Notes For July 11th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On July 11th, 1960, To Kill A Mockingbird, the classic novel by the famous American writer Harper Lee, was published.

The classic semi autobiographical Southern Gothic Bildungsroman novel was inspired by actual events from the author's childhood. Harper Lee, born Nelle Harper Lee in Monroeville, Alabama, in 1926, was the daughter of a prominent lawyer.

In 1919, before she was born, her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, had defended two black men accused of murder. The men were convicted, hanged, and mutilated, and Amasa never practiced criminal law again.

In 1936, when Harper was ten, a black man named Walter Nett was accused of rape by a white woman, convicted, and sentenced to death. A series of letters then appeared which proved that Nett's accuser had lied.

Instead of being released from prison, Nett's death sentence was commuted to life. He died a year later of tuberculosis. After Harper Lee's father quit practicing law, he founded a newspaper. The paper would cover the Nett trial and its shocking aftermath.

Some scholars believe that it wasn't the Nett case but the case of Emmett Till that inspired Harper Lee to write her famous novel. In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy visiting relatives in Mississippi, made the mistake of flirting with a white woman.

The woman's name was Carolyn Bryant. When her husband Roy found out that a black kid had flirted with his wife, he, his half-brother John Milam, and an unknown accomplice abducted Emmett Till, beat him savagely, shot him in the head, then dumped his nude body in the Tallahatchie River.

Roy Bryant and John Milam were arrested and charged with murder. At their trial, it took an all-white jury just over an hour to acquit them both. One of the jurors later said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long."

The murder of Emmett Till would serve as a catalyst for the then fledgling Civil Rights Movement, helping to bring it to prominence and setting the stage for the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders.

To Kill A Mockingbird tells the story of a black man's tragic fate in Depression era Alabama, as seen through the eyes of the little white girl whose father defended him.

In the small town of Maycomb, Alabama, circa 1936, spunky little tomboy Jean Louise "Scout" Finch lives with her big brother Jem and their widower father, Atticus Finch, a prominent, respected attorney.

School is out for the summer, and Scout and Jem make a new friend - Dill, a boy who is visiting his aunt, who lives nearby. The three children spend their days outside playing and fantasizing about another neighbor, Arthur "Boo" Radley.

As his nickname implies, Boo is a strange and spooky character, a mysterious recluse whom everyone knows of but no one ever sees. As they try to think of ways to get him to come out of his house, the kids wonder if he really is a monster.

Soon, little trinkets begin to appear in the tree outside Boo Radley's house - gifts to Scout and Jem from Radley, though the man never seems to come out of his house.

Scout's obsession with Boo Radley is put aside when a black man named Tom Robinson is accused of raping a white woman, and her father, Atticus, agrees to defend him. For this, Atticus pays a dear price.

Once one of the most respected and admired men in Maycomb, Atticus quickly becomes the most hated man in town. Scout and Jem are taunted by the other children, who call their father a "nigger lover."

After shaming a lynch mob into backing off, Scout, Jem, and Dill secretly watch the trial from the colored section of the courtroom.

Atticus believes that Tom Robinson's accuser, Mayella Ewell, and her father, Bob - a violent, alcoholic racist - are lying. During the trial, Atticus exposes the truth. The lonely, abused Mayella flirted with Tom and got caught by her father.

After beating his daughter, Bob Ewell forced her to accuse Tom Robinson of rape in order to save face. He couldn't allow his friends and neighbors to think that his daughter would flirt with a black man.

Despite the truths revealed in court, the all-white jury still convicts Tom Robinson of rape. The conviction causes Atticus and Jem to lose faith in the American justice system. Later, Tom is shot and killed when he tries to escape from prison.

Even though he won in court, Bob Ewell, furious with Atticus Finch for exposing his daughter, spits in the lawyer's face. In the novel's memorable climax, a drunken, enraged Bob Ewell attacks Scout while she and Jem are walking home from a school Halloween pageant.

Jem tries to save his little sister and gets his arm broken. Suddenly, a man appears out of the shadows and attacks Bob Ewell, stabbing him to death with his own knife. Scout realizes that their savior is none other than Boo Radley. He finally came out of his house.

The strange, silent man scoops Jem up in his arms and carries him home. The sheriff is called, and he and Atticus argue about how to handle Bob Ewell's death. He convinces Atticus that justice would be best served by declaring Ewell's death an accident.

Though it would receive rave reviews and sell over 30,000,000 copies, Harper Lee never expected her novel to be a success. She said:

I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.

Lee was stunned when her novel won her a Pulitzer Prize. Two years after it was published, To Kill A Mockingbird was adapted as a highly acclaimed feature film.

Featuring an Academy Award winning screenplay by playwright Horton Foote, and starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch (he won an Oscar for Best Actor) and in an amazing performance, eight-year-old newcomer Mary Badham as Scout Finch, it's rightfully considered one of the all time great movies.

A staple of study for eighth grade English classes, (where I first read it) To Kill A Mockingbird has faced censorship battles due to its depictions of rape and use of racial epithets.

Scholars - and the author herself - argue that the novel's depiction of a black man suffering at the hands of ignorant, racist white Southerners is the real reason why some people want the book banned from the classroom.

In 2003, a rumor spread that To Kill A Mockingbird was written not by Harper Lee, but by her childhood (and lifelong) best friend, legendary writer Truman Capote, whom the character of Dill was based on.

An Alabama newspaper had quoted Capote's biological father, Archulus Persons, as stating that Capote had written "almost all" of Lee's novel.

Three years later, the rumor was discredited by a letter written by Capote himself that was donated to Monroeville's literary museum.

In this letter to a neighbor, Capote mentioned that his old and dear friend Harper Lee was writing a book that would soon be published. Capote's letter was corroborated by extensive notes between Lee and her editor at the Lippincott publishing house.

In 2006, she received an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame. A year later, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It seemed like To Kill A Mockingbird would be her only novel.

Then, on February 3rd, 2015, Harper Lee announced that she would be publishing another novel. The book, titled Go Set A Watchman and published a few months later in July, was a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird that follows Scout as a grown woman.

Watchman was actually written before Mockingbird, which was intended to be its prequel. Lee thought the manuscript had been lost forever, but it was found by her lawyer in a safe deposit box in 2011. The manuscript was published exactly as written, with no revisions.

It's 20 years later, and the Civil Rights movement is just starting to become a major force for change. With racial tensions escalating across the country, especially in Scout Finch's home state of Alabama, she can't help but recall the lessons she learned in her childhood.

Scout, now going by her proper name Jean Louise, joins the Civil Rights movement and is stunned to discover that her now elderly father Atticus, whom she idolized and who risked everything to defend an innocent black man from racist injustice, is opposed to civil rights.

What's more, he's determined to fight school integration and has been consorting with the Ku Klux Klan. For the first time, Jean Louise begins to see her father through the eyes of an intelligent grown woman instead of through the rose colored glasses of a naive, adoring little girl.

She finds that Atticus is flawed like any other person and, like other white Southerners, fears the sudden end of the only way of life he's ever known. Can it be true? Will Jean Louise's relationship with her father be shattered forever?

The announcement of a second Harper Lee novel came as quite a shock to the literary community. The 89-year-old author had been residing in a nursing home, having suffered a stroke a while back. Her vision and hearing were deteriorating.

The timing of Watchman's publication made some wonder if Lee, perhaps senile, was being exploited by her publisher. Suspicion of elder abuse led the state of Alabama to conduct an investigation. They interviewed Lee and determined that no abuse had taken place.

Her longtime friend, historian Wayne Flynt, said that the "narrative of senility, exploitation of this helpless little old lady is just hogwash. It's just complete bunk."

Needless to say, the publication of Go Set A Watchman caused quite a stir. Many readers believed that Lee had betrayed them and soiled the legacy of one of America's most beloved literary characters.

Others, like this writer, found Watchman to be a powerful read and a worthy successor to To Kill A Mockingbird that truthfully explores the insidious nature of intolerance.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself. It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent."

- Harper Lee

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Harper Lee's classic novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. Enjoy!

Notes For July 10th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On July 10th, 1871, the legendary French novelist, essayist, and critic Marcel Proust was born. He was born Valentin Louis Georges Eugene Marcel Proust in Auteuil, France - a borough of Paris.

Proust's family was affluent, as his father, Achille Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist whose work was dedicated to containing the epidemic of cholera in Europe and Asia. He wrote many books and articles on medicine and hygiene.

Marcel's mother, Jeanne, was the daughter of a wealthy, intellectual Jewish family. He was very close to her. As a boy, Marcel Proust was a sickly child. He suffered his first serious asthma attack at the age of nine.

At the age of eleven, he enrolled as a student at the Lycee Condorcet. Despite the fact that his education was often interrupted by his health problems, he excelled at his studies and won an award in his final year.

Proust began writing at an early age. In 1890, when he was nineteen and still in school, in addition to being published in literary magazines, for a year, he published a regular society column in the journal La Mensuel.

In 1892, he helped found a literary magazine called La Banquet, where his short pieces would often appear. He was also published in the famous Le Revue Blanche.

As a young man, the dandy Proust was a dilettante and social climber, lacking the discipline required to fulfill his aspiration to be a great novelist. He garnered a reputation as an amateur and a snob, then finally got serious, buckled down, and began writing what would become his magnum opus.

À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, or In Search Of Lost Time, was a 3,000+ page epic semi autobiographical novel. It would be published in English as Remembrance Of Things Past.

After numerous rejections, Remembrance Of Things Past would be published in a series of seven volumes over a period of 14 years, with the last two published posthumously. The first volume, Swann's Way, was published in 1913.

Proust's dazzling novel is rightfully considered one of the greatest ever written, and continues to influence writers and scholars to this day. It was shaped by people and events in Proust's life, including his own experiences.

He employed a lyrical narrative rich in detail, symbolism, and philosophy. It's often melancholic and fascinated with the nature of memories, especially involuntary memories, which are triggered by seeing a certain object, hearing a certain sound, or smelling a certain aroma.

The most famous memory evoked in Swann's Way is the narrator's memory of eating that classic French tea cake, the madeleine:

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been molded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?

The memories in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, recalled in incredibly rich detail, were in complete contrast with the plot-driven novels of its time. This may have contributed to its initial rejection.

Some believe it had more to do with the fact that Proust, who was gay, wrote openly and honestly about homosexuality at a time when it was not only despised by society but also a crime punishable by imprisonment.

His narrator in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is not gay, but other characters are (most notably the Baron de Charlus in the fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah) and homosexuality is a recurring theme in Proust's writings.

Unfazed by the rejection of Swann's Way by publishers, Proust raised the money to publish the novel himself. It made him famous. Scholars have proclaimed A la Recherche du Temps Perdu to be one of the greatest modern novels ever written.

The legendary Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov named it as one of the greatest prose works of the 20th century, along with James Joyce's Ulysses and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. W. Somerset Maugham called it "the greatest fiction to date."

In 2002, Penguin Books published a new English translation of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Edited by Christopher Prendergast, it's a collaboration of seven different translators.

Ten years later, Naxos Audiobooks began releasing its acclaimed series of unabridged English language audiobooks of all the volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, narrated by Neville Jason, famous for the abridged audiobook version of the series he'd recorded many years earlier.

I have already listened to the first six volumes of this new unabridged series, and the narration is magnificent. As always, unabridged audiobooks are the only way to go, especially when listening to the classics.

Writing Remembrance Of Things Past took a toll on Marcel Proust's chronically poor health. During the last three years of his life, he was mostly confined to his bedroom.

He slept during the day and wrote at night, struggling to complete his novel. In 1922, after he had finished the book, Proust contracted pneumonia and later died of a pulmonary abscess at the age of 51.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."

- Marcel Proust

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a rare 1980 documentary on Marcel Proust. Enjoy!

Notes For July 9th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On July 9th, 1775, the famous English novelist and playwright Matthew Lewis was born in London. Born to an affluent family, he received his education at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford.

Lewis spent most of his vacations abroad, studying modern languages. His ambition was to become a diplomat, and at the age of nineteen, he served as an attache to the British Embassy at the Hague in the Netherlands.

As a teenager, Lewis took up writing as a hobby and developed a passion for it. During a period of ten weeks, while he worked at the British Embassy, he wrote a novel which would cause a furor and become famous as one of the all time great works of Gothic literature.

First published in 1796 under the name M.G. Lewis, The Monk was both a masterpiece of Gothic horror and a scathing satirical attack on the brutality, corruption, and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church in the 18th century.

Set in Madrid during the Spanish Inquisition, the title character is Ambrosio, a pious and respected Capuchin priest and teacher at a monastery who is beloved by everyone in Madrid.

He becomes obsessed with one of his students - a beautiful young man named Rosario who reveals himself to be Matilda, a woman in disguise. That's when we learn that Ambrosio's piety is false.

Pride and vanity were his main motivations for establishing himself as a respected priest. That and his lust makes him a prime target for seduction, an easy task for Matilda, who is actually a demon in human form.

She seduces Ambrosio into a downward spiral of perversion and degradation. Even a painting of the Virgin Mary arouses the priest's uncontrollable lust. Later, another object of purity arouses Ambrosio and leads to his horrific downfall.

The novel then switches gears and tells the story of the romance between Lorenzo and his beloved, a virginal young girl named Antonia. A subplot reveals the injustices suffered by Lorenzo's sister when she is tortured by nuns. There's also a narrative about a character called the Bleeding Nun.

Later, Ambrosio, overcome with lust for the innocent Antonia, kills her mother and uses Matilda's black magic to help him seduce her. He rapes Antonia, then kills her in a fit of rage. His sins finally catch up with him and he is delivered into the hands of the Inquisition.

Horribly tortured and sentenced to death, Ambrosio sells his soul to Satan in exchange for saving his life, after which, the Devil prevents the priest's last, pathetic attempt at repentance.

Sealing Ambrosio's fate, Satan reveals that Antonia - the girl Ambrosio raped and killed - was his long lost sister. Then he subjects the priest to an agonizing death. Of course, The Monk caused a furor when it was published.

Lurid, lewd, and shockingly graphic, it was the first novel to feature a Catholic priest as the villain. A sensation with readers and critics alike, the novel made its author a celebrity. He was given the nickname Monk.

Ultimately, a magistrate issued an injunction restricting the sale of The Monk on the grounds of obscenity. Lewis removed some elements that he thought were the reason for the magistrate's ruling and published a second edition. The novel still retained most of its horror.

The furor didn't die down, though. When Matthew Lewis became an elected Member of Parliament, he was exposed as the M.G. Lewis who wrote The Monk, and a scandal erupted. The novel would continue to earn praise, provoke outrage, and become one of the greatest Gothic novels of all time.

Lord Byron paid tribute to Lewis in his poem English Bards And Scotch Reviewers. Legendary French writer and philosopher Marquis de Sade praised Lewis's writing skills in his classic essay, Reflections On The Novel.

Over the years, The Monk would become a major literary influence. Jane Austen satirized it in her classic novel Northanger Abbey (1818), and it would inspire the writing of the infamous book The Awful Disclosures Of Maria Monk, or The Hidden Secrets Of A Nun's Life In A Convent Exposed.

First published in 1836, the book was supposedly a memoir written by an actual nun, Maria Monk, who lived in a convent in Montreal. In her book, Maria Monk describes the victimization of herself and her fellow nuns by priests from the seminary next door.

According to the book, the priests, driven mad with sexual frustration from the vows of chastity imposed on them, would sneak into the convent at night through a secret tunnel and force the nuns to submit to them sexually - with the help of the Mother Superior.

In a Gothic style similar to that of Matthew Lewis, Maria Monk provides a graphic and sensational account of perversion and corruption. Nuns who refuse to submit to the priests end up mysteriously disappearing.

Should a nun become pregnant as the result of her rape, after giving birth, the priests would baptize her baby, then strangle it and throw it into a lime pit. These were just some of the atrocities chronicled in the book.

Although it was published as a memoir - a true account - historians agree that The Awful Disclosures Of Maria Monk was really a work of fiction. Some believe that Maria suffered from schizophrenia as the result of a childhood head injury and had trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality.

Others believe that she was just a disgruntled nun manipulated by fundamentalist Protestants into wildly exaggerating her claims of abuse. The book is still used today by fundamentalist Protestant evangelists as an anti-Catholic tract to lure converts away from the Church.

Despite the controversy over The Monk, Matthew Lewis continued to write, and in addition to his short story collections, he wrote a play, The Castle Spectre (1796) - a Gothic romance that would become extremely popular on the British stage.

After his father died, Lewis inherited his large fortune. In 1815, Lewis traveled to the West Indies to visit his father's plantations in Jamaica. In the summer of 1816, he went to Switzerland and visited his friends, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, and told them five ghost stories which were later recorded in his journal.

The following year, Lewis, an abolitionist, returned to Jamaica to try and improve the living conditions of the slave population. He recorded his experiences in his journal. Unfortunately, a year later, he contracted yellow fever and died at the age of 42.

His journal of this period was published posthumously as Journal Of A West Indian Proprietor (1833), and a volume of his personal correspondence would be published as The Life And Correspondence Of M.G. Lewis in 1839.

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Quote Of The Day

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"An author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an animal whom everybody is privileged to attack; for though all are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them."

- Matthew Lewis

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Matthew Lewis' classic novel, The Monk. Enjoy!

Notes For July 8th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On July 8th, 1952, the famous American writer Anna Quindlen was born in New York City. When she was nineteen years old, her mother died of ovarian cancer at the age of 40. Quindlen's relationship with her mother would influence her writing, which often deals with mother-daughter conflicts.

Anna Quindlen graduated from Barnard College in 1974. For her thesis, she wrote a collection of short stories, and one of them was published in Seventeen magazine. After graduating, she took up journalism and became a reporter for the New York Post.

Three years later, in 1977, she left to work for the New York Times, and over the years, she held different positions with the venerable newspaper, including that of a columnist, and her column Life In The 30s became hugely popular.

She later became a columnist for Newsweek, and her column Public And Private won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. She married attorney Gerald Krovatin and bore him three children.

Quindlen wrote in her spare time, and her first book, a nonfiction work called Living Out Loud, was published in 1988. In 1991, she published her first novel, Object Lessons.

It told the story of Maggie Scanlan, a 13-year-old girl coming of age in the 1960s as the only daughter in a family ruled by a domineering, ignorant, bigoted, sexist Irish-Catholic father. Maggie's mother also struggles to find a place for herself.

Quindlen's second novel, One True Thing (1994) was an even bigger bestseller. It incorporates more elements from her personal life. Ellen Gulden, a writer for a New York newspaper, has always idolized and been close to her father George, a celebrated novelist and college professor.

When her estranged mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ellen's father orders her to come home and take care of her, even though he could afford to hire professional help. Angered that her father would ask her to jeopardize her job, Ellen refuses, but her father guilt-trips her into becoming her mother's caregiver.

When George asks Ellen to write the introduction to an anthology of his writings, she's delighted. But soon, she begins to see a different side of him. As she takes care of her mother, he acts like she isn't sick at all, and he soon manipulates Ellen into doing his wife's chores, such as washing and mending his clothes.

Ellen starts to question her image of her father, and comes to reconcile with her mother. She realizes that although he's a brilliant writer, her father is also a deeply flawed man who has made many mistakes, including infidelity - a memory Ellen had tried to suppress for years. Yet, he loves his wife dearly and can't bear to watch her slip away into death.

In 1995, following the success of One True Thing, Anna Quindlen realized that her schedule had become too hectic, so she resigned as a journalist and became a full-time writer.

Her third novel, a suspense thriller called Black And Blue (1998), was selected by Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. It told the story of Fran Benedetto, a battered woman who gathers up the courage to escape from her savagely abusive husband, fleeing with her ten-year-old son.

Fran builds a new life for herself and her son and tries to put the past behind her. Unfortunately, her ex-husband, a violent psychopath, is also a police officer, and he knows how to find people...

Anna Quindlen continues to write bestselling novels, as well as nonfiction works and children's books. She has established herself as one of the top authors of women's fiction. Her most recent novel, After Annie, was published in February of 2024.

In After Annie, when Annie Brown, a wife and mother in her thirties, dies suddenly from an aneurysm, her family is devastated. Her husband Bill, a plumber, is overwhelmed by grief and falls apart.

Annie's eldest child, 13-year-old Ali, is forced to grow up fast in order to take care of her younger siblings and her dad and keep the family going. Ultimately, the Browns realize that Annie's greatest gift was the inner strength she gave her loved ones to move on without her...

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Quote Of The Day

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"I sometimes joke that my greatest shortcoming as a writer is that I had an extremely happy childhood."

- Anna Quindlen

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Anna Quindlen discussing her most recent novel, After Annie, at a Barnes & Noble Book Club Virtual Event. Enjoy!

IWW Members' Publishing Successes For The Week Ending 7/6/25

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Amita Basu

My debut short story collection, At Play and Other Stories, has been published by Bridge House Press, a small traditional British publisher.

The 15 stories feature contemporary Indian women as they grapple with family and friendship, miscarriages and runaway children, love and sex, work and ambition, physical and mental illness, coming of age and aging, and the struggle to make a living.

The collection is available in Kindle and paperback from Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon India.

Many of these stories were drafted or revised on the Workshop. My hearty thanks to everyone here.

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Notes For July 4th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On July 4th, 1804, the legendary American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was born. He was born Nathaniel Hathorne, Jr. in Salem, Massachusetts. He would change the spelling of his last name to Hawthorne to distance himself from the shameful acts of his relatives.

Hawthorne's great-great-great grandfather, William Hathorne, was a magistrate infamous for his lack of compassion and extremely harsh sentences. His son was even worse.

William's son, John Hathorne, served as a judge during the notorious Salem Witch Trials, where many innocent people were falsely accused of witchcraft, convicted in kangaroo courts, then tortured and executed.

John Hathorne was the only judge who refused to repent or express any regret for his contemptible actions during the Salem Witch Trials. His infamy would besmirch the Hathorne family name for generations.

When Nathaniel Hawthorne was four years old, his father, a sea captain, contracted yellow fever and died. His mother moved the family in with relatives, living first in Salem, then in Raymond, Maine.

Hawthorne loved Maine. "Those were delightful days," he wrote, "for that part of the country was wild then, with only scattered clearings, and nine tenths of it primeval woods."

When Nathaniel was fifteen, he was sent back to Salem to begin his formal education. He hated Salem and missed his mother and sisters. He took up writing and would send his family issues of a homemade newspaper he wrote and copied by hand.

The newspaper, which Hawthorne called The Spectator, contained essays, poetry, and news items that reflected his sardonic, adolescent sense of humor.

In 1821, at the age of seventeen, Hawthorne went off to college. He didn't want to go, but his uncle insisted and paid his tuition at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

On his way to college, Hawthorne met and struck up friendships with legendary poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future U.S. President Franklin Pierce.

Nathaniel Hawthorne began his career as a writer in 1836, when he served as the editor of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, a literary magazine based in Boston.

Though he would leave the magazine to take a higher paying job as a weighter and gauger at the Boston Common House, Hawthorne continued to write, and his short stories were often published in magazines and anthologies.

Hawthorne's classic short story Young Goodman Brown was written and published during this time. The title character leaves his wife, Faith, to run an errand in the woods.

While walking through the forest, Brown meets a mysterious man who carries a black staff shaped like a serpent. He also runs into a townswoman, Mistress Cloyse, who knows the stranger. She accepts his snake staff and literally flies away.

Later, Brown happens upon a witches' Sabbath. All of the townspeople are part of the coven, except for Brown and his wife - who are about to be initiated! Brown calls out to Heaven to be saved and the scene vanishes.

Brown is left badly shaken. He thought he lived in a good Christian community, but, seeing the evil hidden within it, he loses faith in humanity and in his own wife.

This story is a metaphor for the hypocrisy and cruelty of the Puritans - a frequent theme in Hawthorne's writings. He was racked with guilt over the role of his ancestor in the Salem Witch Trials.

When a collection of Hawthorne's short stories was published in book form as Twice-Told Tales, it made his name as a writer.

Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody, an artist and transcendentalist with whom he would have three children. He became a follower of transcendentalism as well.

Later, when he and Sophia moved to Concord, Massachusetts, their next door neighbor turned out to be Hawthorne's literary and spiritual idol, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The late 1840s found Hawthorne back in Salem, working as a civil servant and suffering from a crippling bout of writer's block. He wrote the following to his old friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

I am trying to resume my pen. Whenever I sit alone, or walk alone, I find myself dreaming about stories, as of old; but these forenoons in the Custom House undo all that the afternoons and evenings have done. I should be happier if I could write.

Hawthorne beat his writer's block and returned in grand form with The Scarlet Letter (1850), which is rightfully considered one of the greatest American novels of all time.

The classic, haunting tale of love, anguish, and Puritan cruelty was one of the first mass produced novels in American history. It sold nearly 3,000 copies in its first ten days of publication.

Now financially secure, Hawthorne quit his job and moved to a small farmhouse in the Berkshire mountains, where he remained a productive writer and struck up a friendship with one of his biggest fans - the legendary writer Herman Melville.

Melville had been working on his classic novel Moby Dick when he met Hawthorne. The dedication page of Moby Dick reads, "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne."

Hawthorne followed The Scarlet Letter with more classic novels, including The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun.

He also published more classic short story collections, including Mosses from an Old Manse, The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, and his collections of children's stories, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys and Tanglewood Tales.

Nathaniel Hawthorne died on May 18th, 1864, at the age of 59. That same day, in an eerie Hawthorne-esque coincidence, his son Julian was initiated into a college fraternity by being blindfolded and locked in a coffin.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash."

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic short story, Young Goodman Brown. Enjoy!

Notes For July 3rd, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On July 3rd, 1883, the legendary Austro-Hungarian writer Franz Kafka was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The eldest child of a wealthy Jewish family, Kafka's two brothers would die in infancy, and his three sisters would perish in the Holocaust.

All of his life, Franz Kafka would suffer severe emotional abuse at the hands of his father, Hermann. In 1919, five years before his father died, Kafka wrote him a 45-page letter and asked his mother to deliver it. She refused.

He opened the letter this way:

You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete...

The letter would later be published as Letter To His Father along with other correspondence after Kafka's death.

Franz Kafka was of Austrian and Hungarian descent and spoke German as his primary language, but quickly became fluent in Czech. He would later study the French language and culture, as Gustave Flaubert was one of his favorite writers.

Kafka's family rarely practiced their Jewish religion; he received his bar mitzvah at the age of thirteen, but the family only went to temple four times a year.

He loathed going to temple, but he loved Yiddish literature and theater, and would later attend the Eleventh Zionist Congress. He considered moving to Israel.

Kafka attended the Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague, where he planned to study chemistry. Two weeks into his first semester, he switched his major to law, a longer course of study that would give him the opportunity to take classes in German studies and art history.

At the end of his freshman year, he met Max Brod, who would become his lifelong friend and later, literary executor. He would meet another lifelong friend at university - journalist Felix Weltsch.

Together, Kafka, Brod, and Weltsch would become members of the Prague Circle, a loosely knit group of German-Jewish writers who lived in Prague and contributed to its culture.

In 1906, Kafka earned his Doctor of Law degree and began a year-long internship as a law clerk for the civil and criminal courts. A year later, he took a job at a large Italian-owned insurance company, the Assicurazioni Generali.

The job required Kafka to work from 8PM to 6AM, which he hated because it made writing difficult. After less than a year, Kafka resigned and was later hired as an insurance officer for the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia.

He was a very competent and diligent employee and proud of his work, but he really considered his position a brotberuf - a "bread job" he worked just to pay his bills.

By 1911, Kafka quit his insurance job to help his brother-in-law run an asbestos factory. He devoted much of his free time to running the business, but still found some time to write.

During his life, his writing didn't attract much attention. He published only a few short stories and didn't complete any of his novels, except for his classic novella The Metamorphosis (1915).

Two years after completing it, Kafka contracted tuberculosis. After a seven year battle with the disease, Franz Kafka died in 1924 at the age of 40.

He had left instructions to his executor Max Brod that his all his letters, diaries, and manuscripts be burned unread. Knowing that Kafka didn't really mean what he said, Brod didn't honor his last wishes.

He prepared Kafka's three unfinished novels for publication, editing them for coherency. Kafka's previously unpublished short stories, diaries, and letters, were also published posthumously.

Kafka's girlfriend, Dora Diamant, also kept a collection of his writings, even though he'd asked her to destroy them. Unfortunately, these writings - a collection of 20 notebooks and 35 letters - were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933.

The search for these missing writings is ongoing, as they are suspected to have survived, and may be locked away somewhere in the world, long forgotten.

Kafka's writings were very much the product of his poor relationship with his father, whose years of emotional abuse left Franz a psychological wreck.

He suffered from clinical depression, social anxiety, migraines, insomnia, and psychosomatic illnesses. Some scholars believe that he was likely a schizophrenic.

Even though he lived with his parents for most of his life, he felt a profound sense of alienation from them, and alienation is a theme that runs deep in his writing.

In his classic novella The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect.

His first concern is not that he has become a monstrous bug, but how he will get to work. Instead of compassion, Samsa's condition inspires his family to react with repulsion and reject him, locking him up in his room.

His sister, Grete, to whom he is close, cares for him at first, bringing him food and water. But as his condition becomes more of a social and financial burden to his family, even Grete rejects him.

Samsa's father proves to be the most cruel. He resents having to come out of retirement and work to help pay off his son's debts. He chases Gregor around the dinner table and pelts him with apples. One of them becomes lodged in Gregor's back and results in an infection that kills him slowly and painfully.

The Trial (1925) tells the story of Josef K, a senior bank clerk who, on his 30th birthday, finds himself arrested by two unidentified agents for an unspecified crime.

As he awaits trial on charges that are not revealed to him, K soon realizes that nothing is as it seems. When he goes to visit the Magistrate - a pillar of integrity and morality - he finds a collection of pornography hidden amongst the man's books.

When K complains to the Magistrate that the agents who arrested him asked for bribes, he later witnesses the two men being flogged in a store room at his bank. K pleads for mercy for the men, but the flogger won't be swayed.

K thinks that the whipping may have been staged to frighten him, but the next day, in the bank store room, K again witnesses the agents being flogged.

In The Castle (1926), a man known only as K arrives at a village to work as a land surveyor, summoned by the village authorities who rule from a place called the Castle.

The gigantic, castle-like structure houses a monstrously huge, impossibly complex bureaucracy that thrives on endless, incredibly detailed paperwork. The authorities maintain that their system is flawless, but that's a lie - it was a clerical error that summoned K to the village.

In this one-man-against-the-system story, Kafka cleverly maintains ambiguity as to exactly what duties the authorities and the other workers at the Castle perform.

Franz Kafka was a brilliant writer way ahead of his time, a master of surrealism and political allegory. One can only imagine what he might have written had he lived to witness the horrors of the Holocaust that would claim the lives of his sisters.

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Quote Of The Day

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“A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.”

- Franz Kafka

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Franz Kafka's classic novella, The Metamorphosis. Enjoy!