This Day In Literary History
On February 13th, 1991, the famous auction house Sotheby's announced that the original draft of Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) had been discovered. Specifically, the first half of Twain's original draft manuscript, thought long lost.
The story of this major discovery began with a 62-year-old librarian from Los Angeles. Her aunt, who had lived in upstate New York, recently passed away. Six trunks full of her papers were sent to her niece. When the librarian finally got around to sorting through these papers, she made an incredible find.
Her grandfather, James Gluck, a lawyer and rare book collector, had acted as Twain's literary agent. Twain had sent Gluck the second half of his completed first draft of Huckleberry Finn to sell to the Buffalo and Erie Library in Buffalo, New York. He had once lived in Buffalo.
Twain had lost the first half of his manuscript, which is why Gluck only received the second half. For many years, it was believed that the first half had been lost forever. Then a librarian in Los Angeles sorted through trunks filled with her late aunt's papers.
There, in one of the trunks, she found the lost first half of Twain's original draft of Huckleberry Finn. Stunned, she asked Sotheby's to authenticate the manuscript. They had it shipped by armored car and plane to New York City, and found that it was indeed Mark Twain's lost original first half of Huckleberry Finn.
Since the manuscript contained the author's handwritten corrections and notes, there could be only one explanation for its existence: Twain had found the lost first half of his manuscript and sent it on to James Gluck in Buffalo. By then, he was already working on his second draft and gave no further thought to the original.
Finally put together as a complete whole, the original version of Huckleberry Finn is an amazing discovery. In addition to extended original scenes with more detail, it also included additional scenes that did not appear in the final version of the novel.
One of these additional scenes was a 15-page passage where, on a stormy night, Jim the runaway slave tells Huck Finn stories of his encounters with ghosts and corpses. Deemed too dark and macabre for a novel geared toward children, this scene had to be cut.
After a legal battle between Gluck's heirs, the Buffalo and Erie Library, and the University of Berkeley's Mark Twain Papers Project over the rights to the manuscript, an amicable settlement was reached between the parties.
The Buffalo and Erie Library retained the physical manuscript papers and all three parties would share equally in the royalties when the manuscript was published. Many publishing houses were chomping at the bit for the opportunity to publish it.
In 1995, Random House won the the bidding war for the right to publish the original version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Quote Of The Day
"Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
- Mark Twain
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a segment from the TV series 60 Minutes on a recent censorship controversy surrounding Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
This Day In Literary History
On February 12th, 1938, the famous American writer Judy Blume was born. She was born Judith Sussman in Elizabeth, New Jersey. As a little girl, she recalled, "I spent most of my childhood making up stories inside of my head."
In 1961, she graduated New York University with a Bachelor's degree in education. Two years earlier, she married her first husband, John Blume, with whom she had two sons. They divorced in 1976; though Judy retained John's surname, she described their marriage as "suffocating."
Not long after her divorce in 1976, Blume married physicist Thomas Kitchens. The marriage ended two years later. She described it as "A disaster, a total disaster. After a couple years, I got out. I cried every day. Anyone who thinks my life is cupcakes is all wrong."
It wouldn't be until 1987 that Judy found her soul mate in George Cooper, a law professor turned nonfiction writer, and married him.
Judy Blume had been working as a teacher in 1969 when her first book was published, a funny picture book called The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo. Her children were in preschool at the time.
The following year, Blume established h
erself as one of the best young adult novelists of her time with two poignant and provocative novels, Iggie's House and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
Iggie's House told the story of Winnie Barringer, a young tomboy who is devastated when her best friend Iggie moves away. The Garbers, an African-American family, move into Iggie's old house and Winnie makes friends with the kids - Glenn, Herbie, and Tina.
Winnie soon learns an unforgettable lesson in the evils of racism when another neighbor, Mrs. Landon, a virulent bigot, determines to drive the Garbers out of the neighborhood. Winnie also observes the effects of Mrs. Landon's racism on her daughter, Clarice.
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is a memorable coming of age story centered on 11-year-old Margaret Simon. Margaret is the child of an interfaith marriage - her father is Jewish, her mother Christian.
Margaret's parents have no use for religion, so she wasn't raised in any faith. This irks her because her friends all have a religious affiliation and practice their faiths. Her Jewish grandmother is determined to see her raised as Jewish, which annoys both her parents.
Margaret's mother reveals that she's been estranged from her Christian parents for over a decade because they were fiercely opposed to her marrying a Jewish man. Meanwhile, Margaret strikes up a friendship with Nancy, the girl next door, and meets her friends Gretchen and Janie. They form a club called the Pre-Teen Sensations.
Together, they cope with the onset of puberty, with Margaret experiencing anxieties over feelings for boys, having to wear a bra, and getting her first period. Then, Margaret's mother makes the mistake of writing to her estranged parents.
Margaret's Christian grandparents pay an unexpected visit, revealing themselves to be virulent anti-Semites and demanding that Margaret be raised a Christian. Margaret's furious Jewish grandmother gets into a fight with them, and Margaret, who can't stand it anymore, explodes at all of them.
She tells them that she wants nothing to do with their god or their religions, and if she ever changes her mind, she'll decide what she believes in. Her parents applaud her. The novel ends with Margaret finally getting her period and happy that she's become a woman.
This fantastic and controversial novel is often attacked by conservatives for its sexual frankness and attitude toward religion and always appears on the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged books.
In 2023, it was adapted as a highly acclaimed feature film co-produced by Judy Blume and with excellent performances by newcomer Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret and Kathy Bates as her Jewish grandmother.
Freckle Juice (1971) is another funny children's picture book about a young boy named Andrew who wants freckles like his friend Nicky has. Sharon, a girl in Andrew's class, sells him a recipe for "Freckle Juice" for fifty cents.
Andrew makes a batch of Freckle Juice - which contains disgusting ingredients - and drinks it, but no freckles appear. He's been swindled. Meanwhile, Nicky, who hates his freckles, buys a recipe from Sharon that's guaranteed to remove them!
Other memorable Judy Blume young adult novels include It's Not the End of the World and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, both published in 1972. In It's Not the End of the World, sixth grader Karen finds her life suddenly turned upside down.
Karen is overjoyed when her teacher turns out to be Mrs. Singer, the very nice teacher she desperately wanted. Unfortunately, Mrs. Singer, who got married over the summer, now acts like a total witch.
Meanwhile, Karen's parents' marriage disintegrates. They fight constantly and seem to really hate each other. When Karen's father announces his plans to file for divorce, her mother is finally happy - until Karen's angry teenage brother Jeff blows up at Mom and runs away from home.
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is the first in a series of memorable novels featuring the Hatcher family. Peter Hatcher is a smart yet naive nine-year-old boy in the fourth grade. His 2-year-old little brother Farley, known by his nickname Fudge, is a holy terror.
The irrepressible Fudge wreaks all sorts of havoc around the house and out in public, and always gets away with it - while Peter is expected to be his brother's well behaved keeper. When Fudge gets into trouble, Peter gets the blame. Angry and resentful, he still loves his brother.
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing would be followed by Superfudge (1980), Fudge-a-Mania (1990), and Double Fudge (2002). A spinoff of the Fudge series, Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, was published in 1972.
This memorable novel featured Peter Hatcher's annoying classmate and sort-of friend Sheila Tubman in her own coming of age story. Though she has an abrasive, self-confident personality, Sheila suffers from several crippling phobias - fears of spiders, dogs, and swimming - which are the source of her secret shame.
When Sheila's family stays at a big house in Tarrytown, New York for the summer, she goes to camp and strikes up a friendship with Merle "Mouse" Ellis, an easygoing, tomboyish girl her age whose genuine courage inspires Sheila to conquer her fears.
In addition to her young adult novels, Judy Blume has also written novels for teenage and adult readers, which remain controversial to this day. Her novels for teenagers, beginning with Deenie (1973), dealt honestly with teen sexuality, including masturbation.
For this reason, disgruntled individuals and conservative groups have often tried to ban Blume's teen novels from high school library shelves. Her first novel geared toward adult readers, Wifey (1978), also drew criticism.
Wifey was set in the time of its publication - the 1970s. The main character, Sandy Pressman, is a bored New Jersey housewife who decides to bring life to her stagnant existence by having a passionate affair with her old high school boyfriend.
This was a time of sexual revolution - when conservative social mores gave way to liberalism and couples began experimenting with swinging and open marriages. Sandy soon discovers evidence that her husband is having an affair of his own...
Blume was sharply criticized for publishing Wifey under her own name instead of using a pseudonym. Even though the book was subtitled "An Adult Novel by Judy Blume," the author's young readers - especially her adolescent readers - took an interest in it.
Depsite the controversy, Wifey and Blume's other adult oriented novels Smart Women (1983) and Summer Sisters (1998) all became critical and commercial successes. To date, her works have won over 90 awards.
Her most recent book, In The Unlikely Event, was published in June of 2015. Set in the early 1950s, it tells the story of Miri Ammerman, a fifteen year old girl struggling to deal with both adolescence and the three plane crashes that take place in her New Jersey hometown within a three month period.
The novel was based on actual events in Judy Blume's life. Three plane crashes took place in her hometown, Elizabeth, New Jersey, from late 1951 through early 1952, claiming a total of 118 lives. Her father, a dentist, was called on to help identify the victims.
Quote Of The Day
"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear."
- Judy Blume
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Judy Blume discussing her most recent novel, In The Unlikely Event, live at the Politics & Prose bookstore and coffeehouse. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On February 11th, 1778, the legendary French writer and philosopher Voltaire made a triumphant return to Paris after a 28-year exile.
Voltaire (the pseudonym of Francois-Marie Arouet) was born to a middle class family. As a young man, he entered law school, but quit to become a writer. He began his literary career as a playwright.
As a young man, while working as secretary to the French ambassador to the Netherlands, he fell in love with a Protestant girl, but his devout Catholic father prevented him from marrying her, kindling within him a seething lifelong hatred of the Church and religion in general.
In addition to his plays, he wrote poetry and prose; these works were of a polemic nature, and he possessed a rapacious wit. He was condemned by the establishment as a dangerous radical. In 1717, he published his classic epic poem La Henriade, a satirical attack on the French monarchy and the Church.
The poem resulted in Voltaire's arrest. He was jailed in the Bastille for almost a year. Imprisonment failed to temper his poison pen, and by 1726, he found himself in trouble again.
Outraged by Voltaire's retort to his insult, Chevalier de Rohan, a young aristocrat, obtained a royal lettre de cachet from King Louis XV - a warrant for Voltaire's arrest and imprisonment without trial.
To avoid serving more time at the Bastille, Voltaire fled to England. He returned to Paris almost three years later. He continued to write and publish polemical essays, poetry, and prose.
His essay collection Philosophical Letters on the English praised the constitutional monarchy of England for its respect for human rights and condemned the French monarchy for its violations of them.
Its publication marked the beginning of an escalating outrage over Voltaire's writings. He would flee arrest again, then return. Eventually, King Louis XV banned him entirely from France.
He moved first to Berlin, then settled in Switzerland, where he wrote his classic comic novel Candide and lived for 28 years.
When Voltaire finally returned to Paris in February of 1778, he was met with a hero's welcome. Around three hundred people came to visit him. He died three months later at the age of 83.
Quote Of The Day
"An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination."
- Voltaire
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of The Philosophy of Voltaire, an essay by the famous writer, philosopher, and historian Will Durant. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On February 10th, 1890, the legendary Russian writer Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow, Russia. He was born into a wealthy Russian-Jewish family. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was a famous artist; his mother, Rosa Kaufman, was a concert pianist. The Pasternaks were a liberal, intellectual family.
Boris Pasternak originally aspired to become a composer. He entered the Moscow Conservatory, but left abruptly in 1910, traveling to Germany and enrolling at the University of Marburg, where he studied philosophy.
After graduating, instead of a career in philosophy, he decided to become a writer. He returned to Moscow in 1914. Later that year, his first book, a poetry collection, was published.
During World War I, Pasternak taught school and worked at a chemical factory in Vsevolodovo-Vilve near Perm. He spent the summer of 1917 living in the steppe country near Seratov, where he fell in love for the first time.
Filled with a new passion, he began writing what would become his seminal poetry collection, My Sister Life. Its innovative style would revolutionize Russian poetry, influencing the works of young poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetayeva.
After the Russian Revolution in October of 1917, Pasternak decided to remain in Russia, fascinated with the new ideas and possibilities that the Revolution brought to life. Filled with hope for the future, he kept writing. My Sister Life was published in 1921.
Later that year, he published Rupture, another seminal and influential poetry collection. He soon found that his innovative, modernist style of poetry was at odds with the Communist Party's doctrine of Socialist Realism.
Pasternak changed his style to make it more acceptable to the Soviet public. His next poetry collection, The Second Birth, was published in 1932. Though the poems proved to be just as brilliant as his earlier works, his new style alienated his refined readers abroad.
Throughout the decade, he would become disenchanted with Soviet communism and the totalitarian rule of Stalin. Ironically, during the purges, Stalin himself supposedly crossed Pasternak's name off an arrest list, telling his secret police, "Don't touch this cloud dweller."
A few years before the start of World War II, Boris Pasternak and his wife settled in Peredelkino, a village several miles away from Moscow that served as a writers' colony.
In 1943, he published a collection of patriotic verse titled Early Trains, which prompted his fellow writer Vladimir Nabokov to describe him as a "weeping Bolshevik" and "Emily Dickinson in trousers."
After the war ended, Pasternak resumed work on a novel that he had started writing some 30 years earlier. The 600-page epic semi-autobiographical novel would prove to be an all-time classic work of literature that made its author world famous.
Dr. Zhivago, completed in 1956, reflected Pasternak's disenchantment with Soviet communism and the totalitarian rule of Stalin. It takes place during three major events in Russian history: World War I, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War of 1917-23.
The sensitive Dr. Yuri Zhivago is a physician, poet, and idealist - a borderline mystic who finds himself living in a senseless world that is both modern and barbaric.
Dr. Zhivago embarks on a dreamlike, surreal journey through Russia. World War I is raging, and he treats wounded men at the front. He soon meets a woman, Larissa "Lara" Guishar, who becomes his great love.
Lara is engaged to Pavel "Pasha" Antipov, an idealistic young student, but she has an affair with Viktor Komarovsky, a powerful lawyer who both attracts and repels her.
The first time Zhivago meets Lara, it's a brief encounter where he assists his mentor in treating Lara's mother, who attempted suicide after learning of her affair with Komarovsky. He sees Lara again at a Christmas party where she attempts to shoot Komarovsky.
When Zhivago is later reunited with Lara at the front, where she is serving as a nurse, they fall in love while working together at a makeshift field hospital. They don't consummate their love until after the war, when they meet again in the town of Yuriatin.
Meanwhile, Lara's fiance Pasha is presumed killed in action, but he's actually a prisoner of war. He escapes from the Nazis and joins the Bolsheviks, becoming a ferocious Red Army general known for his executions of prisoners.
Pasha is nicknamed Strelnikov, which means "the shooter." He's really not a Bolshevik, he just likes to shoot prisoners and hopes that the war will end soon so he can return home to Lara.
After falling from grace and losing his position in the Red Army, Pasha returns home, hoping to find Lara waiting for him. By this time, however, she has taken off with Komarovsky. Pasha has a long talk with Dr. Zhivago, then commits suicide. The loss of Lara causes Zhivago's life to go downhill as well.
Zhivago has two children with another woman, but is haunted by his memories of Lara. He tries to write, but fails to complete any of his writing projects. He becomes absent-minded, erratic, and physically ill. Lara finally returns to Russia - on the day of Zhivago's funeral.
Dr. Zhivago raised the ire of Soviet authorities with its negative depictions of Soviet communism and the Red Army. As a result, it could not be published in the Soviet Union. So, Pasternak's friend smuggled the manuscript out of the country. It was first published in Italy in 1957.
The novel became an overnight sensation and was quickly translated into various languages and published throughout the non-communist world. From 1958 to 1959, the American edition of Dr. Zhivago spent 26 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.
Soviet literary critics, who never read his novel, called for Pasternak to be expelled from the Soviet Union, demanding that the authorities "kick the pig out of our kitchen-garden."
A Russian edition of Dr. Zhivago was published secretly in 1958 and circulated underground. The costs of printing and distribution were paid for in part by the American CIA.
That same year, despite pressure from Soviet authorities, the Nobel committee awarded Pasternak a Nobel Prize in Literature for his novel. He thanked them, but refused to accept the award, for fear of losing his Soviet citizenship and being exiled. Over 30 years later, Pasternak's son Yevgeny accepted the award on his father's behalf.
In 1965, a feature film adaptation of Dr. Zhivago was released. The big-budget Hollywood epic starred Omar Sharif in the title role and Julie Christie as Lara.
Featuring an all-star supporting cast and masterfully directed by David Lean, the film became a huge hit with critics and audiences, despite the fact that Robert Bolt's screenplay condensed the novel and sanitized it as per Production Code requirements.
The movie grossed more than ten times its huge budget of $11 million, or about $112 million in today's money. The score, composed by Maurice Jarre, remains one of the most popular and best selling film soundtracks, with Lara's Theme being the best loved piece.
Today, Dr. Zhivago is rightfully considered an all-time classic film. Sadly, Boris Pasternak never lived to see it. He died of lung cancer in 1960 at the age of 70.
In 2006, another adaptation of Dr. Zhivago premiered on Russian TV. It is considered more faithful to Pasternak's novel than the Hollywood movie.
Quote Of The Day
"Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades."
- Boris Pasternak
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 60-minute BBC documentary on Boris Pasternak's classic novel, Dr. Zhivago. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On February 6th, 1937, Of Mice and Men, the classic novella by the legendary American writer John Steinbeck, was published. It was one of several great novels by Steinbeck that were written and set during the Great Depression.
Of Mice and Men (the title comes from a line in a poem by legendary Scottish poet Robert Burns) told the story of two migrant farm workers, George Milton and Lennie Small. The ironically named Lennie Small is a giant of a man with incredible physical strength but very limited mental capacity.
A gentle giant with the mind of a child, Lennie's inability to understand his physical strength forms the tragic crux of the story. George Milton is the polar opposite of Lennie. Small in stature but intelligent and wise, he looks after Lennie, who is his best and only friend.
The novel opens with George and Lennie finding work on a ranch in Soledad, California. They had to flee from their previous place of employment when the affectionate Lennie's innocent petting of a young woman's dress was mistaken for attempted rape.
At the ranch, the two friends run afoul of Curley, the owner's son. Curley, a petit man like George, suffers from a Napoleon complex. He's a surly, aggressive ex-boxer who hates big men. Slim, one of the workers, befriends Lennie and gives him a puppy.
George and Lennie dream of someday having their own piece of land to farm. They've been working hard and saving their money. When they befriend Crooks, the black stable hand, he wants in on the dream, too. An educated man, he became isolated and embittered because the racist white workers want nothing to do with a black man.
Another worker who becomes George and Lennie's friend and wants in on their dream is Candy, an aging handyman who lost a hand in an accident. Candy fears that he will soon become unemployable and useless.
Meanwhile, Curley's wife, an abused yet vain woman, shamelessly flirts with all the men - except Crooks, because he's black and she's a racist. At one point, she threatens to have him lynched. When the other men ignore her advances, she belittles them.
Tragedy strikes twice when first Lennie accidentally kills his puppy by petting it too hard, then Curley's wife pays him a visit, looking for a sympathetic ear for her gripes.
The woman bemoans her loneliness and the fact that her dreams of becoming a movie star have been crushed. Lennie admires her pretty hair and she offers to let him stroke it. Once again, Lennie underestimates his own strength and is too rough with her.
Initially angry with Lennie because he's messing her hair, the woman feels his strength, panics, and screams. This causes Lennie to panic. Desperate to get her to stop screaming, he accidentally breaks her neck, killing her.
Lennie flees, and the corpse is found by the other ranch hands. A devastated George realizes that this the end of his and Lennie's dream. He meets Lennie at their secret place, where he'd told Lennie to go if there was trouble.
George talks about their dream as if nothing has happened. Then, when Lennie isn't looking, George shoots him in the back of the head, sparing him from a horrific death at the hands of Curley and his lynch mob.
Of Mice and Men received rave reviews upon its initial publication in 1937 - even more praise than John Steinbeck's other classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath - and became an all-time classic work of literature.
A staple of study for middle school English classes, the novella is often targeted for banning from the classroom and school libraries by conservative parents and pressure groups. It appears on the American Library Association's (ALA) annual lists of banned and challenged books.
Recently, the novella ranked #4 on the ALA's list of the Most Challenged Books of 21st Century. Why would anyone want to ban Of Mice and Men from schools? Complaints range from vulgar language to the promotion of leftist political views and euthanasia.
Of Mice and Men would be adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1939 which starred Burgess Meredith as George and Lon Chaney Jr. as Lennie. Another acclaimed feature film adaptation, released in 1992, starred Gary Sinise (who also directed) as George and John Malkovich as Lennie.
John Steinbeck originally conceived Of Mice and Men as a play in the form of a novella. It's comprised of three acts, with each act containing two chapters. Steinbeck saw it as a novella that could be acted out as a play from its dialogue or a play that read like a novella. He later adapted it as a stage play.
The character of Lennie Small was based on a real man that Steinbeck had known back when he himself worked as an itinerant laborer:
I was a bindlestiff myself for quite a spell. I worked in the same country that the story is laid in. The characters are composites to a certain extent. Lennie was a real person. He's in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn't kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how many times I saw him do it. We couldn't stop him until it was too late.
In a strange and disturbing twist, the character of Lennie Small is used as the criteria for executing retarded convicts in the state of Texas. If a mentally retarded defendant is convicted of a capital offense, he is still eligible for execution if when interviewed, he appears to be smarter than Lennie Small.
John Steinbeck's son, Thomas Steinbeck, an outspoken anti-capital punishment activist, angrily protested this practice, calling it a misappropriation of and an insult to his father's work.
Quote Of The Day
"Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them."
- John Steinbeck
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of John Steinbeck's classic novella, Of Mice and Men. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On February 5th, 1914, the legendary American writer William S. Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He was born into a wealthy and prominent family; his grandfather, whom he was named after, invented the adding machine and founded the Burroughs Adding Machine Company.
It would later became the famous, international Burroughs Office Machine Corporation. Bill's parents sold their stake in the company shortly before the 1929 stock market crash. His father owned an antique store and gift shop.
Though he had protected the family from the crash, Mortimer Burroughs Sr. had also prevented them from sharing in the wealth when the company returned to prominence following the Great Depression.
William S. Burroughs had an older brother, Mortimer Burroughs Jr. Their mother, Laura Lee Burroughs, was a descendant of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. She was into astrology and spiritualism and kindled young Bill's interest in the occult.
At fifteen, Bill was sent to the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, a boarding school for boys "where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens."
Burroughs hated Los Alamos. He kept to himself and enjoyed going for solitary hunting, fishing, and hiking trips. He avoided team activities and became a chronic malingerer.
Two important things happened to Burroughs during his time at Los Alamos: he became aware of his homosexuality and he conducted his first experiment with drugs. He fell in love with another boy, but kept it a secret, expressing his feelings only in his journals.
Though he had gotten caught taking chloral hydrate, he wasn't expelled for it, as some claim. He left voluntarily after persuading his parents to let him come home.
When he got home, Burroughs realized that some of his belongings were missing, including his telltale journals. The school had agreed to send the rest of his personal effects to him later. They did. Everything was sent back, including his journals.
Still, Burroughs was terrified that someone had read them. He destroyed his journals and vowed never to write again, a vow he would keep until middle age, even though as a child he longed to be a writer.
At the age of eight, Burroughs had written his first short story, Autobiography Of A Wolf. When asked if he meant biography, he said no. He meant autobiography. The year he attended Los Alamos, he had an essay, Personal Magnetism, published in the John Burroughs Review. (No relation.)
When he was twelve, he read You Can't Win, the celebrated autobiography of Jack Black, a hobo who rode the rails and drifted through the seedy underworld of late 19th and early 20th century America and Canada, becoming a professional thief and opium addict.
To the young, alienated Burroughs, the book was a revelation in its depiction of the Johnson Family, a community of thieves, bums, and hobos who proved to be more honorable and compassionate than the so-called proper society of his own time in America.
After graduating high school in 1932, Burroughs enrolled at Harvard University, majoring in liberal arts. During the summers, he worked as a cub reporter and covered the police docket. He hated the work and refused to cover events he considered distasteful, like the death of a child.
Around this time, although he was gay, he hung out at an East St. Louis brothel and lost his virginity to a female prostitute whom he would frequently patronize. After graduating from Harvard, Burroughs went to Europe to study medicine at a school in Vienna.
While living there, he enjoyed the city's open and active gay community. He met a Jewish woman named Ilse Klapper and married her so she could escape the Nazis and emigrate to the United States. As the Nazis were about to take over Austria, Burroughs himself left the country and returned to the U.S.
Back home, he worked a series of menial jobs and fell into a deep depression. To impress a man he had become infatuated with, Burroughs cut off his left pinky finger at the knuckle. He would later base a story on it called The Finger. After the Pearl Harbor attack led the U.S. into World War II, Burroughs joined the Army.
He was disappointed by his classification of 1-A Infantry; he wanted to be an officer. His mother got him a disability discharge due to his mental instability, but he would remain in limbo, living in the barracks for five months before the discharge went through.
Burroughs moved to Chicago and worked at several jobs including as an exterminator, an experience that found its way into his writing. When his friends Lucien Carr and David Kammerer moved to New York City, Burroughs followed suit.
By 1944, he was sharing an apartment with new friend Jack Kerouac, his wife Edie, and a young poet and college student named Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs, who had taken up writing again, collaborated with Kerouac on a novel, And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks. It would be published posthumously in 2008.
The novel was based on the fate of their friends Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. Carr had been stalked by the lovesick Kammerer, who was gay. Carr was straight and had tried unsuccessfully to convince Kammerer that they couldn't be anything more than friends.
He wouldn't take no for an answer and Carr killed him, allegedly in self-defense. A panicked Carr then asked Jack Kerouac to help him. Together, they covered up the crime, dumping Kammerer's body in the Hudson River.
After living in fear of being caught, they took Burroughs' advice and turned themselves in. Kammerer was seen as a predatory homosexual, so Carr only served a brief sentence for covering up the killing. Kerouac was acquitted of wrongdoing.
As for Burroughs, he made another friend - Herbert Huncke. He was the quintessential Times Square hustler - a petty crook, junky, drug dealer, con man, and occasional male prostitute, though he wasn't gay. He also happened to be a writer.
After Burroughs' failed attempts at romance with Allen Ginsberg put a strain on their friendship, Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac decided to find someone else for Burroughs. That person turned out to be a woman named Joan Vollmer.
A divorcee and single mother of a six-year-old daughter, Joan was a libertine who possessed an intellect equal to Burroughs. She moved into the apartment and they got along famously.
Joan also possessed Burroughs' taste for narcotics; while he indulged in his morphine habit, she became addicted to benzedrine, an amphetamine legally sold over the counter at the time and dispensed in an inhaler.
She huffed so much benzedrine that she became delusional and had to be hospitalized following a severe psychotic episode. Meanwhile, to support his habit, Burroughs sold heroin and engaged in petty thievery such as rolling drunks in the subway.
While Joan languished in Bellevue, Burroughs was arrested for forging a drug prescription. He completed his "house arrest" in St. Louis, returned to New York, released Joan from the psychiatric ward, and moved with her to Texas.
There, she bore him a son, William S. "Billy" Burroughs, Jr. Billy was born addicted to benzedrine and couldn't be breastfed because his mother's milk was loaded with the drug. A year later, Burroughs, Joan, and their friends moved to New Orleans.
In New Orleans, police searched Burroughs' house and found letters to and from Allen Ginsberg that mentioned a delivery of marijuana they were planning to sell. To avoid a prison term at Angola, Burroughs fled to Mexico to wait out the statute of limitations on his charges.
He enrolled at Mexico City College in 1950, where he studied Spanish, Aztec codices, and the Mayan language. A year later, while partying with their friends at home, Burroughs and Joan, both very drunk, decided to play a game of William Tell.
Joan put her highball glass on top of her head and told Bill to shoot it off with his pistol. Sober, Burroughs was a skilled marksman; drunk, he missed the glass and shot Joan in the forehead, killing her instantly.
Burroughs' brother arrived and bribed Mexican officials to let Bill out on bail while he awaited trial on a charge of negligent homicide. He hired a prominent Mexican attorney who bribed ballistics experts to support Bill's story that the gun had gone off accidentally.
Bill's parents took care of his son and Julie (Joan's daughter from a previous marriage) went to her mother's parents. After Bill's lawyer fled to escape his own legal troubles, he decided to do the same, returning to the U.S.
In the Mexican court, he was convicted in absentia and given a two-year suspended sentence. The death of Joan would haunt Burroughs the rest of his life and, ironically, inspire him to finally become a serious writer.
After drifting around South America for a few months in a fruitless search for yage - an elusive drug allegedly used by Mayan shamans to experience visions and develop psychic abilities - Burroughs went to Tangier, Morocco.
Tangier was then an "international zone" controlled by several different countries. Drugs were plentiful, homosexuals lived openly, and the police rarely bothered people because there were few laws to enforce. The city was a haven for smugglers, artists, writers, and expatriates of all sorts.
Before Joan died, Burroughs had completed his first published novel. Junky (1953), a semi-autobiographical, straightforward tale of one man's experiences as a drug addict and hustler, told in a detached, non-judgmental narrative, was published as a pulp novel by Ace Books, with some help from Allen Ginsberg.
Burroughs had also written Queer, a groundbreaking novel (also semi-autobiographical) about an American writer living in Mexico who comes to terms with his homosexuality and embarks on a love affair with another man that is doomed from the start. Queer would not be published until 1985.
Forty years later, Queer was adapted as an acclaimed feature film directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Daniel Craig as Burroughs' alter ego, William Lee.
In Tangier, Burroughs found a new boyfriend - Kiki, a sweet-natured Spanish rent boy who prostituted himself to foreign tourists. He and Bill spent their days together getting high and making love. After Kiki helped him kick a heroin habit, Burroughs regained his health and began writing what would become one of the most celebrated and controversial novels of the 20th century.
Naked Lunch (1959) was an experimental, loosely connected collection of what Burroughs called "routines." They were basically short stories and sketches edited together in the format of a novel. Surreal in nature with non-linear narratives, the routines were blistering satires of 1950s American life.
They contained profane language, drug use, explicit straight and gay sex, and extremely graphic albeit comic violence - all of which were alien and shocking to 1950s readers. It was Swiftian satire at finest, aimed at the banal and hypocritical heart of Eisenhower's America.
One particular passage, a satire of capital punishment in the tradition of Jonathan Swift's classic essay A Modest Proposal, begins as a humorous parody of a stag film, with a woman and two men - Mary, Mark, and Johnny - having a bisexual three-way encounter that turns into a surreal nightmare.
After engaging in sexual acts that become increasingly more bizarre, the menage a trois descends into Dante-like madness that includes cannibalism and climaxes (pun intended) with all three of the lovers hanged. Then they come back to life and take a bow. It was all just a show.
When Jack Kerouac came to Tangier to help Burroughs type up the manuscript, the writing literally gave him nightmares: "I had nightmares of great long baloneys coming out of my mouth. I had nightmares typing that manuscript."
Allen Ginsberg later arrived in Tangier to help Bill with the manuscript, along with his new boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky. Eventually, Ginsberg and Orlovsky settled in Paris at what came to be called the Beat Hotel, and Burroughs joined them there.
The Beat Hotel, named by American Beat poet Gregory Corso, was a ramshackle rooming house located in the Latin Quarter of Paris, known for the famous Beat artists, writers, and musicians who lived there.
The landlady, Madame Rachou, was notorious for her stinginess with the heat and electricity, though she would sometimes accept paintings and manuscripts from her often cash-strapped tenants in lieu of rent.
Naked Lunch was submitted for publication to Maurice Girodias, whose Olympia Press publishing house was known for publishing both celebrated, controversial works of literature and pornographic novels. Girodias rejected Naked Lunch as disorganized and confused.
After Ginsberg helped Burroughs edit and organize the manuscript, they sent excerpts to the Chicago Review - a literary magazine published by the University of Chicago. The editor, Irving Rosenthal, published the excerpts in the spring and autumn 1958 issues of the magazine.
Not long afterward, a local conservative columnist devoted one of his columns to attacking the Chicago Review's editorial policies for publishing what he considered obscene material. News of the column reached the Dean's office, and he demanded to see the galleys for the winter issue.
He was appalled not only by the Burroughs material, but also by the writings of Jack Kerouac and other authors who appeared in the magazine. The Dean suppressed the entire contents of the winter issue.
Rosenthal resigned as editor in protest. He founded his own literary magazine, Big Table, and republished the Naked Lunch excerpts and the other material that the Dean had kept out of the Chicago Review.
The censorship controversy and the ensuing media coverage caught Maurice Girodias' attention. After he read the excerpts in Big Table, he agreed to publish Naked Lunch. Though a maverick publisher, Girodias was a lousy businessman, and Burroughs saw little money from his novel.
Then, legendary publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press published the book in the United States in 1962, which resulted in a landmark obscenity trial in Boston where Naked Lunch was ruled to be not legally obscene. The republication made Burroughs' name as a writer.
While living at the Beat Hotel, Burroughs made another friend - an important friend who would take him into the next phase of his literary career. Brion Gysin was a gay bohemian artist of Swiss-Canadian descent. He and Burroughs never became lovers, but they did become lifelong friends and collaborators.
One day, while working on collages, Gysin pasted together parts of different newspaper articles. Combined, they produced hilarious results, and Gysin would laugh hysterically at them. Burroughs saw lots of literary potential in what Gysin had done. It reminded him of the works of Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, whom he had met.
Burroughs began creating what he called "cut-ups" - pieces of writing made by cutting up two different texts and putting them together. Poet Gregory Corso, a close friend of Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac, was appalled. He considered literary cut-ups too random to be of any real artistic value.
Burroughs argued that the randomness was offset by the fact that producing a coherent whole out of two different halves required a lot of editing. He would take cut-ups even further by creating entire cut-up novels. He bought himself a tape recorder and experimented with audio cut-ups, splicing together various recordings.
In the early 1960s, Burroughs wrote and published his amazing "cut-up trilogy" of novels, The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964).
These novels used both straightforward narratives and surreal tapestries of cut-up texts to tell the story of Nova Police Inspector Lee's pursuit of the Nova Mob. Lee must destroy their word and image machine, with which they control reality as we know it.
In this bold new vision, language becomes a virus, and the word hoard must be rubbed out. Burroughs' cut-up novels are considered to be the very first works of cyberpunk science fiction. They also contain some of the most dazzling prose poetry ever written.
By 1966, Burroughs left Paris and moved to London to kick another heroin habit, taking the cure once again from Dr. Dent, a British physician who had invented a painless heroin withdrawal treatment using an electronic box attached to the patient's temple. After kicking, Burroughs remained in London for several years.
He visited the U.S. occasionally to help his son Billy, who had been arrested for forging prescriptions in Florida. Billy had become a writer and published two noted novels, Speed and Kentucky Ham, but he was a hopeless drug addict and alcoholic who ultimately drank himself to death - after receiving a liver transplant.
While in London, Burroughs collaborated with celebrated British underground filmmaker Antony Balch and made several experimental short films, the best of which was Towers Open Fire. It featured footage of the "dream machine" invented by Brion Gysin.
In the early 1970s, Burroughs wrote two more novels, The Wild Boys (1971) and Port Of Saints (1973), where he returned to mostly straightforward narratives. In need of money, he returned to the U.S. and taught creative writing at several colleges.
He settled in New York City, in a basement apartment on the Lower East Side. He called it "the Bunker." It was part of an old YMCA building that had been renovated. It included lockers and communal showers.
The punk rock scene that exploded in England had reached the U.S., and Burroughs became the idol of not just punk rockers, but other rock musicians as well. His new secretary and occasional lover, James Grauerholz, was a 21-year-old bookseller and rock musician.
Burroughs became a columnist for the pop culture magazine Crawdaddy. When his punk rocker friends got him hooked on heroin again, James helped Burroughs kick the habit and launched him on a new career path - that of a traveling performer.
Burroughs performed live readings from his works everywhere, from universities to punk rock clubs, with James acting as his agent and tour manager. He even read on an episode of Saturday Night Live. The money was good, but soon, a huge rent increase and the ever present temptation of heroin drove him out of the Bunker.
He settled in Lawrence, Kansas, and began work on his last great trilogy of novels: Cities Of The Red Night (1981), The Place Of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987).
Burroughs had a memorable co-starring role in director Gus Van Sant's classic 1989 film, Drugstore Cowboy, where he played Father Tom, the junky priest and friend of the main character, Bob, (Matt Dillon) a junky who robs drugstores to score his fixes.
In the 1990s, Burroughs recorded several new albums of readings, the background music provided by his rock musician friends. His 1993 album, Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, featured music by hip-hop group The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy.
The album included a reading of Burroughs' classic short story The Junky's Christmas, which appeared in his 1987 short story collection, Interzone. Francis Ford Coppola directed a short claymation film adaptation of the story, featuring live action footage of Burroughs.
In 1992, the legendary film director David Cronenberg made a feature film adaptation of Naked Lunch. It was praised by critics, but received mixed reviews from Burroughs fans because it wasn't really an adaptation of the novel - it was a hodgepodge of elements from the novel and events from Burroughs' life.
Still, it makes for a strange and surreal viewing experience, and features stellar performances by Peter Weller as Bill Lee and Roy Scheider as Dr. Benway. I enjoyed it. Cronenberg said that it would be impossible to faithfully adapt Naked Lunch for the screen because it would cost many millions of dollars to make and no one would want to see it. I disagree.
During his final years, Burroughs took up painting and developed an unusual technique for creating abstracts: shooting cans of spray paint placed in front of canvasses. His final film appearance was in a music video for Last Night On Earth by the legendary Irish rock band U2.
William S. Burroughs died in 1997 of complications following a heart attack at the age of 83.
Quote Of The Day
“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”
- William S. Burroughs
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of William S. Burroughs' classic 1959 novel, Naked Lunch. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On February 4th, 1826, The Last of the Mohicans, the classic novel by the legendary American writer James Fenimore Cooper, was published in the United States.
The second novel in Cooper's celebrated LeatherstockingTales series, The Last of the Mohicans is set in 1757, during the Seven Years' War, also known as the French and Indian War.
In this conflict, fought from 1754-1763, the British government and its American colonial allies fought the French and their Native American (Indian) allies over disputed territory in North America and control of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers.
The story opens in the upstate New York wilderness as two young women, Cora and Alice, are being escorted to a fort where their father, Colonel Munro, is the commander. Escorting the ladies are Major Duncan Heyward (a young officer from the fort) and David Gamut, a traveling musician.
The group's guide is Magua, a Huron tribesman. He has them take a short cut to save time. What the group doesn't know is that Magua is setting them up for an ambush. The white travelers are suddenly attacked by a band of hostile Iroquois Indians.
Frontier scout and master woodsman Natty "Hawkeye" Bumppo and his Mohican friends (Chingachcook and his son Uncas) come to the group's rescue, but unfortunately, the treacherous Magua escapes into the forest.
Later, Hawkeye takes Heyward, Gamut, and the women to some sheltered caves to spend the night. They don't get much sleep. Early the next morning, the group is attacked again, by Iroquois braves on horseback.
Gamut is hurt and the women hide in the caves while Hawkeye and Heyward plan a counterattack. They engage the Iroquois in a bloody battle, but run out of ammunition. So, while Hawkeye and the Mohicans head for the fort to get help, Heyward guards the women.
Unfortunately, they are captured by the Iroquois before help can arrive. Heyward tries to trick Magua into returning the ladies to their father for a reward, but Magua doesn't want a reward - he wants to take revenge on Colonel Munro by marrying his daughter, Cora.
Hawkeye returns, and since the Iroquois are terrified of him, they release their captives. Magua escapes again, and Hawkeye and the others resume their journey. They reach the fort, which is under attack by the French.
Colonel Munro is forced to surrender his fort to the French, but that's the least of his troubles; the evil Magua kidnaps his daughters yet again. Munro, Major Heyward, Hawkeye, and the Mohicans set out to rescue them...
The Last of the Mohicans is rightfully considered a classic work of American literature. It has been adapted numerous times for the radio, screen, and television. The first Hollywood feature film adaptation of the novel was a silent picture released in 1920.
The silent film adaptation is most famous for an uncredited appearance by future horror film superstars Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff as Indians. Lugosi played Chingachcook, the noble Mohican, in a German film released that same year.
The most recent film adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans was released in 1992. It was praised by critics, but loudly panned by fans of the novel, because the screenplay had almost nothing to do with the book.
Daniel Day-Lewis played Hawkeye - whose name was changed from Natty Bumppo to Nathaniel Poe! The movie was directed by Michael Mann, who admitted that he had never read the novel.
James Fenimore Cooper would go on to write more great novels, including The Pioneers (1823), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841).
Quote Of The Day
"America owes most of its social prejudices to the exaggerated religious opinions of the different sects which were so instrumental in establishing the colonies."
- James Fenimore Cooper
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of James Fenimore Cooper's classic novel, The Last of the Mohicans. Enjoy!
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