stories in the paper that Ben is reading. Meanwhile, in the background, the dumb waiter in the room occasionally - and strangely - opens to deliver food orders.

Ben tries to explain via the dumb waiter's speaking tube that the orders were sent to the wrong room. At the play's climax, the speaking tube whistles and Ben answers it while Gus is getting a drink of water in the bathroom. It's their orders for their next hit. The play ends with Ben drawing his gun on the target - Gus.

Harold Pinter would write nearly thirty plays and fifteen sketches. Between 1968 and 1982, he wrote a series of "memory plays" that explored the nature of memory - its vagaries, ambiguities, and mysteries.

Pinter also wrote 27 screenplays, adapting his plays and the works of others for the screen. He won an Academy Award for his 1981 screenplay adaptation of John Fowles' novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman.

In October of 2005, Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award outraged right wingers around the world. A prominent liberal political activist, Pinter railed against the Cold War arms race, nuclear weapons, the blockade of Cuba, the South African apartheid regime, the Gulf War, and the later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He believed that the George W. Bush administration "was charging towards world domination while the American public and Britain's mass-murdering prime minister sat back and watched." Pinter described the war in Iraq as "a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the conception of international law."

The most controversial aspect of Pinter's political activism was his strong rebuke of the Israeli government for its persecution of the Palestinian people. Though Jewish himself, he expressed his contempt for the Israeli apartheid regime, signing the mission statement of the activist group Jews for Justice for Palestinians.

Harold Pinter was awarded the French Légion d'honneur. He died of liver cancer in 2008 at the age of 78.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living."

- Harold Pinter

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Harold Pinter giving his Nobel lecture. Enjoy!

Notes For October 9th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 9th, 1849, Annabel Lee, the classic final poem by the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe, was published. It was published posthumously by the New York Daily Tribune, just two days after his death.

Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston in January of 1809, would become most famous as a master of the short story and the author of classic Gothic horror tales such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, and The Fall of the House of Usher.

However, he began his literary career as a poet, wrote poetry prolifically, and became famous for classic poems such as The Conqueror Worm and The Raven. His last great poem was Annabel Lee.

Written in May of 1849 as Poe's life was falling apart and his health rapidly deteriorating, Annabel Lee was an ode to his great love, his young wife Virginia, who had succumbed to tuberculosis two years earlier at only 24.

Virginia, a cousin of Poe's, was thirteen when they first married, though they wouldn't share a bed until she was sixteen. They adored each other. Virginia often sat close to Poe while he wrote. She maintained his pens and prepared his manuscripts for mailing.

In a letter to a friend, Poe wrote of his Virginia, "I see no one among the living as beautiful as my little wife." When she contracted tuberculosis in 1847 at the age of nineteen, Poe was devastated.

Virginia turned to her husband for the strength to fight her illness. A year before her death, she wrote this poem:

Ever with thee I wish to roam —
Dearest my life is thine.
Give me a cottage for my home
And a rich old cypress vine,
Removed from the world with its sin and care
And the tattling of many tongues.
Love alone shall guide us when we are there —
Love shall heal my weakened lungs;
And Oh, the tranquil hours we'll spend,
Never wishing that others may see!
Perfect ease we'll enjoy, without thinking to lend
Ourselves to the world and its glee —
Ever peaceful and blissful we'll be.

Unfortunately, as Virginia's illness grew worse, Poe fell back into the alcoholism that had nearly destroyed him in the past. Her death devastated the man who had loved her so dearly.

A friend remarked that "the loss of his wife was a sad blow to [Poe.] He did not seem to care, after she was gone, whether he lived an hour, a day, a week or a year; she was his all."

Drowning in his grief for Virginia, Poe visited her grave often and drank heavily. The more he drank, the worse his mental state became. He tried in vain to move on, knowing that he really couldn't live without her.

He dated poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement was called off as a result of Poe's drinking, his mental instability, and the interference of Sarah's mother, who did all she could to sabotage the relationship.

Poe returned to Richmond and resumed his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. He later returned to Baltimore, where he plunged into a quagmire of severe alcoholism and mental illness. He fell into financial ruin and disappeared.

Before his disappearance, Poe gave a manuscript to a friend of his. It was something he'd written a while back, a poem he described as a "little trifle that may be worth something to you." It was his completed manuscript of Annabel Lee.

On October 3rd, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found wandering the streets of Baltimore by a man named Joseph W. Walker. Severely ill, incoherent, and wearing someone else's clothes, Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital. He died four days later at the age of 40.

Poe's death certificate and medical records were lost in a fire, so the actual cause of his death remains a mystery. Newspapers reported that he died of "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation."

These were common euphemisms used when a person died of illicit causes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or venereal disease. They were also used when the authorities wanted to keep the real cause of death quiet.

Some scholars and biographers have suggested that Poe may have been murdered for political reasons or may have contracted rabies, syphilis, meningitis, or another illness. Others theorize that he just drank himself to death out of grief, which, sadly, is the most likely case.

It has been theorized that Poe was a victim of cooping, a form of electoral fraud common in the 19th century. Cooping gangs would kidnap citizens off the street, ply them with alcohol, beat them, and force them to vote for a particular candidate (multiple times, using fake papers) under the threat of more violence or death.

Rufus Griswold, an enemy of Poe's who had published his work in the past, somehow became his literary executor. He wrote a biography of Poe called Memoir of the Author, where he described the writer as a depraved madman addled by drink and drugs.

Most of Griswold's claims were either outright lies or half-truths. For example, although Poe was an opium user and wrote about it, he was only a casual user and never became addicted to the drug.

Griswold's biography was virulently denounced by those who knew Edgar Allan Poe. The letters that Griswold presented as proof of his claims were later revealed to be forgeries.

Over a hundred years after Poe's death, his classic poem Annabel Lee would inspire the legendary Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov to write his classic novel, Lolita (1955).

The novel opens with protagonist and narrator Humbert Humbert recalling his great childhood love Annabel Leigh, (named after Poe's Annabel Lee) her sudden death from typhus, and the grief that would lead him down a path of self-destruction, ending in his death.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."

- Edgar Allan Poe

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic poem, Annabel Lee. Enjoy!

Notes For October 8th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 8th, 1943, the famous American writer R.L. Stine was born. He was born Robert Lawrence Stine in Columbus, Ohio. The oldest of three children, Stine's father was a shipping clerk, his mother a homemaker.

When he was nine years old, Stine found a typewriter in his attic. He began writing with it immediately, typing up everything from short stories to joke books. After graduating from Ohio State University in 1965, Stine moved to New York City to become a writer.

In 1969, he married his girlfriend Jane Waldhorn, a writer and editor who would found the children's book publishing company Parachute Press. In 1980, the Stines had their first and only child, a son named Matthew.

As a writer, R.L. Stine got his start writing joke books for children. He wrote dozens of joke books, publishing them under the pseudonym Jovial Bob Stine. He created the teen humor magazine Bananas and worked for years with the children's cable TV channel Nickelodeon. He would later switch genres from humor to horror.

In 1987, Stine published his first teen horror novel, Blind Date. He would follow it with Twisted, Beach Party, The Boyfriend, The Baby-sitter, Beach House, Hit And Run, The Girlfriend, and other titles, most of which were published as part of a series - the Point Horror series.

Around this time, he also co-created and served as head writer for the Nickelodeon children's TV series Eureeka's Castle, which ran from 1989-1995.

In 1990, Stine, with his wife's company Parachute Press, began publishing a new series of teen horror novels called the Fear Street series, set in the fictional East Coast town of Shadyland. Fear Street is a street in the town that had been named after a cursed family.

In the books, a group of average teenagers find themselves pitted against malicious, often supernatural adversaries, though sometimes the kids get caught up in non-supernatural horror dramas like murder mysteries.

Although the Fear Street novels are geared toward teen readers, they often featured violence and gore on a par with adult horror novels.

Tom Perrotta, the bestselling novelist known for such memorable works as Election (1998) and Little Children (2004), revealed in a 2007 interview that he had ghostwritten one of R.L. Stine's Fear Street novels, The Thrill Club.

In 1992, two years after his Fear Street teen horror series took off, Stine and Parachute Press decided to produce a series of horror novels geared toward preteen readers. It would prove to be his most successful series of books.

It would become a pop culture phenomenon that made R.L. Stine a household name and earned him a place on the Forbes List of the 40 Best Paid Entertainers of 1996-1997, as his income that fiscal year was $41,000,000.

The series of books was called Goosebumps. Stine cranked out dozens of them. The typical Goosebumps book was a paperback novella of approximately 120 pages long. The first title was Welcome To Dead House.

In it, 12-year-old Amanda and her younger brother Josh move into a house that their father inherited from his great uncle. The siblings soon discover that their new home, located in the town of Dark Falls, is cursed.

Every child who ever lived in the home was murdered; now it's haunted by the living dead children, who need to consume new blood from a freshly killed victim every year to preserve their immortal existence. So they tricked Amanda and Josh's father into moving there.

Though not as gruesome as Stine's Fear Street series, the Goosebumps books were just as scary. Some parents complained that they were too scary for their preteen readers. Nevertheless, the series became a monster hit with kids - no pun intended.

Translated into 32 languages, the Goosebumps series has sold over 300,000,000 copies worldwide. Frightening, clever, well written, and often containing surprise twist endings, the Goosebumps books also had many adult fans, myself included.

R.L. Stine won numerous awards for his Goosebumps books, which were adapted as a TV series that ran from 1995-1998. When the series debuted on CBBC in the UK, due to the government's strict censorship guidelines for children's programming, many episodes were banned or heavily cut.

However, on the cable channel Jetix, available in England and Ireland, the episodes aired with few or no cuts. In the U.S., in addition to the TV series, there were direct-to-video releases of Goosebumps shows on VHS and DVD.

A Goosebumps feature film was released in 2015 for the Halloween season, starring Jack Black as R.L. Stine. In it, the horrors from the reclusive writer's books come to life and threaten the Maryland town where he lives.

The movie did poorly on its opening weekend, grossing only $23 million on an estimated $53 million budget, but the total domestic gross for its theatrical run was $80 million, with a worldwide total gross of $158 million.

So, a sequel, Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, was released three years later. Its opening weekend was worse than the previous film's, grossing only about $15 million on a lower budget of $35 million. The total worldwide gross was $93 million.

In Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, some kids find an old manuscript while cleaning out an abandoned house. They recite an incantation in it, unknowingly resurrecting Slappy the Dummy, a demonic ventriloquist's dummy.

In 1995, after writing numerous children's books, Stine published Superstitious, his first horror novel geared toward adult readers. Unfortunately, the book was poorly received and became a critical and commercial failure.

Stine has since written other adult oriented novels, such as The Sitter and Eye Candy, but those too have proven to be nowhere near as successful as Stine's children's horror novels.

He has published other horror series for kids, including Ghosts Of Fear Street (a younger version of the Fear Street series geared toward preteens) and The Nightmare Room. He also published a non-horror series called the Rotten School books, which featured the comic misadventures of a group of kids at boarding school.

R.L. Stine's most recent horror series for children is the Goosebumps SlappyWorld books, launched in 2017 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original series, narrated by / and or featuring Slappy the Dummy, the most famous villain of the original Goosebumps series.

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Quote Of The Day

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"I'm really a writing machine. I have no rituals. I don't need a special desk or special background music. As long as I have a keyboard in front of me, I can write."

- R.L. Stine

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of R.L. Stine's first Goosebumps novel, Welcome To Dead House.

Notes For October 4th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 4th, 1535, the first complete English language copies of the Bible were printed, based on the translations of the legendary English scholar, linguist, and polemicist William Tyndale, and his protege, Miles Coverdale.

The Bible's Old Testament was originally written in Aramaic and ancient Hebrew, the New Testament in ancient Greek. During the first three centuries A.D., most copies of the Bible were handwritten in either Greek or Hebrew. The first complete Latin translation appeared between the late 4th and early 5th centuries.

The Catholic Church adopted the Latin Bible as the "official" Bible, and it would remain so for many centuries. Although scholars would translate biblical passages into many different languages, the Church mandated that Latin was the only true language of the Bible.

Masses were performed in Latin, the lyrics for sacred music were written in Latin, and so were the Catholic missals. No matter what country one lived in or what native language one spoke, Latin was a required language of study for the faithful.

This was a major problem at a time when the vast majority of people were illiterate and education was a luxury only the affluent could afford. It gave the Catholic Church a tremendous amount of power over the faithful, who could only access the scriptures through the Church, not on their own in their native language.

The Church would not abolish the Latin Mass until 1962. By then, some compromises had been made, such as including translations of the Latin text in missals and allowing priests to perform select Masses in their native languages.

By the time of the Renaissance, scholars and humanists were calling for complete translations of the Bible in their native languages. The most prominent of these was William Tyndale.

Born to a noble family in Gloucestershire, England, he was well educated. Displaying a gift for linguistics, he became fluent in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

Although he belonged to the Church of England, (which was still part of the Roman Catholic Church at the time) and served as a deacon, Tyndale was openly critical of the Church.

He detested the zeal with which prominent Catholics defended a Church that he believed was thoroughly corrupt. He particularly hated the so-called scholars whom he believed had perverted the scriptures to conform to Church doctrine.

Tyndale determined to translate the Bible, in its entirety, into English so that the whole word of God would be within the reach of the common man. A conservative clergyman told him that the Pope had decreed Latin to be the language of the faith and that "We had better be without God's laws than the Pope's!"

A furious Tyndale countered, "I defy the Pope, and all his laws; and if God spares my life, ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost!"

Tyndale met with Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall of the (still Catholic) Church of England, a renowned classicist, to ask for his help in obtaining permission to translate the Bible into English. Tunstall was not keen on the idea of an English Bible and turned him down.

Undaunted, Tyndale went ahead with his plans. Knowing that he couldn't risk working on his translation in England, (doing so would have been a capital offense) he went to Germany to work on it in secret.

He was supported by Protestants who were excited by the prospect of an English language Bible, which they saw as a highly effective tool for reaching the masses and winning converts from the Catholic Church.

When Tyndale wasn't working on his translation, he wrote polemics criticizing the Church's doctrines and rites. In one of them, An Answer unto Sir Thomas More's Dialogue, he blasted the future Catholic saint's work, Dialogue Concerning Heresies.

This resulted in More's whopping 500,000 word rebuttal, Confutation of Tyndale's Answer. More believed Tyndale to be a "hell-hound in the kennel of the Devil," and attacked his polemics as "a filthy foam of blasphemies" from "a brutish, beastly mouth."

Although Tyndale's plan to translate the Bible into English infuriated More the most, it was one of his polemics that infuriated King Henry VIII.

In The Practyse of Prelates, Tyndale asserted that Henry's planned divorce from Catherine of Aragon (so he could marry Anne Boleyn) was against scripture and a plot orchestrated by Cardinal Wolsey (a high Church official) to ensnare Henry in the papal court of Pope Clement VII.

A furious Henry asked the German emperor, Charles V, to issue a warrant for Tyndale's arrest on charges of heresy and treason, and return him to England for trial. Germany had an extradition treaty with England.

Tyndale's English language Bible was published in October of 1535. Copies were smuggled into England and Scotland, where they were condemned by Cardinal Wolsey. For an entire year, he wandered through Europe as a fugitive.

During his year on the run, Tyndale avoided the seemingly endless parade of authorities, spies, and bounty hunters that pursued him. Finally captured in Antwerp, Belgium, he was turned over to England.

In October of 1536, William Tyndale was tried for heresy, convicted, and sentenced to death. Thomas Cromwell attempted to intercede on Tyndale's behalf, but it was to no avail. Strangled and burned at the stake, his last words were "Lord, open the King of England's eyes!"

Tyndale's prayer was answered. King Henry VIII soon broke ties with the Roman Catholic Church, and four years after Tyndale's execution, his English language Bible was officially published in England, along with other English Bibles based on his translation, including King Henry's official Great Bible.

The famous King James Version, first published in 1611, which still remains the standard English language Bible, was mostly based on William Tyndale's translation.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Take heed, therefore, wicked prelates, blind leaders of the blind; indurate and obstinate hypocrites, take heed... ye will be the chiefest in Christ's flock, and yet will not keep one jot of the right way of his doctrine... ye keep thereof almost naught at all, but whatsoever soundeth to make of your bellies, to maintain your honour, whether in the Scripture, or in your own traditions, or in the pope's law, that ye compel the lay-people to observe; violently threatening them with your excommunications and curses, that they shall be damned, body and soul, if they keep them not. And if that help you not, then ye murder them mercilessly with the sword of the temporal powers, whom ye have made so blind that they be ready to slay whom ye command, and will not hear his cause examined, nor give him room to answer for himself."

- William Tyndale

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a documentary on William Tyndale. Enjoy!

Notes For October 3rd, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 3rd, 1895, The Red Badge of Courage, the classic novel by the famous American writer Stephen Crane, was published in book form. Like most novels of the time, it first appeared in a serialized format, published by a newspaper.

The book version differed greatly from Crane's original serialized manuscript, as its publisher feared that its subject matter - how the horrors of war can bring out both the best and the worst of soldiers in battle - would prove too controversial. The manuscript was heavily edited.

Crane was no stranger to controversy; his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) was a critical and commercial failure due to its controversial story of a Bowery girl driven to poverty, prostitution, and despair after her violent alcoholic mother kicks her out.

The author hadn't deliberately intended to offend his readers, he just believed in literary realism, which was being employed by his contemporaries, such as the legendary French writer Emile Zola.

After reading accounts of famous Civil War battles in magazine articles, Crane was appalled by the dry writing, which he found to be "as emotionless as rocks." What was it really like to be a soldier in battle, facing the horrific carnage of the Civil War?

He had the idea for his next novel and immediately began work on the manuscript. He completed it in April of 1894. The original title was Private Fleming / His Various Battles. It would later be changed to The Red Badge of Courage.

Henry Fleming is an 18-year-old private in the Union Army. Carried away by the romance of war and glory, he joined the Army over his mother's objections. The novel opens with Henry's regiment, the 304th New York Regiment, awaiting battle by a river one cold day.

As he anxiously waits for the battle to begin, Henry wonders if he'll be brave when the time comes or turn tail and run. His hometown friend and fellow soldier, Jim Conklin, admits that he'd run if the other men did. Suddenly, the battle begins as the Confederates charge.

Henry's regiment initially drives the enemy back, but the Confederates regroup quickly and attack again. Some of the Union soldiers are forced to flee. Fearing that the battle is lost, Henry deserts his regiment and escapes into a nearby forest - but not before hearing a Union general declare victory.

Ashamed of his cowardice, Henry wanders through the woods and comes upon an eerie sight - a decomposing corpse in a quiet clearing. Frightened, he flees the forest and happens upon some injured soldiers returning from the battle - one is Jim Conklin, delirious from blood loss.

Jim angrily refuses Henry's help and dies. Henry crosses paths with a group of retreating soldiers and is accidentally struck on the head by a gun butt. Tired, hungry, and thirsty, Henry decides to return to his regiment regardless of his shame.

At camp, his comrades, believing his wound was the result of a bullet graze, take care of him. Nobody witnessed Henry's desertion; he's in the clear. He still feels ashamed. The next morning, his regiment goes into battle against smaller group of Confederates, and he proves himself a good soldier.

In the final battle between his regiment and the Confederates, Henry acts as a flag bearer to replace the fallen color sergeant. A Confederate regiment, hidden behind a distant fence, attacks. The Union soldiers, having no cover, are sitting ducks.

The regiment faces an agonizing choice: death if they stay or disgrace if they retreat. The officers order a charge. Though as a flag bearer, he's unarmed, Henry bravely leads the other men in the charge. He escapes injury and the Confederates are defeated.

The novel concludes on this haunting, impressionistic note:

It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks — an existence of soft and eternal peace.

Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.

The Red Badge of Courage, with its modern, realistic style and nontraditional plot, became an overnight sensation, receiving ten print runs in its first year. Most critics raved about it, but a few condemned it as "a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies."

The novel would be adapted as a feature film a few times. The first and most famous adaptation was released in 1951. Directed by legendary filmmaker John Huston, it starred real life war hero turned actor Audie Murphy as Henry Fleming.

Though he tragically died young of tuberculosis at the age of 28, during his short lifetime, the prolific Stephen Crane published five novels, five short story collections, and two poetry collections. Other works were published posthumously.

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Quote Of The Day

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"A man with a full stomach and the respect of his fellows had no business to scold about anything that he might think to be wrong in the ways of the universe, or even with the ways of society. Let the unfortunates rail; the others may play marbles."

- Stephen Crane

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Stephen Crane's classic novel, The Red Badge of Courage. Enjoy!