This Day In Literary History
On August 8th, 1818, the legendary English poet John Keats returned home from a strenuous walking tour of the United Kingdom. The tour took him through Scotland, Ireland, and the Lake District of Northwestern England.
Keats was accompanied by his friend, Charles Armitage Brown. Keats' brother George and his sister-in-law Georgina accompanied them as far as Lancaster. The couple then went to Liverpool. From there, they emigrated to America.
In July of 1818, while on the Scottish Isle of Mull, John Keats caught a bad cold. He continued on the walking tour and his cold worsened. He began showing the early signs of tuberculosis. Soon, he became too ill to remain on the tour.
Back home by August, Keats set about nursing his brother Tom, who was dying of tuberculosis, exposing himself to more infection. Tom died a few months later.
At that time, tuberculosis, then known as consumption, had not yet been identified as a bacterial infection of the lungs. It was seen as a weak person's illness, contracted by the physically or spiritually weak, in the latter case a symptom of either severely repressed or unbridled lust.
Since tuberculosis was believed to be caused by engaging in sexual practices considered sinful, (or the desire to engage in such practices) the disease carried with it a huge social stigma. Contracting tuberculosis was as humiliating as contracting a venereal disease.
John Keats would die of tuberculosis at the age of 25, three years after returning home from his walking tour. As his health deteriorated, he established himself as one of the greatest English Romantic poets of all time.
Ironically, during his short life, Keats' works were savaged by critics to the point that he was driven to despair by the bad reviews. His close friend and fellow poet Lord Byron urged him to buck up and not let the critics get to him.
Byron, recalling his own reaction to negative reviews, quipped, "Instead of bursting a blood-vessel, I drank three bottles of claret and began an answer." In his classic poem Don Juan, Byron described Keats' fate this way:
'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.
When John Keats died in 1821, tuberculosis had finally been identified as a bacterial infection. Though he was no longer shamed by the disease, a new myth began that dragged his name through the mud.
It was said - and even his friend Percy Shelley believed - that John Keats had been killed by bad reviews, too weak to withstand the critics' onslaught. In Adonais, Shelley's classic poem eulogizing Keats, he depicted the poet's critics as loathsome creatures like worms and reptiles.
Although Keats' girlfriend Fanny Brawne blamed Shelley's poem for exacerbating the myth of Keats' fragility, the real culprits were Keats' executors. He had wanted his epitaph to read, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water," but this is how his executors engraved his headstone:
This Grave contains all that was Mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET Who, on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone.
Quote Of The Day
"I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion - I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more - I could be martyred for my religion. Love is my religion - I could die for that."
- John Keats
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a reading of John Keats' classic poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On August 7th, 1934, the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that Ulysses, the classic novel by the legendary Irish writer James Joyce, was not legally obscene.
To be specific, the Court of Appeal upheld a lower court's ruling declaring that Ulysses was not legally obscene. It was a major First Amendment victory, one that British Joycean scholar Stuart Gilbert called "epoch making."
Beginning in 1918, Ulysses was published in serialized form in the American literary magazine The Little Review. In 1920, the magazine published the novel's controversial thirteenth episode,Nausicaä.
This outraged a moralist group called The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) which objected to the content and determined to keep Ulysses from being published in America in any format.
The NYSSV was founded in 1873 by the notorious Anthony Comstock and his supporters in the Young Men's Christian Association. (Yes, that YMCA.) Comstock was a United States Postal Inspector.
The same year that he founded the NYSSV, Comstock persuaded Congress to pass the Comstock Act, which made it illegal to send obscene materials through the mail.
The passage of the Comstock Act resulted in the enacting of "Comstock Laws" at the state and federal level. The last of these laws wouldn't be struck down by the Supreme Court until 1965.
The Comstock Act was a nightmare. Comstock's definition of obscenity was so vague that he even used the law and his power as a Postal Inspector to block the shipment of certain medical textbooks to medical students.
When Comstock had copies of George Bernard Shaw's classic play Mrs. Warren's Profession blocked, calling Shaw "an Irish smut dealer," the furious playwright said:
Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all.
Although Comstock enjoyed a public reputation as a devout Christian guardian of morality, privately, he was corrupt - and notoriously so. As a moralist, he destroyed the lives of many innocent people.
Comstock proudly admitted to being responsible for 4,000 arrests and 15 suicides. In his later years, he suffered from poor health after having suffered a severe blow to the head from an unknown attacker.
Before he died in 1915, Comstock attracted the attention of an admirer - a young law student named J. Edgar Hoover who agreed with Comstock's political beliefs and was interested in his shady methods of investigation, prosecution, and conviction.
Comstock's NYSSV was successful in its prosecution of The Little Review for publishing the offending episode from Ulysses.
At the first trial in 1921, the literary magazine was ruled legally obscene, and as a result, Ulysses was banned in the United States. The ruling was a product of its time. The Nausicaä episode contained a scene which must have been shocking to 1920s sensibilities.
At the beach, Leopold Bloom (one of the main characters) meets Gerty MacDowell, who has come to watch a fireworks display. Gerty notices Bloom staring at her. Her passion stirred by both Bloom and the fireworks, Gerty deliberately exposes herself to him.
Bloom becomes aroused and starts to masturbate, which arouses her in return. They both reach orgasm as a Roman candle explodes overhead, gushing out "a stream of rain gold hair threads." Afterward, Gerty leaves and reveals herself to be lame, leaving Bloom to contemplate her lameness.
With Joyce's playful punning, the erotic scene becomes a parody of the Catholic Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament ceremony, with Bloom acting out his own version of an Adoration where Gerty's body serves as the body of Christ. The revelation of her lameness is Joyce's biting metaphor for the Catholic Church.
The trial that resulted in Ulysses being banned in the United States drew a huge amount of publicity. As a result, pirated editions of the novel were published and sold on the black market or under the counter in bookshops.
Joyce's novel became a runaway bestseller, but he didn't earn a penny from the sale of those pirated books. In 1933, after twelve years of frustration, Joyce's official U.S. publisher, Random House, decided to set up a test case.
The publisher imported a shipment of uncensored French editions of Ulysses and had Customs confiscate a copy after the ship was unloaded.
That year, the case of United States vs. One Book Called Ulysses came to trial. On December 6th, 1933, U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey ruled that Ulysses was not legally obscene.
The NYSSV was outraged and appealed the decision. The case reached the United States Second Court of Appeal, which affirmed the lower court's ruling on August 7th, 1934. Ulysses was finally published uncensored in the United States.
Since then, most U.S. editions of the novel - including the one that I have - feature the text of the Woolsey ruling as part of the forward. Woolsey ruled that Ulysses was not pornographic because it contained no "dirt for dirt's sake."
Also, the novel was so hard to understand that people would be unlikely to read it for the purpose of titillation. The ruling changed the standard for literary obscenity and made it impossible for an entire novel to be declared obscene because of a few offending lines or passages.
When the Second Court of Appeal affirmed Woolsey's decision, they called Ulysses a "sincere portrayal" and said it was "executed with real art." I couldn't agree more.
Quote Of The Day "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."
- James Joyce on his novel Ulysses.
Vanguard Video Today's video features a lecture on the legacy of James Joyce's classic novel, Ulysses. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On August 6th, 1809, the legendary English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. Although his father, George Tennyson, was a rector, (who married a vicar's daughter) the Tennyson family were descendants of King Edward II.
George Tennyson's skill at money management made him far more affluent than the typical country clergyman, and the family was thus able to spend summers vacationing at Mablethorpe and Skegness on the East coast of England.
Alfred Lord Tennyson was the fourth of twelve children. When he and his older brothers Charles and Frederick were teenagers, they began writing poetry. By the time he was 17, they had published a collection of their poems.
Charles Tennyson would later marry the younger sister of Alfred's wife. Another one of Alfred's brothers, Edward Tennyson, would end up institutionalized at a private asylum, where he died.
First educated at Louth Grammar School, Tennyson entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where he would join an intellectual secret society called the Cambridge Apostles. While studying at Cambridge, he met poet Arthur Henry Hallam, who became his best friend.
The same year, his first commercially published book, Poems by Two Brothers, came out. It also contained works by his older brother, Charles. In 1829, Alfred Lord Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for his poem Timbuctoo.
A year later, his first solo poetry collection, Poems Chiefly Lyrical, was published. It contained two of Tennyson's most celebrated poems, Claribel and Mariana.
Although some critics derided it for being too sentimental, Tennyson's verse proved to be very popular with readers. It also caught the attention of fellow writers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
When Tennyson's father died in the spring of 1831, he had to leave Cambridge before obtaining his degree. He lived at the rectory and took responsibility for his widowed mother and his siblings.
His friend Arthur Henry Hallam came to live with the Tennyson family, and later became engaged to Alfred's sister, Emilia. In 1833, Tennyson published his second book of poetry, simply called Poems.
This collection, which included his famous poem, The Lady of Shalott, met with such critical scorn that Tennyson wouldn't publish another for ten years, though he continued to write.
That same year, Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly of a stroke while on vacation in Vienna. His death had a profound effect on Tennyson, who composed a poem in tribute to his friend called In Memoriam A.H.H.
Considered one of Tennyson's masterpieces, it included the famous lines "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Then never to have loved at all." The poem became a favorite of Queen Victoria, who found solace in it after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861. In 1862, she requested a meeting with Tennyson.
In 1842, while living in London, Alfred Lord Tennyson published two more volumes of his Poems series of poetry collections. Unlike the first volume, they met with immediate success. They featured Tennyson classics such as Locksley Hall, Tithonus, and Ulysses.
His writing career back on track, he continued to write and publish poetry collections. By 1850, Tennyson reached the pinnacle of his career. That year, he finally published his masterpiece In Memoriam A.H.H..
On top of that, he was appointed Poet Laureate following the death of William Wordsworth. Also in 1850, at the age of 41, Alfred Lord Tennyson married his childhood sweetheart Emily Sellwood, who bore him two sons, Hallam and Lionel.
In 1855, Tennyson wrote another one of his classics, The Charge Of The Light Brigade. The poem is a tribute to the British cavalrymen who were involved in an ill-fated charge on October 25th, 1854, during the Crimean War.
In 1884, Queen Victoria - a huge fan of his work - bestowed on Tennyson the title Baron Tennyson of Aldworth, and he took a seat in Parliament's House of Lords.
Alfred Lord Tennyson continued to write into his 80s. Near the end of his life, he revealed that he had pretty much rejected religion and become an agnostic. It was a shocking revelation, even in the waning years of the Victorian era, but not a surprise.
He'd blasted Christianity in Maud, writing that "the churches have killed their Christ," and in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, he wrote that "Christian love among the churches look'd the twin of heathen hate."
Tennyson died in October of 1892 at the age of 83. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. He is rightfully considered one of the greatest poets of the English language.
Quote Of The Day "Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within."
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
Vanguard Video Today's video features a reading of Alfred Lord Tennyson's classic poem, The Lady of Shallott. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On August 5th, 1850, the legendary French writer Guy de Maupassant was born in Dieppe, France. He grew up in Normandy, where he collected in his photographic memory a lot of information he would use in his short stories, which often dealt with the Norman people.
Maupassant's parents separated when he was eleven years old. He lived with his mother, to whom he was very close. They lived in the Villa de Verguies, which was located between the sea and the countryside.
In these surroundings, the young Maupassant developed a passion for outdoor adventure. He would fish with the local fishermen off the coast. In 1868, when he was eighteen years old, Maupassant saved poet Algernon Swinburne from drowning off the coast of Eterat.
That wasn't the first writer he met; when he started junior high school, Maupassant met the legendary novelist Gustave Flaubert, a childhood friend of his mother. Her father was Flaubert's godfather.
After receiving his primary education, Guy de Maupassant entered a seminary, but he got himself expelled, as he came to hate religion and the prospect of joining the clergy. He went to university instead.
Shortly after he graduated in 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Only twenty years old, he volunteered for military service and fought bravely. After the war ended, he returned home and moved to Paris.
Maupassant joined Gustave Flaubert's literary circle. He became Flaubert's protege and was introduced to famous writers such as Emile Zola, Henry James, and Ivan Turgenev. From Flaubert, Maupassant learned the craft of writing.
He set out to start his own writing career, supporting himself by working as a civil servant in two different positions. He hated the jobs. For recreation, he canoed on the Seine and pursued women.
In 1880, Maupassant established himself as a short story writer when he published Boule de Suif (Ball of Fat) in the anthology Les Soirees de Medan (Evenings at Medan) along with works by Zola and other writers.
Set during the Franco-Prussian War, "Boule de Suif" is the nickname of a well-known prostitute traveling in a coach with some bourgeois passengers. The coach is detained by a Prussian officer who demands that Boule de Suif sleep with him. She refuses, and he continues to detain the coach.
The other passengers grow restless and demand that she sleep with the Prussian. She swallows her pride and agrees. Afterward, he allows the coach to leave. The other passengers treat her like she had the plague.
Remembering how these hypocrites had devoured the food and drink in the basket she brought with her, all Boule de Suif can do is weep. Although Guy de Maupassant had written six novels, he was best known as the master of the short story.
He wrote over 300 stories, one-tenth of which were horror stories. His most famous horror story was Le Horla (1887). In this disturbing tale, a wealthy young Norman believes that he has unwittingly summoned a horla.
Horlas are invisible monsters, cousins to vampires, and they are said to eventually bring about the downfall of Man. As the young Norman grows more fearful of the horla he has summoned, he tries to destroy it.
He eventually burns his house down, killing all of his servants. Believing that the horla is still alive, he decides to commit suicide. Was the horla real or just in his mind?
Madness is a recurring theme in Maupassant's stories; in A Night In Paris, the paranoid narrator suffers from a compulsion to walk the streets. In A Madman, a judge commits murder just to see what it feels like to kill, then sentences an innocent man to death for the crime.
And in The Inn - which may have inspired Stephen King to write his classic novel The Shining - two caretakers are living at a remote inn in the French Alps that becomes snowed in and unreachable. When one of them goes missing, the other starts to go mad. Or is the inn haunted by an evil presence?
Ironically, Guy de Maupassant's fascination with madness in his writings would soon cross over into real life, as an undiagnosed case of syphilis, contracted in his 20's, progressed over the years and eroded his sanity.
In middle age, Maupassant developed a desire for solitude, a fear of death, and growing paranoia. In January 1892, he attempted suicide by cutting his throat. He was committed to the famous celebrity asylum of Dr. Esprit Blanche, where he died in July 1893, a month before his 43rd birthday.
One of the great masters of the short story, Maupassant's work has inspired the writings of W. Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, and other great writers. H.P. Lovecraft credited Maupassant's horror tales - especially Le Horla - as the inspiration for his classic The Call Of Cthulhu.
All writers of short stories owe it to themselves to read Guy de Maupassant.
Quote Of The Day “You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.”
- Guy de Maupassant
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Guy de Maupassant's classic short story, The Horla. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On August 1st, 1949, the legendary American writer and musician Jim Carroll was born in New York City. Born to an Irish Catholic family, he grew up on the Lower East Side. When he was 15, his family moved to Manhattan.
In 1961, at the age of twelve, Carroll began keeping the diaries that would make him famous. His two passions were basketball and writing. He excelled at basketball.
Carroll became a star basketball player for Trinity School, an elite Catholic High School. While there, his talent led him to the 1966 National High School All Star Game.
Carroll's coach and teammates didn't know that he was living a secret double life as a heroin addicted poet. He first tried heroin at the age of thirteen. He financed his habit by stealing, hustling, and prostituting himself.
In 1967, while he was still in high school, Carroll's first poetry collection was published. Organic Trains got him noticed by the literary world, and very soon, his work was being published in prestigious literary magazines such as The Paris Review and Poetry.
After his second poetry collection, 4 Ups and 1 Down was published in 1970, Jim Carroll began working for legendary artist Andy Warhol as a screenwriter, writing dialogue and creating character names for Warhol's films.
Also during the 1970s, Carroll published his third poetry collection, Living at the Movies (1973), and his most famous book, The Basketball Diaries (1978).
The Basketball Diaries was a collection of excerpts from the diaries he kept as an adolescent, covering his high school basketball career, his nightmarish heroin addiction, and his passion for writing.
Considered one of the last great works of Beat literature, The Basketball Diaries painted a stark and vivid portrait of the hard drug culture of early 1960s New York City. It would be adapted as an acclaimed and controversial feature film in 1995.
The film, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Jim Carroll, sparked controversy due to a scene where Carroll fantasizes about gunning down his classmates at school.
In 1997, a mentally ill 14-year-old boy named Michael Carneal opened fire on students at Heath High School, killing three and injuring five more. The Basketball Diaries was one of Carneal's favorite movies.
Three of the victims' families filed multi-million dollar lawsuits against the movie studios who distributed The Basketball Diaries and the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers, and the producers of violent video games.
Their lawyer, Jack Thompson, claimed that violent movies, violent video games, and Internet pornography inspired Carneal to go on a rampage. The lawsuits were thrown out and Thompson was later disbarred for his unethical conduct, including perjury.
It was this same case that made Stephen King decide to pull his novel Rage (1977) out of print. Michael Carneal was found to have had a copy of Rage - which was about a mentally ill high school student who guns down two teachers and takes his classmates hostage - in his locker.
After the publication of The Basketball Diaries in 1978, Jim Carroll, having finally kicked his heroin habit for good, moved to California to make a fresh start.
There, with encouragement from his old friend and former roommate, legendary rocker and poet Patti Smith, Carroll formed a punk rock group called The Jim Carroll Band. Their debut album, Catholic Boy, was released in 1980.
Catholic Boy, which hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart at #73, featured the single People Who Died, which appeared in the 1985 feature film, Tuff Turf. The band also had a cameo appearance in the film.
The Jim Carroll Band would release several more albums, the last being an EP called Runaway (2000). As a songwriter, Carroll would collaborate with such famous artists as Lou Reed, Boz Scaggs, the Blue Oyster Cult, ELO, and Pearl Jam.
In the 1990s, Carroll became a spoken word performance artist, giving live readings of his works, including his first and only novel The Petting Zoo, which would be published posthumously in 2010.
Jim Carroll died of a heart attack in September of 2009. He was 60 years old.
Quote Of The Day
“Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination.”
- Jim Carroll
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Jim Carroll giving a 93-minute spoken word live performance in 1995. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 31st, 1919, the famous Italian writer Primo Levi was born in Turin, Italy. He was born to a liberal, intellectual Jewish family. His father worked for a manufacturing firm in Hungary, his mother played piano and spoke fluent French.
He had a younger sister, Anna Maria, to whom he was always close. As a young boy, Primo Levi was thin, shy, and sickly. When he entered the Massimo d'Azeglio Royal Gymnasium at the age of eleven, he was a year ahead of his schoolmates.
He was shorter than his peers, smarter than them, and the only Jew in school, which resulted in bullying. Despite his chronic illness, he passed his high school entrance exams at 14. Like all Italian schoolboys, he was required to join the Opera Nazionale Balilla.
The Opera Nazionale Balilla was the Italian Fascist equivalent of the Hitler Youth. Unlike the Nazis, Italian fascism did not include racist ideology. The National Fascist Party even had Jewish members. But this would change in a few years.
The teenage Primo Levi attended the Liceo Classico Massimo d'Azeglio, a high school known for its antifascist teachers, including philosopher Norberto Bobbio and novelist Cesare Pavese. Then, while he was studying chemistry in university, everything changed.
In 1938, a group of prominent Italian fascist scientists and intellectuals published the Manifesto of Race, a collection of theories in line with Nazi ideology. It declared Italians part of the Aryan race and Jews the enemy.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini personally had no anti Semitic convictions and was criticized by Hitler for not ridding Italy of its Jews. After the publication of the Manifesto of Race, the criticism intensified.
Believing it was necessary to strengthen the alliance between Italy and Germany, he passed the infamous Racial Laws, which stripped Italian Jews of their civil rights, public positions, and assets. Books by Jewish authors were banned.
This was a huge mistake on Mussolini's part, as many non-Jewish Italians - including his own supporters - hated the Racial Laws, which would be the catalyst that led to Mussolini's overthrow and public execution after the war.
As Primo Levi had matriculated a year earlier, he was allowed to remain in university, but had difficulty finding a supervisor for his graduation thesis. Still, he obtained his degree, though the Racial Laws blacklisted him.
So he took clandestine jobs, often using a fake name and fake papers. In 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III deposed and imprisoned Mussolini, prompting the Nazis to invade Italy and liberate him. By then, Levi was fighting for the Italian Resistance.
After he and his comrades were arrested by the fascist militia, Levi was sent to the Fossoli internment camp. When the Nazis took it over, he was sent to the Auschwitz death camp. Fortunately, as a professional chemist, he was useful to the Nazis.
This kept Levi alive - barely, as he subsisted on starvation rations. Then he met a man named Lorenzo Perrone. Neither a Jew nor a prisoner, Perrone was an Italian civilian laborer who had been forced by his employers to work at Auschwitz.
A master bricklayer, Perrone was horrified by what he witnessed in the camp. He struck up a friendship with Primo Levi and smuggled him a soup ration every day, which kept him from starving to death. He would never forget this act of kindness.
During his time in Auschwitz, Levi worked in a laboratory on a project to produce synthetic rubber. He saw his fellow Jews brutalized and exterminated en masse while he survived. It haunted him for the rest of his life.
Primo Levi had spent nearly a year in Auschwitz when the death camp was liberated by the Red Army in January of 1945. Malnourished and suffering from scarlet fever, he returned home a living corpse with a bloated face and traumatic memories.
Unable to find work in his hometown of Turin, he took long train trips to work in Milan. He would tell people he met on the train stories about Auschwitz. He decided to write about these experiences. His first book, a memoir, was published in 1947.
If This Is a Man opens with Levi's arrest by the Italian fascist militia and ends with the liberation of Auschwitz. He wrote the book in calm, sober prose, which made the horrors he described even more vivid and haunting.
At the time If This Is a Man was published, Levi had quit his job and started an independent laboratory with his old friend Alberto Salmoni. He had just married his wife Lucia. She gave birth to their daughter Lisa the following year.
That year, Primo Levi was reunited with Lorenzo Perrone, the bricklayer who saved his life. Unable to cope with what he'd seen inside Auschwitz, Perrone became a homeless alcoholic wreck and was suffering from tuberculosis when Levi rescued him from the streets.
Levi would close his laboratory, which had been located in Alberto Salmoni's parents' house, after it became too dangerous to produce chemicals there. He worked as a chemist for various companies while he wrote. He also became a Holocaust education activist.
Over the years, he visited over 130 public schools to talk about his experiences in Auschwitz and was stunned by the historical revisionism being employed by the conservative government's schools, which downplayed the scope of the Holocaust and Italy's role in it.
Levi also took Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to task for falsely claiming that the number of Russians killed in the Soviet gulags was the same as the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. The numbers were not even close.
Approximately 30% of prisoners in the gulag died, while the Nazis exterminated between 90 and 98% of their prisoners. Solzhenitsyn, who won the Nobel Prize, was later exposed as a lifelong virulent anti Semite, a fact that he deliberately hid from the Nobel committee.
Primo Levi's writings would include a second memoir, The Truce (1963), two novels, a poetry collection, several short story collections, and several essay collections, with the Holocaust and his work as a chemical engineer being major themes.
In April of 1987, a few months before his 68th birthday, Levi was killed in a fall from his third story apartment. His death was ruled a suicide. His biographers agreed with this, as he was suffering from depression and the stress of caring for his elderly mother and mother-in-law.
Other factors included his traumatic memories of Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, his fellow writer and fellow Holocaust survivor, said that "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later," but Levi's friends disputed the suicide ruling as he left no note and there were no warning signs.
They believe that Levi's death was an accident. He had plans for the short and long term future, and a few days before his death, he had complained to his doctor that he was suffering from dizzy spells.
Quote Of The Day
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
- Primo Levi
Vanguard Video
Today's video features an 89-minute tribute to Primo Levi, recorded live at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History On July 30th, 1818, the legendary English writer Emily Brontë was born in West Yorkshire, England. Her sisters Charlotte (author of the classic novel Jane Eyre) and Anne were also poets and novelists. Her brother Patrick Branwell Brontë was a poet and painter.
Their father was a poor Irish clergyman, but he did have an impressive collection of classic literature.Emily and her siblings educated themselves by reading all of his books. As children, they created imaginary worlds and filled notebooks with stories about them.
Emily attended Miss Patchett's Ladies Academy at Law Hill School near Halifax, then later, a private school in Brussels.When her sister Charlotte discovered her own talent as a poet, they decided to collaborate on a book of poetry, along with sister Anne.
Due to the prejudice against women writers in the Victorian era, the Brontë sisters, like other female authors, published their poetry undaer male pseudonyms. Emily took the name Ellis Bell, Charlotte became Currer Bell, and Anne's nom de guerre was Acton Bell.
Their first book, published in 1846, was titled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.The following year, Emily Brontë published her classic novel, Wuthering Heights, as Ellis Bell.
Originally published in two volumes, (Anne Brontë later wrote a third volume called Agnes Grey) Wuthering Heights is rightfully considered one of the greatest Gothic novels of all time.
It told the unforgettable story of the intensely passionate, yet ultimately doomed love affair between childhood sweethearts Heathcliff and Catherine, soul mates who are ultimately separated by cruelty and snobbery, their unresolved emotions threatening to destroy them.
When it was first published, Wuthering Heights received mixed reviews due to its stark and brutal depictions of mental and physical cruelty. It has since been recognized as one of the all-time classics of English literature.
Unfortunately, Emily Brontë would never write another novel. After her brother died of tuberculosis, Emily contracted the disease herself, a result of a cold she caught during his funeral. She died in December of 1848, at the age of thirty. Her sister Anne died of tuberculosis the following year.
After Emily Brontë's death, her sister Charlotte edited her two volumes of Wuthering Heights into a standalone novel, and republished it under Emily's real name. Charlotte also died young of tuberculosis, or so her death certificate stated.
Some biographers have claimed that she actually died from either typhus or dehydration, as well as malnutrition from excessive vomiting brought on by severe morning sickness.
Although Emily Brontë's life was tragically cut short, her literary legacy lives on. Wuthering Heights continues to inspire readers to this day, and has been adapted numerous times for the stage, screen, radio, and television.
Quote Of The Day "Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves."
- Emily Brontë
Vanguard Vide Today's video features a complete reading of Emily Brontë's classic novel, Wuthering Heights. Enjoy!
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