This Day In Literary History
On March 26th, 1920, This Side of Paradise, the classic first novel by the legendary American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published. In the summer of 1919, Fitzgerald, then 22 years old, had broken up with his girlfriend, Zelda Sayre.
Depressed, he spent most of the summer drunk before returning to his family's home in St. Paul, Minnesota. There, he began writing again, resuming work on his first novel, which had been rejected by publishers.
The original draft of the novel was titled The Romantic Egotist. Fitzgerald's rewrite was practically a brand new novel; only 80 pages of his original manuscript made it into the 300+ page final draft, which was retitled This Side of Paradise.
He hoped that if he became a successful novelist, he could win Zelda back. She had dumped him because she thought he would never be able to provide her with a comfortable living.
On September 4th, 1919, Fitzgerald had a friend deliver his completed manuscript to Max Perkins, an editor at Scribner's in New York. The novel was nearly rejected by the other editors, but on Perkins' insistence, they accepted it.
(Max Perkins, one of the greatest book editors and publishers of all time, not only discovered and edited F. Scott Fitzgerald's work, he also discovered and edited the novels of other great writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, and helped them get published.)
He believed that Fitzgerald was a major talent, and that This Side of Paradise would be a bestseller. The author pleaded for an immediate release, but was told that his novel wouldn't be published until the spring.
So, on March 26th, 1920, This Side of Paradise was published by Scribner's in a first edition press run of 3,000 copies. It sold out in three days, confirming Fitzgerald's prediction that he would become an overnight sensation.
Between 1920 and 1921, nearly 50,000 copies of the novel were printed. The author didn't earn a huge income from his first novel, but it sold well. He made just over $6,200 in 1920 - almost $100,000 in today's money - and the novel's success helped him earn more from his short stories, which made up the bulk of his income.
This Side of Paradise was a dark and lyrical tale of love warped by greed and status-seeking. It told the story of Amory Blaine, a poor but handsome young Midwesterner, from his early years and his education at Princeton through his service in World War I and his return home.
Blaine learns a hard lesson when his attempts at romance with wealthy debutantes fail miserably and leave him heartbroken. The novel ends with his famous summation, "I know myself, but that is all."
The style Fitzgerald employed for his first novel was a mishmash of straightforward narrative and narrative drama intertwined with letters and poems by the protagonist, Amory Blaine.
This is not a surprise, considering that Fitzgerald cobbled together different writings to form the novel. And yet, the end product turned out to be brilliant and gave readers and critics a preview of the genius that would produce The Great Gatsby five years later.
The success of his first novel wouldn't be the only prediction of Fitzgerald's to come true. After the book was accepted by Scribner's, he won Zelda back and they became a couple again.
A week after the novel was published, they were married. Unfortunately, their alcoholism and Zelda's worsening mental illness would doom their relationship. His health ravaged by his heavy drinking, F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44 after suffering his third and final heart attack.
Quote Of The Day "All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel,This Side of Paradise. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 25th, 1925, the famous American writer Flannery O'Connor was born. She was born Mary Flannery O' Connor in Savannah, Georgia. She described herself as "a pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex."
When she was six years old, she taught her pet chicken to walk backwards. The story made the local news, then was picked up Pathe News for one of its national newsreels. O'Connor and her chicken appeared in a newsreel segment titled Little Mary O'Connor and Her Trained Chicken.
When she was fifteen, her father died of lupus, a hereditary disease that ran in the O'Connor family. She was devastated by the loss. She graduated from the Peabody Laboratory School in 1942 and went on to earn a Social Sciences degree at the Georgia State College for Women, now known as Georgia College State University.
A year later, in 1946, she was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she had enrolled to study journalism. While in the Writers' Workshop, she became friends with some important writers and critics who taught there, including Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, and Paul Engle.
Writer and essayist Andrew Lytle, also the longtime editor of the Sewanee Review, was an early admirer of Flannery O'Connor's work. He published her short stories and others' essays on her work.
Poet and novelist Paul Engle, the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was the first to read and critique the early drafts of what would become O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood (1952).
Flannery O'Connor's writings were heavily influenced by her experiences growing up a liberal Catholic in the fiercely conservative, fundamentalist Protestant "Bible Belt" of the American South. Her style was a unique form of Southern Gothic.
Her backward (often grotesquely backward) Southern characters would undergo a transformation bringing them close to her way of thinking. She didn't shy away from controversial subjects such as racism, poverty, and the dangers of fundamentalism.
O'Connor was best known as a master of the short story, foreshadowing and irony her trademarks. She published two short story collections, A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge, published posthumously in 1965 - a year after her death.
The title story of A Good Man is Hard to Find was her most famous and brilliant short story. In it, an unnamed old woman accompanies her son Bailey and his family on their vacation to Florida. She really wants to go to Georgia to see her childhood home, and pesters Bailey until she gets her way.
The old woman's directions lead the family down an abandoned dirt road, and she realizes that her childhood home is in Tennessee, not Georgia. Frustrated, she spooks her cat, which attacks Bailey and causes him to have an accident. No one is seriously injured.
Not wanting to face Bailey's wrath, the old woman fakes an injury to gain sympathy. The family waits for a passerby to help them. A car pulls up and some men get out. One is a shirtless, bespectacled man with a gun.
He seems to be a good Samaritan, but the old woman recognizes him as an escaped murderer called The Misfit. When she identifies him as The Misfit, he tells his accomplices to murder the family. The old woman begs for her own life and tries to preach to him about Jesus.
This makes him angrier, and he tells her that he doesn't want to waste his life serving someone who may not exist, nor does he want to displease a God who may exist. Frustrated by this paradox, his philosophy is "There's no pleasure but meanness."
When the old woman reaches out to The Misfit and calls him her child, he recoils and shoots her three times. After his accomplices murder the rest of the family, The Misfit cleans his glasses and thinks about the old woman.
He sums her up by saying that "she would have been a good woman... if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." When one of his accomplices mentions how much fun they had killing the family, The Misfit angrily chides him, saying "It's no real pleasure."
Another one of Flannery O'Connor's great stories was The Life You Save May Be Your Own. It told the haunting tale of an old woman so desperate to marry off her mute daughter Lucynell that she ends up paying a poor drifter to marry the girl.
Although mute and simple, Lucynell is so beautiful that when a young man sees her asleep at a diner counter, he comments that "She looks like an angel of God." Her husband abandons her, then later, while driving as a storm is breaking, he notices a road sign that says "Drive carefully - the life you save may be your own."
O'Connor's novels took her distinctive style even further, painting dark portraits of religion and faith. Wise Blood (1952) was a dark comedy about an American soldier, Hazel Motes, who returns home after serving in Korea.
He carouses with a prostitute, then embarks on a new career path - after meeting some religious hucksters, he decides to become one himself. His war experiences convinced him that the only way to escape sin is to have no soul.
So, Motes founds the "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ," casting himself in the role of prophet. He begins to believe in his own false prophecy, which leads to his tragic and surreal downfall.
The Violent Bear It Away (1960) told an even darker story of the perversion of religion and faith. The novel opens with the death of Mason Tarwater, an insanely religious old man. Tarwater had been grooming his great-nephew Francis (whom he kidnapped shortly after he was born) to be a prophet.
After Tarwater dies, Francis goes to stay with his anti-religious uncle Rayber. Despite Rayber's intentions and Francis's own determination to resist his calling, the boy can't escape the fact that he's losing his mind.
Francis ultimately accepts his "destiny" to become a prophet and goes completely mad - both of which occur after he is drugged and raped by a man who had given him a ride.
In 1951, Flannery O'Connor was diagnosed with lupus - the disease that killed her father. The doctors gave her five years to live, but she lived for fourteen years, writing two novels and over two dozen short stories.
She also wrote over a hundred book reviews which appeared in two local Catholic newspapers. She died of lupus complications in 1964 at the age of 39. Nearly sixty years after her death, she remains one of America's most celebrated writers.
Quote Of The Day
"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, and brutal."
- Flannery O'Connor
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a rare recording of Flannery O'Connor reading her classic short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 24th, 1955, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the classic play by the legendary American playwright Tennessee Williams, opened on Broadway. The play focused on a Southern family in crisis - the affluent Pollitt family.
The Pollitts hide their dark secrets under a cloak of respectability. The extended family has gathered to celebrate the 65th birthday of patriarch Big Daddy Pollitt, the richest cotton grower in the Mississippi Delta.
The family knows that Big Daddy is dying of cancer and won't live to see another birthday, but have conspired to keep him (and his wife, Big Mama) from finding out about his terminal condition.
All of Big Daddy's kin ingratiate themselves to him, hoping to receive the lion's share of his huge estate when he dies - all of them except indifferent son Brick Pollitt, who, along with his wife Maggie, (the Cat) are having serious marital problems.
Brick is an aging, injured, detached alcoholic ex-football hero who neglects his wife and spends most of his time drinking and railing against mendacity. A desperate Maggie reveals to Brick that she had an affair with his best friend Skipper, even though she knew that Skipper was secretly gay.
Suspecting that her husband might also be gay, Maggie seduced Skipper to prevent anything from happening between the two men. The affair drove Skipper to drink, despair, and suicide.
A disgusted Big Daddy has similar suspicions. He accuses Brick of drinking to escape his guilt over not saving Skipper from suicide - because he and Skipper were more than just best friends.
Furious, Brick reveals that Big Daddy is dying. Maggie, knowing that the old man never made out a will, panics and fears that he'll disinherit Brick. She escaped a miserable childhood of grinding poverty and despair when she married into the rich Pollitt family.
The prospect of being poor again terrifies her, so she falsely claims to be pregnant to win her father in-law's sympathy. Later, Maggie throws away Brick's liquor, telling him:
We can make that lie come true. And then I'll bring you liquor, and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into!
The original Broadway production was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Ben Gazzara as Brick, Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie, and legendary folksinger-actor Burl Ives as Big Daddy.
Gazzara's understudy was a young actor named Cliff Robertson, who would go on to become a star of stage, screen, and television. But when Gazzara left the play, Jack Lord replaced him.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won Tennessee Williams a Pulitzer Prize - his second. He won his first Pulitzer for his famous play, A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1958, three years after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway, a feature film adaptation was released.
Directed by Richard Brooks, it starred Paul Newman as Brick and Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie, with Burl Ives and Madeleine Sherwood reprising their Broadway roles as Big Daddy and Big Mama.
Unfortunately, due to the stifling Hollywood Production Code in effect at the time, the screenplay toned down Tennessee Williams' play considerably, removing all the sexual elements of the story.
Richard Brooks was not the studio's first choice to direct the film; it had been offered to George Cukor, but he turned it down in disgust after reading the bowdlerized screenplay.
As for Tennessee Williams' reaction, he hated the movie so much that he told people on line for the premiere not to see it, yelling "This movie will set the industry back 50 years! Go home!" Quote Of The Day
"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory."
- Tennessee Williams
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete live performance of Tennessee Williams' classic play,Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
This Day In Literary History
On March 20th, 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the classic novel by the legendary American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, was published. Like most novels of the time, it first appeared in a serialized version. It was published by The National Era, an abolitionist magazine.
The author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and her husband, Calvin Stowe, were both ferocious abolitionists and dedicated their home to the Underground Railroad - the famous secret network of safe houses for fugitive slaves traveling en route to free states.
In 1850, Congress, bowing to pressure from the South, tried to tighten the screws on the Underground Railroad by passing the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it illegal for people - even those in free states - to help fugitive slaves.
The law also compelled local law enforcement to arrest fugitive slaves and provide assistance to the vicious bounty hunters privately hired to track runaway slaves.
The free states reacted with outrage to the Fugitive Slave Act, which resulted in gross abuses. Many openly defied it. Several free states passed laws granting personal liberties, including the right to a fair trial, to fugitive slaves.
Wisconsin's state Supreme Court declared the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional. The law failed to disrupt the Underground Railroad; by the time it was passed, the network had become far more efficient. Afterward, it grew as the unjust law inspired scores of moderate abolitionists to become passionate activists.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was written as a response to the Fugitive Slave Act - to educate people about the horrors of slavery. The novel told the unforgettable story of a kind and noble slave whose faith and spirit cannot be broken by the evils of slavery.
The novel opens on a Kentucky farm owned by Arthur and Emily Shelby, who like to think that they're kind to their slaves. However, when he needs money, Arthur has no problem selling two of his slaves without regard to where they might end up.
The slaves are Uncle Tom, a wise and compassionate middle-aged man, and Harry, the son of Emily's maid, Eliza. The Shelbys' son George, who looked upon Uncle Tom as a friend and mentor, hates to see him go.
Uncle Tom and Harry are sold to a slave trader and shipped by riverboat down the Mississippi. While on the boat, Uncle Tom strikes up a friendship with Eva, a little white girl. When she falls into the river, he saves her life.
Her grateful father, Augustine St. Clare, buys Uncle Tom from the slave trader and takes him to his home in New Orleans. There, the friendship between Uncle Tom and Eva deepens. Sadly, Eva becomes severely ill and dies - but not before sharing her vision of heaven.
Moved by how much Uncle Tom meant to Eva, her father vows to help him become a free man. His racist cousin Ophelia is moved to reject her prejudice against blacks. Unfortunately, Augustine St. Clare is killed at a tavern, and his wife reneges on his promise to help Uncle Tom.
She sells him at auction to Simon Legree, who owns a plantation in Louisiana. Legree is an evil, perverse, sadistic racist who tortures his male slaves and sexually abuses the women. When Uncle Tom refuses to follow an order to whip another slave, Legree beats him savagely.
The beating fails to break Uncle Tom's spirit or his faith in God. The sight of Uncle Tom reading his bible and comforting other slaves makes Legree's blood boil. He determines to break Uncle Tom and nearly succeeds, as the daily horrors of life on the plantation erode the slave's faith and hope.
Just when it seems that Uncle Tom will succumb to hopelessness, he has two visions - one of little Eva and one of Jesus himself. Moved by these visions, Uncle Tom vows to remain a faithful Christian until the day he dies.
He encourages two fellow slaves, Cassy and Emmeline, to run away. When Simon Legree demands that Uncle Tom reveal their whereabouts, he refuses. A furious Legree orders his overseers to beat Uncle Tom to death.
As he lay dying, Uncle Tom forgives the overseers, which inspires them to repent. George Shelby arrives with money to buy Uncle Tom's freedom, but sadly, it's too late. Uncle Tom dies before he can become a free man.
George returns to his parents' farm in Kentucky and frees their slaves, telling them to always remember Uncle Tom's sacrifice and unshakable faith. That's actually just a bare outline of this classic epic novel.
The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin caused a national uproar. In the North, it was regarded as the bible of abolitionism and inspired many closet abolitionists to come out and join in the fight against slavery.
In the South, the book was regarded as an outrage. It was called utterly false and slanderous - a criminal defamation of the South. Many Southern writers who supported slavery wrote literature dedicated to debunking Harriet Beecher Stowe's expose of the horrors of slavery.
Their writings, called "anti-Tom" literature, portrayed white Southerners as benevolent supervisors of blacks - a helpless, child-like people unable to survive without the direct supervision of their white masters.
To defend herself against the South's accusations of slander and defamation, Stowe wrote and published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), a nonfiction book documenting the horrors of slavery that she both witnessed herself and researched, which inspired her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The book included surprisingly graphic descriptions of the sexual abuse of female slaves, who, in addition to being molested or raped by their white masters and overseers, were also prostituted and forced to "mate" with male slaves to produce offspring that would fetch a good price on the auction block.
When Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared in book form in 1852, it was published in an initial press run of 5,000 copies. That year, it sold 300,000 copies. Its London edition sold 200,000 copies throughout the United Kingdom. It became a hit throughout Europe as well.
Ironically, by the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, the book was out of print in the United States, as Stowe's original publisher had gone out of business. She found another publisher, and when the book was republished in 1862, the demand for copies soared.
That same year, Harriet Beecher Stowe was invited to Washington D.C. to meet with President Abraham Lincoln, who supposedly said to her, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
The novel would be adapted many times for the stage, screen, radio, and television. In the 20th century, Uncle Tom's Cabin courted a new controversy that continues to this day. African-American activists have accused the abolitionist novel of being racist itself, with its use of racial stereotypes and epithets.
These accusations, like the accusations of racism leveled against Mark Twain's classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), come from a failure to place the novel in its proper historical context and consider its overall message.
Quote Of The Day
"I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation."
- Harriet Beecher Stowe on her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
This Day In Literary History
On March 19th, 1933, the famous American writer Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey. His parents were of Ukrainian-Jewish descent. Roth graduated from Newark's Weequahic High School in 1950. He attended Bucknell University and earned a degree in English.
For his graduate studies, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he earned a Master's degree in English and worked briefly as an instructor in the university's creative writing program.
Roth continued his teaching career, teaching creative writing at the University of Iowa and Princeton University. Later, he would teach comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania until he retired in 1991.
While at the University of Chicago, Roth met legendary novelist Saul Bellow and Margaret Martinson, who would become his first wife. Though they separated in 1963 and she was killed in a car accident five years later, she would have a huge impact on his writings and inspire female characters in several of his novels.
Philip Roth began his writing career by publishing short stories and reviews in various magazines. He reviewed movies for The New Republic. In 1959, his first book was published, and it established him as a major talent.
Goodbye, Columbus contained the title novella and five short stories, all of which were steeped deep in Judaism - specifically, Jewish American culture and customs.
The title novella told the story of Neil Klugman, an intelligent college graduate who has remained a poor, working class Jew with a low-paying job. He works at a library and lives with his aunt and uncle.
Neil falls in love with Brenda Patimkin, a student at Radcliffe who comes from a wealthy Jewish family. What begins as a simple summer romance evolves into a complex story of existential angst, as class differences begin to derail Neil and Brenda's relationship.
Goodbye, Columbus won Roth the National Book Award and was adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1969, starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw as Neil and Brenda. Though celebrated by critics and most readers, some Jewish groups objected to Roth's less than flattering portrayal of certain Jewish characters.
In the short story Defender of the Faith, a Jewish American Army sergeant resists when three lazy draftees try to manipulate him into granting them special favors because they are fellow Jews.
In 1962, Philip Roth and the acclaimed black novelist Ralph Ellison appeared on a panel to discuss minority representation in literature. The questions directed at Roth soon turned into denunciations, and he was accused of being a self-loathing Jew.
The label dogged him for most of his career, but Roth would strike back at his Jewish critics with his classic 1969 novel, Portnoy's Complaint, a scathing, raunchy black comedy. It's an experimental novel that takes the form of one long monologue.
The neurotic, middle-aged Alexander Portnoy rants to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel, in a monologue loaded with neuroses, complexes, and of course, sexual hang-ups. He rages at his inability to enjoy sex.
Portnoy is a self-loathing Jew who rages at the injustice of having to grow up Jewish in a gentile dominated country full of anti-Semitism. He rages at his overbearing mother, which burdens him with the heavy chains of guilt. But it's sex that frustrates him most of all.
As a teenager, Portnoy masturbated excessively, not out of lust, but as a form of narcissism. Both attracted to and repelled by gentile women, he uses and abuses them and gives them demeaning nicknames such as "the Pumpkin" and "the Monkey."
Portnoy's absurdly funny sexual exploits are described graphically - so graphically that the novel proved to be quite a shocker for readers in 1969. The book was banned in Australia. When publisher Penguin Books defied the ban and secretly printed copies of the book, the authorities tried to prosecute them and failed.
Philip Roth would write many more great novels. He was most famous for his series of Zuckerman novels, which are narrated by Roth's alter ego, Jewish writer Nathan Zuckerman. The first Zuckerman book was The Ghost Writer, published in 1979.
His 1997 Zuckerman novel, American Pastoral, won him the Pulitzer Prize. In it, Zuckerman attends his 45th high school reunion and runs into his old friend, Jerry Levov, who tells him the tragic life story of his older brother, Seymour "Swede" Levov, who recently died.
Most of the story deals with the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 70s, as Swede's teenage daughter Merry protests the horrors of the Vietnam War by becoming a domestic terrorist and bombing a post office. Years later, she remains in hiding.
American Pastoral was adapted as a feature film in 2016, directed by Ewan McGregor, who also starred in it with Jennifer Connelly and Dakota Fanning.
Other Roth novels of note include The Human Stain (2000), where Nathan Zuckerman tells the story of his new neighbor Coleman Silk, a 71-year-old college professor who falls victim to an unjust accusation.
Silk is accused of racism by two black students, which leads to his resignation. It's later revealed that Silk is actually a light-skinned black man who, for most of his life, has been passing himself off as a white Jew to escape racist persecution.
The Human Stain was adapted as a film in 2003. Directed by Robert Benton, it starred Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk and Gary Sinise as Nathan Zuckerman.
The Plot Against America (2004) is a fascinating piece of "what if" historical fiction. In it, conservative aviation hero Charles Lindbergh (in real life an anti-Semite and Hitler supporter) defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election and becomes President of the United States.
As Lindbergh establishes a cordial relationship with Hitler and keeps the U.S. out of the war, American Jews - including Roth's family - worry what will become of them.
One of Lindbergh's top cronies is car magnate Henry Ford, who in real life was a virulent anti-Semite and the author of a racist nonfiction book called The International Jew - the World's Foremost Problem (1920).
The Plot Against America was adapted as an HBO miniseries in 2020. Created and written by David Simon and Ed Burns, it starred Winona Ryder, Morgan Spector, and John Turturro.
In addition to his novels and short stories, Roth wrote nonfiction works, including an autobiography. His final novel, Nemesis, was released in October of 2010. Set in 1944, it told the story of a Jewish community in Newark, New Jersey struggling to cope with a polio epidemic.
Philip Roth died in May of 2018 at the age of 85.
Quote Of The Day
"Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts."
- Philip Roth
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a full length BBC documentary on Philip Roth. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 18th, 1932, the legendary American writer John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. As a young boy, he would watch his mother - an aspiring writer - as she wrote short stories and tried to get them published:
One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk.... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in – and come back in.
Updike served as class president and graduated high school as valedictorian. He won a full scholarship to Harvard, where he frequently contributed articles and drawings to the Harvard Lampoon, later serving as its president until he graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with an English degree.
Instead of writing, he decided to become a graphic artist and enrolled at The Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford. His wife, Mary Pennington, whom he married a year earlier, went to England with him.
When they returned to the U.S., Updike planned to become a cartoonist, and was soon a frequent contributor of both cartoons and short stories to The New Yorker. His first published books were The Carpentered Hen (1958), a poetry collection, and The Same Door (1959), a collection of short stories.
In 1960, Updike and his family moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he would write his first novel, the first in a highly acclaimed series. It was called Rabbit, Run (1960). It told the story of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a 26-year-old kitchen gadget salesman.
Rabbit is desperate to escape the confines of an unhappy marriage and an unfulfilling middle class life. A former high school basketball player, he impulsively decides to visit Marty Tothero, his old coach.
He has dinner with Tothero and two girls, one of which is Ruth Leonard, a part-time prostitute with whom he has an affair. Rabbit abandons Ruth when his pregnant wife goes into labor. After his baby daughter is born, he reconciles with his wife, but it doesn't last, and he returns to Ruth.
His alcoholic wife starts drinking again, and accidentally drowns the baby. Rabbit tries to reconcile with her once more, but at the funeral of their daughter, his inner turmoil explodes. Proclaiming his innocence in the baby's death, Rabbit runs away and returns to Ruth.
When she tells him that she's pregnant with his child, he's relieved that she decided not to have an abortion, but he won't divorce his wife. He seemingly abandons Ruth yet again, but his fate is unclear as the novel ends.
Updike followed it with three sequels: Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990). Rabbit is Rich won him the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Rabbit at Rest won Updike another Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. The 500+ page epic novel, which ends the series with the main character's death, is considered one of his masterworks.
The two award winning sequels made him one of only three writers to win two Pulitzer Prizes. The other writers were William Faulkner and Booth Tarkington.
John Updike would write other great series of novels including the Bech series, the Scarlet Letter Triology, and the memorable Eastwick books - The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and TheWidows of Eastwick (2008).
He also wrote over a dozen solo novels, over a dozen short story collections, poetry collections, and nonfiction works. In 2006, he wrote Terrorist, a timely novel about the evils of religious extremism.
It told the story of Amad Ashmawy Mulloy, an American born devout Muslim teenager who lives in New Jersey with his liberal Irish-Catholic mother, whom he both loves and hates.
He struggles to balance his strict religious practice with the modern Western world in which he lives. Amad's only real friend is Jack Levy, his high school guidance counselor - a Jewish man who rejected his own religion.
When Amad develops sexual feelings for a girl, he represses his natural impulses as per the requirements of his Islamic faith. His frustrations lead him down a path of religious extremism.
Fearing that his education in Western schools will strengthen his growing doubt about his religion, he decides to leave school and become a truck driver. His truck driving skills and religious extremism lead to his recruitment by a terrorist cell.
Amad becomes part of their plot to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in New York. On the day of the attack, his accomplices fail to show up at their planned meeting place, so he decides to carry out the suicide mission alone.
Driving a bomb-laden truck, Amad runs into Jack Levy, who begs him not to go ahead with the attack and warns him that the whole plot was a government sting.
Amad's friend and co-conspirator Charlie Chehab was an undercover CIA agent and the other terrorists beheaded him when his cover was blown. Jack also admits to having an affair with Amad's mother.
As he approaches the location of the bombing with Jack in tow, Amad finally reconsiders his extremist beliefs and decides that God doesn't want him to kill anyone. He and Jack return home to New Jersey.
John Updike is rightfully considered to be one of the greatest writers of his generation. He won over two dozen awards, including his two Pulitzer Prizes. He died of lung cancer in January 2009 at the age of 76.
Quote Of The Day
"Writing... is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable... writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy."
- John Updike
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 90-minute interview with John Updike on CSPAN-2's Book TV. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 17th, 1948, the legendary American science fiction writer William Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina. Though he spent most of his childhood in Wytheville, Virginia - his parents' hometown - his family moved frequently due to his father's position as a manager for a large construction company.
While his family lived in Norfolk, Virginia, Gibson attended Pines Elementary School, where his teachers never encouraged him to read, much to the chagrin of his parents. Around this time, his father died, choking to death in a restaurant while on a business trip.
The family returned to Wytheville, which was a small Appalachian town, a place that Gibson described as "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent, but was deeply distrusted." He hated it.
Living in such a disturbing and surreal atmosphere led William Gibson to become a shy, withdrawn adolescent who kept to himself. When he was twelve, he "wanted nothing more than to become a science fiction writer."
A year later, without his mother's knowledge or permission, he bought an anthology featuring works by the Beat generation's greatest writers - William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs would become Gibson's favorite writer and a major influence on his work.
As a teenager, Gibson rejected his religion and read voraciously, with the works of Burroughs and Henry Miller being his favorites. At school, his grades were poor, so his mother threatened to send him to boarding school.
To her surprise, he was enthusiastic about going to boarding school, so she sent him to the Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson. Gibson hated the structure of the school, but he was glad to escape from Wytheville and his "chronically anxious and depressive" mother.
He was also glad that the school forced him to come out of his shell and develop social skills. His academic performance was strangely uneven. When he took the SAT (Standard Achievement Test) exams, his teachers were baffled by his scores. In math, he scored near zero, but his score on the written test was near perfect.
When Gibson was eighteen, his mother died. He left school without graduating and drifted through the United States and Europe, choosing a mostly solitary life and becoming part of the late 1960s counterculture.
In 1967, he was called to appear at a draft hearing, and honestly told the interviewers that his goal in life was to indulge in every mind-altering substance known to man. He was never drafted, but moved to Canada anyway.
He would later quip that he avoided the draft not out of conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, but to remain free to "sleep with hippie chicks" and smoke hashish.
After arriving in Canada, Gibson met a girl in Vancouver and spent the rest of the 1960s traveling with her, as he couldn't stand living among the American expatriate community, which was was rife with depression, suicide, and hardcore drug abuse.
He financed most of his travels with the $500 he was paid for appearing in a CBC newsreel story about the hippie subculture in Yorkville, Toronto. During their travels, Gibson and and his girlfriend spent time in countries such as Greece and Turkey.
In 1972, Gibson and his girlfriend returned to Canada. They settled in Vancouver and married. Gibson earned most of his living by scouring thrift stores for rare items priced well below their value, which he would resell to collectors at a huge profit.
When he realized that instead of working, he could receive generous financial aid from the government by going to college, he enrolled at the University of British Columbia, (UBC) from which he graduated in 1977 with a degree in English.
Gibson considered entering a Master's degree program with the topic of his thesis being hard science fiction novels as a form of fascist literature, but he changed his mind and worked at various jobs including teaching assistant in a film history course at UBC.
He also indulged in his passion for punk rock. In 1980, he attended a science fiction convention in Vancouver, which turned him off the genre, even though he had already written several early works of science fiction.
Around this time, Gibson met John Shirley, who would become his lifelong friend. Shirley was a punk rock musician turned sci-fi / horror writer. He encouraged Gibson to submit his stories for publication and introduced him to fellow sci-fi writers Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner.
When they read Gibson's stories, they proclaimed them to be "breakthrough material." So, Gibson began submitting his work, and soon, his short stories were appearing regularly in magazines such as Omni and Universe 11.
His stories were indeed breakthrough material, far outside the mainstream of science fiction. They were in the cyberpunk tradition, akin to the legendary early 1960s "cut-up" novels of his idol, William S. Burroughs.
Gibson's stories dealt with concepts like cyberspace - a term he coined which refers to a computer-simulated reality - and were written in the style of the pulp novels and noir films of the 1940s and 50s.
In 1984, Gibson's first novel was published. Neuromancer wasn't a commercial success, but word of mouth spread quickly and made the novel an overnight underground hit - a cult classic that sold over 6,500,000 copies worldwide.
It became the first novel to win all three major science fiction awards - the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award.
Neuromancer was the first novel in Gibson's classic Sprawl trilogy. It eerily predicts the development of the Internet and its World Wide Web. Set in a futuristic, dystopic Chiba, Japan, the novel tells the story of Henry Dorsett Case, a small time hustler who was once a talented computer hacker.
Then his employer caught him stealing, and as punishment, damaged his central nervous system with a mycotoxin, leaving him unable to access the global computer network with his brain-computer interface. Now, Case is an unemployable, suicidal drug addict.
While searching for a cure for his damaged nervous system in Chiba's "black clinics," Case is saved by Molly Millions, a "street samurai" and mercenary who works for Armitage, a shadowy ex-Green Beret officer.
Armitage offers to cure Case in exchange for his services as a hacker. Armitage fixes Case's nervous system but installs in his body sacs of mycotoxin that will burst if he fails to complete his work in time.
So, Case and Molly work together and form a close relationship. They don't know what Armitage really has planned, but they investigate and eventually discover the truth - he plans to merge two AI (Artificial Intelligence) entities, Wintermute and Neuromancer, into one all-powerful, godlike being.
William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy would include the novels Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). The trilogy brought the author out of obscurity and made his name as one of the all time great science fiction writers.
He would write more great novels, including the Bridge trilogy, Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999) as well as other novels and short stories.
In 1993, he wrote his first major nonfiction work, an article for Wired magazine called Disneyland with the Death Penalty, a stinging critique of life in modern Singapore.
Gibson describes Singapore as having a mega-corporation like government fixated on constraint and conformity, with a marked lack of creativity and humor. Life in Singapore is a "relentlessly G-rated experience."
It's a conservative Republican wet dream of meticulously clean streets, practically nonexistent crime, (thanks to a harsh capital punishment system where one can be executed for offenses such as drug smuggling) and a culture of mindless, vapid materialism where shopping becomes a nearly religious experience.
And yet, there are also no slums in Singapore, and instead of a visible sex trade, there are government sanctioned "health centers" which are really massage parlors where one can get far more than a massage.
The government enforces morality with strict censorship of movies, music, and the media. It places great value on marriage and procreation, and both organizes and enforces mandatory dating policies.
In his 1993 essay, Gibson predicted the explosion of online pornography and cast doubt on the resilience of Singapore's controlled, conservative society in the face of the mass exposure of its citizenry to the coming "wilds of X-rated cyberspace."
He speculated that "Singapore's destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable weirdness." Creative Review hailed Gibson's essay as "fabulously damning."
Singapore reacted to it with outrage, banning the sale of Wired magazine there. "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" became a famous catch phrase used to describe Singapore - especially by Singaporeans opposed to their country's authoritarian conservative government.
Two of Gibson's short stories were adapted as feature films. Johnny Mnemonic (1995), featuring a screenplay by William Gibson, starred Keanu Reeves in the title role. New Rose Hotel (1998), directed by Abel Ferrara, starred Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe.
Gibson also wrote for television. He penned the teleplays for two classic episodes of The X-Files (1993-2002) - Kill Switch and First Person Shooter.
William Gibson's latest novel, Agency, was published in January of 2020.
Quote of the Day
"To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing."
- William Gibson
Vanguard Video
Today's video features William Gibson discussing his most recent novel, Agency, at the Politics and Prose bookstore and coffeehouse. Enjoy!
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