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!
This Day In Literary History
On February 3rd, 1907, the famous American writer James Michener was born. His birth date is a guesstimate; he knew neither who his parents were nor exactly when and where he was born. He was raised by his adoptive mother, Mabel Michener, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Micheners were Quakers.
In 1929, James Michener graduated summa cum laude from Swarthmore College, earning a Master's degree in English and psychology. He spent the next two years traveling through and studying in Europe, then took a job as an English teacher at Hill High School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.
From there, he taught English at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania, then attended Colorado State Teachers College, (now known as the University of Northern Colorado) earned a Master's degree, and taught there for several years.
After a one-year teaching stint at Harvard from 1939-40, Michener left his teaching career to become a social studies education editor for Macmillan Publishers. When World War II broke out, he enlisted and became a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy.
Stationed in the South Pacific and assigned as a naval historian, he would use the experience to begin a writing career after the war ended. His first book was published in 1947. He was 40 years old at the time.
Tales of the South Pacific was a collection of related short stories set on the Solomon Islands in the Coral Sea during World War II. Though the stories deal with the Navy, most of the action takes place on shore.
The book was a huge success and made James Michener's name as a writer. It won him a Pulitzer Prize and was later adapted as the hit Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway musical, South Pacific. A classic feature film adaptation of the musical was later released.
The extremely prolific Michener wrote numerous epic novels. His detail rich prose reflected his meticulous research. Some of his most memorable works include The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953), a tale of American fighter pilots in action during the Korean War.
The novel was adapted as a feature film in 1954 - just one year after it was published. Hawaii (1959) traced the history of the Hawaiian Islands from prehistoric times through the 1950s. It was adapted for the screen in 1966.
Centennial (1974) explored the history of the northeast Colorado plains from prehistoric times through the 1970s. It would be adapted as a TV miniseries in 1978.
Space (1982) was an epic, fictionalized history of the American space program that began with the work of Nazi rocket scientists during the war. It was adapted as an Emmy Award winning TV miniseries in 1985.
Texas (1985) traced the history of the Lone Star State, featuring both fictional and real historical characters, including explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. It was adapted as a TV movie in 1994.
In 1960, James Michener got involved with politics, becoming chairman of the Bucks County, Pennsylvania committee to elect John F. Kennedy. Two years later, he ran as a Democratic candidate for Congress.
He would consider his foray into politics a mistake, saying "My mistake was to run in 1962 as a Democrat candidate for Congress. [My wife] kept saying, 'Don't do it, don't do it.' I lost and went back to writing books."
During Michener's lifetime, his novels sold an estimated 75,000,000 copies. He made a great deal of money, which he used for philanthropic endeavors, giving away more than one hundred million dollars to universities, museums, libraries, and other charitable causes.
In 1989, he donated all of his royalties from the Canadian edition of his novel Journey (which is set in the Canadian Yukon during the Gold Rush) and created the Journey Prize, which is awarded annually for the year's best short story published by an up-and-coming Canadian writer. The prize is worth $10,000 Canadian.
In his later years, James Michener suffered from kidney failure and required daily dialysis. In October of 1997, after suffering through four years of treatments, he decided to end them. He died soon afterward of kidney failure at the age of 91.
Quote Of The Day
"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions." - James Michener
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a nearly two hour interview with James Michener. Enjoy!
My essay, The Ice Medusa: Writing From Your Fear, was released as a pamphlet in OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters' Pamphlet Series. The essay was originally published in Web Del Sol's Perihelion (still available in their archives). It's beautiful in pamphlet form - do pick up a copy. It's free. Download it here.
This Day In Literary History
On January 30th, 1935, the legendary American writer Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington. His father, Bernard Brautigan Jr., was a factory worker, his mother Lulu a waitress.
They separated when Lulu was pregnant, and Richard Brautigan only met his biological father twice because his mother had told him that her second husband, Robert Porterfield, was his biological father. She had never told Bernard Brautigan Jr. she was pregnant.
Richard Brautigan spent his childhood in grinding poverty thanks to his mother's history of broken relationships. She would have two more children with two other men. When Richard was six years old, he and his two-year-old sister Barbara Ann were left alone in a motel room for two days.
The family drifted around the Pacific Northwest, ultimately settling in Eugene, Oregon. They still faced grinding poverty and hunger, sometimes not eating for a few days at a time. Nevertheless, Richard Brautigan proved to be an intellectually gifted child. He began writing poetry and short stories when he was twelve.
While in high school, Richard wrote for the school newspaper, where his first published poem, The Light, appeared. After graduating with honors, he moved in with his best friend Peter Webster, whose mother became Richard's surrogate mother. He would live with the Websters on and off for a few years.
By December of 1955, unable to find steady work, the then 20-year-old Richard Brautigan faced poverty and hunger yet again. So, he came up with an unusual solution. He threw a rock through the police station window, hoping to be jailed for the offense. There, he would at least be fed.
Instead of being sent to jail, Brautigan was fined $25 and released. He kept trying to get himself sent to jail. He was arrested ten days later and committed to the Oregon State Hospital, where he was diagnosed with both schizophrenia and depression and subjected to electroshock treatments.
Released in February of 1956, he lived briefly with his family, then took off for San Francisco, where he established himself as a writer. He handed out copies of his poems on street corners and read at poetry clubs and coffeehouses.
Brautigan's first published poetry book, The Return of the Rivers, appeared in 1957. It contained just one poem. He followed it with classic poetry collections like The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958) and Lay the Marble Tea (1959).
He married his girlfriend Virginia Alder, and she bore him his only child, a daughter named Ianthe. Their marriage would end in 1962, as he had been suffering from depression and alcoholism.
A year before the breakup, Richard, Virginia, and baby Ianthe went on a camping and hiking trip in Idaho's Stanley Basin. He had his typewriter with him, and as he sat near a trout stream, he began writing some sketches that would become his celebrated second novel.
Trout Fishing in America (1967) made Richard Brautigan's name as a writer. Its chapters were basically short stories with recurring characters and non-linear narratives. The title of the novel is also the name of a main character, the name of a hotel, and a reference to fishing itself.
Like all of Brautigan's novels, Trout Fishing in America is a comedy seasoned with pathos. To get an idea of his humor, a character called Trout Fishing in America Shorty, described as "a legless, screaming middle-aged wino," gets shipped by mail to writer Nelson Algren.
In another chapter, a gang of sixth-grade boys in elementary school become "Trout Fishing in America terrorists" when they write "Trout Fishing in America" in chalk on the backs of all the first-graders.
Trout Fishing in America became an overnight sensation, a classic of the 1960s American counterculture that sold over four million copies. Many copies were sold to people who mistook the novel for a nonfiction book on trout fishing; some chapters read like nonfiction on the subject.
Poet Billy Collins, in his introduction to the 2010 edition of Trout Fishing in America, accurately described Richard Brautigan as "an American Apollinaire with a fishing pole in one hand and a joint in the other."
Although Brautigan was said to have disliked hippies, they loved his avant garde yet folksy poetic style of writing. Soon he was reading his works at psychedelic rock concerts and serving as Poet-in-Residence at the California Institute of Technology.
He also wrote for underground newspapers and recorded a spoken word album for the Beatles' short lived Zapple Records label, which had been dedicated to spoken word and experimental recordings. The album would later be released by Harvest Records as Listening to Richard Brautigan (1970).
Brautigan followed Trout Fishing in America with another classic novel, In Watermelon Sugar (1968), which opens with this memorable, poetic passage:
In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.
Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.
I live in a shack near iDEATH. I can see iDEATH out the window. It is beautiful. I can also see it with my eyes closed and touch it. Right now it is cold and turns like something in the hand of a child. I do not know what that thing could be.
There is a delicate balance in iDEATH. It suits us.
The shack is small but pleasing and comfortable as my life and made from pine, watermelon sugar and stones as just about everything here is.
Our lives we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar and then travelled to the length of our dreams, along roads lined with pines and stones.
In Watermelon Sugar is an avant garde, post-apocalyptic comedy set in iDEATH, a new Eden located amidst the ruins of the old world. iDEATH is reminiscent of the American hippie communes of the 1960s. The people of iDEATH make things out of watermelon sugar at the Watermelon Works.
One member of iDEATH, a man called inBOIL, rebels and leaves the commune to live near the Forgotten Works, a huge trash heap containing the ruins of the old world. Another member of iDEATH, a woman named Margaret, likes to collect "forgotten things."
In the 1970s, as the American counterculture began to wane, Richard Brautigan found his popularity waning as well. Still, he continued to produce great novels such as The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971).
The novel's narrator is an unnamed man in his 30s who works and lives in a library of unpublished manuscripts. Anyone can come in and donate a book they've written to the library, which is open 24 hours. One of the donors turns out to be a girl named Vida.
The 21-year-old Vida has written a book of poems about her body, which she hates because it's too beautiful - too perfect to be real. Nobody cares about her, only her body. Everybody lusts for her, but nobody loves her.
She moves in with the librarian, a kind, gentle man who sees her as a person, not a sex object. They fall in love, but when Vida becomes pregnant, they don't want kids, so the librarian turns to his friend Foster, the library's eccentric, hard drinking archivist, for help in arranging an abortion in Tijuana, Mexico.
The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974) is a surreal Western parody set in Oregon, circa 1902. It opens with two morally ambiguous gunmen, Cameron and Greer, being seduced by a Native American girl called Magic Child.
Magic Child then hires them to kill a monster that lives in the ice caves beneath the home of Miss Hawkline, who turns out to be Magic Child's twin sister. They take the job, and the novel climaxes in a memorable mix of comedy, science fiction, and psychedelia.
Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977) told the story of C. Card, a very inept private detective. His name sounds like "seek hard," but his investigations are complicated by an unusual medical condition.
The condition is a form of narcolepsy where C. Card suddenly falls asleep at random times and dreams of ancient Babylon. The novel alternates between C. Card's adventures in the present (San Francisco, circa 1942) and in ancient Babylon.
Though Richard Brautigan would publish five quality novels and three poetry collections during the 1970s, by the end of the decade, he had been largely forgotten as a writer. Like his mother before him, his personal life would become a series of shattered relationships.
In 1982, So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away, his last novel published during his lifetime, was released - a poetic, melancholic autobiographical novel based on Brautigan's coming of age in 1948 Oregon.
Two years after the novel was published, Brautigan lost his long battle with alcoholism and depression, committing suicide at the age of 49. He had been living alone in a huge old house in Bolinas, California, that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. His body wouldn't be discovered for over a month.
Richard Brautigan's classic 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America continues to inspire new generations of readers and writers, earning the author new fans. In 1979, a folk-rock duo who performed for children named themselves Trout Fishing in America.
In 1994, a California teenager named Peter Eastman Jr. legally changed his name to Trout Fishing in America. That same year, a young couple named their newborn baby Trout Fishing in America.
Quote Of The Day
"Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords."
- Richard Brautigan
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Richard Brautigan's 1970 spoken word album, Listening To Richard Brautigan. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On January 29th, 1860, the legendary Russian writer Anton Chekhov was born in Taganrog, Russia. His father, Pavel, was a devout Orthodox Christian and choir director. Physically abusive to his wife and children, he made their lives hell and served as a model of hypocrisy and tyranny for his son's writings.
As a boy, Anton Chekhov attended a school for Greek boys and the Taganrog Gymnasium, which is now known as the Chekhov Gymnasium. In 1876, Chekhov's father mismanaged his finances while building a new house and bankrupted himself.
To avoid debtor's prison, the family fled to Moscow, where oldest sons Alexander and Nikolai were attending university. Anton was left behind in Taganrog to finish his schooling and work to support the family. His mother was devastated, both emotionally and physically drained.
To earn money, Anton did various odd jobs; he worked as a tutor, caught birds and sold them as pets, and took up writing, selling short stories to newspapers. He sent all the money he could spare to his family, along with humorous letters to cheer them up.
He became a voracious reader, delving into the works of Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, Schopenhauer, and others. He also wrote his first play, a comic drama called Fatherless. He had many love affairs, including one with his teacher's wife.
In 1879, Chekhov completed his primary education, rejoined his family, and enrolled in medical school at Moscow University. He obtained his medical degree and became a doctor, but made little money as a physician, treating mostly poor people for free.
Not long after he began his practice, he started coughing up blood. By 1886, the attacks worsened, but he wouldn't admit to his family and friends that he had tuberculosis.
Chekhov returned to writing, and wrote prolifically, publishing many short stories in weekly newspapers and magazines, which earned him enough money to move his impoverished family into better housing.
He made a name for himself as a writer and was invited to write exclusively for the Novoye Vremya (New Times), one of the most popular papers in St. Petersburg.
It was owned and edited by millionaire newspaper magnate Alexey Suvorin, who was known to pay his writers generously. Suvorin and Chekhov would become lifelong friends.
After reading Chekhov's short story The Huntsman, 64-year-old Dmitry Grigorovich, a celebrated writer of the time, wrote to Chekhov, telling him "You have real talent - a talent which places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation." He advised Chekhov to slow down and concentrate on the quality of his writing instead of the quantity.
Chekhov wrote back that the letter had struck him "like a thunderbolt," saying "I have written my stories the way reporters write up their notes about fires—mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself." Actually, he often wrote with extreme care, and continually revised his work.
In 1887, with a little help from Grigorovich, Chekhov's short story collection At Dusk won him the Pushkin Prize. That same year, a theater owner named Korsh commissioned him to write a play. The play, Ivanov, was written in two weeks and premiered in November.
Chekhov found the whole experience "sickening," and in a letter to his brother Alexander, he humorously described the chaotic production. To Chekhov's amazement, the play was a hit with both critics and theatergoers. Two years later, in 1889, Chekhov's brother Nikolai died of tuberculosis, plunging him into a depression and influencing the writing of his short story, A Dreary Story.
Searching for a purpose in his own life, Chekhov took up the issue of prison reform. In 1890, he made an arduous journey by train, carriage, and river steamer to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island in the far east of Russia. The letters he wrote during the two and a half month journey are among his best.
What Chekhov saw on Sakhalin shocked and disgusted him; prisoners were being flogged, supplies embezzled, and women forced into prostitution. "There were times," he wrote, when "I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation." He was especially moved by the plight of the children who lived with their parents in the penal colony:
On the Amur steamer going to Sakhalin, there was a convict with fetters on his legs who had murdered his wife. His daughter, a little girl of six, was with him. I noticed wherever the convict moved the little girl scrambled after him, holding on to his fetters. At night the child slept with the convicts and soldiers all in a heap together.
Chekhov concluded that charity wasn't the answer - the government had a duty to finance humane treatment of prisoners. He published his findings in a nonfiction work of social science called Ostrov Sakhalin (Island of Sakhalin) (1893-1894).
In 1892, Chekhov bought Melikhovo, a small country estate 40 miles south of Moscow, and settled there with his family. He joked that "it's nice to be a lord," but took his responsibilities as a landlord seriously and helped the local peasants.
He organized relief for the victims of the famine and cholera outbreaks, built three schools, a fire station, and a free clinic where he treated peasants from miles around - even though his tuberculosis attacks increased.
Chekhov began writing his play The Seagull in 1894. It premiered two years later at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. The production was a disaster and Chehkov was so incensed that he renounced the theater and vowed never to write another play.
Theater director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko was impressed by The Seagull and convinced a colleague, Constantin Stanislavski, to direct a production for the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. Stanislavski's brilliant, innovative production was a hit.
His faith in the theater restored, Chekhov returned to play writing when the Art Theatre commissioned him to write more plays. The great Uncle Vanya, which Chekhov wrote in 1896, premiered at the Art Theatre in 1899.
In 1897, Chekhov had suffered a major hemorrhage of the lungs, so he finally went to a clinic, where his tuberculosis, located in the tops of his lungs, was diagnosed. The doctors advised him to make a major change in his lifestyle, so the following year, he bought land in Yalta and built a home there.
When it was completed, he moved in along with his mother and sister. In Yalta, Chekhov planted trees and flowers, kept dogs and tamed cranes as pets, and entertained his friends and fellow writers, including Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. He also wrote more plays for the Art Theatre.
Chekov hated living in Yalta, which he described as a "hot Siberia," so he often visited Moscow or traveled abroad to get away from it. In May of 1901, at the age of 41, Chekhov married his girlfriend, Olga Knipper.
His marriage came as a surprise to many, because he had been called "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor," preferring casual relationships and brothels to marriage.
His attitude is reflected in his classic short story, The Lady With The Dog, which told the tale of Dmitry, an unhappily married Moscow banker who believes that women are only good for one thing. So he engages in many meaningless affairs.
Then one day, while vacationing in Yalta, he meets Anna, a young woman who is walking her dog along the seafront. Smitten, he introduces himself. Soon, Dmitry and Anna begin a passionate affair which lasts until he returns to Moscow.
Back home and back in his daily routine, Dmitry finds himself haunted by his memories of Anna and determines to find her. Using business as a ruse, he goes to St. Petersburg and finds out where she lives. Afraid that she's found someone else, he returns to his hotel.
Later, he goes to see a production of the musical play The Geisha, thinking that Anna might be in attendance. He sees her with her husband. When the man steps out for a smoke, Dmitry greets Anna. Startled, she runs off, and he follows her.
When Dmitry finally confronts Anna, she tells him that she never stopped thinking about him, but begs him to leave, promising to visit him in Moscow. She keeps her promise, and Dmitry realizes that he has fallen in love for the first time in his life. The story ends with Dmitry and Anna trying to plan for a life together.
By 1904, Anton Chekhov was dying of tuberculosis. In June, he and Olga went to the German spa town of Badenweiler, where he wrote cheerful letters to his mother and sister telling them that he was getting better. He was really getting worse. He died on July 15th at the age of 44 - just six months after the premiere of his classic final play, The Cherry Orchard.
This is how Olga described his death:
Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): Ich sterbe ('I'm dying'). The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: 'It's a long time since I drank champagne.' He drained it, lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child...
Quote Of The Day
"The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly."
- Anton Chekhov
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a full cast reading of Anton Chekhov's classic play, Uncle Vanya. Enjoy!
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