Notes For April 8th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 8th, 1954, The Bad Seed, the classic final novel by the famous American writer William March, was published. An iconic, disturbing psychological thriller, it was the perfect novel for the author, who died suddenly a month after its release, to go out with.

March, born William Campbell in Mobile, Alabama in 1893, was intellectually gifted, but his family was dirt poor, so he had to leave school at 14 to work. At 24, he enlisted in the Marines to serve his country during the Great War and became a highly decorated soldier.

In fact, March was awarded the Marines' Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross, and the French Croix de Guerre for refusing to leave after being wounded twice in battle, opting instead to keep fighting the Germans and rescue his own wounded men.

He had also endured a mustard gas attack. His war experiences left him psychologically scarred for life, and he would suffer from anxiety, depression, psychosomatic throat and eye issues, and other mental illnesses. He also struggled with his sexual orientation.

March's war experiences would inspire his classic debut novel, Company K (1933), which followed a company of Marines during the Great War. A grim and brutal antiwar novel, it's been compared to Erich Maria Remarque's antiwar classic, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929).

Though William March wrote six quality novels and was an O. Henry Prize winning short story writer, he saw little commercial success during his lifetime. As he died of a heart attack at 60 just a month after it was published, he never got to bask in the glory of his final novel.

Ironically, he had dismissed The Bad Seed as a mediocre novel, never realizing the commercial juggernaut and cultural icon it would become. The novel was the result of March's expertise in psychology - he was very well read on the subject, given his own issues.

To her mother Christine, eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark seems like the perfect child - she's highly intelligent, charming, loving, obedient, polite, well groomed, and diligent in her studies. Yet, Christine can't help suspecting that something might be wrong with the girl, who also seems cold, calculating, manipulative, narcissistic, and self sufficient beyond her years.

At first, Christine blames her suspicions on her worsening anxieties, as her husband Kenneth's job keeps him out on the road and away from his family most of the time. Her landlady, close friend, and mother figure Monica Breedlove assures her there's nothing wrong with Rhoda.

Monica, who considers herself an expert in psychology, claims she was once psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud. When she invites Christine to a luncheon at her home, the party is attended by Monica's brother Emory and his friend, true crime writer Reggie Tasker. The psychopathic mind becomes the subject of discussion.

When Tasker begins discussing cases of female serial killers - women who murdered family members and others for monetary gain or to start a new life - the name of a particularly infamous killer, Bessie Denker, triggers Christine's recurring memories of living with a different family and running in terror from a different mother. Then she hears a chilling news report on the radio.

A child has been killed during a school outing - her daughter Rhoda's school outing. The identity of the victim is not released. Fearing that it's Rhoda, Christine runs back to her apartment. Rhoda returns home, very much alive, and is totally unaffected by the tragedy. She tells her mother that a classmate of hers, a boy named Claude Daigle, drowned.

Christine knows that name. Rhoda had been furious when Claude won a penmanship award at school that she believed was rightfully hers. Later, Christine learns from Claudia Fern, who founded the private school with her sisters, that Rhoda has been expelled. On the day of Claude's death, Rhoda had been harassing him.

The other kids hated Rhoda, but more than that, they feared her. It didn't bother Rhoda at all; she had no use for friends. Christine also learns that although Claude Daigle's death was ruled an accidental drowning, he had unexplained crescent-shaped marks on his face and his penmanship medal was never found.

Overcome with dread, Christine fears that Rhoda may have killed Claude, though it seems impossible. But someone else sees through Rhoda's act - Leroy Jessup, the janitor, groundskeeper, and gardener for Monica Breedlove's apartments. He's a depraved sociopath and recognizes Rhoda's sociopathic nature.

Leroy sees a kindred spirit in Rhoda, but he's troubled by her meanness, which is greater than his own. He wants her to be nice to him, so he teases her by claiming that he knows she murdered Claude Daigle. He knows no such thing and doesn't believe for a minute that an eight-year-old girl could kill anyone.

Rhoda loathes Leroy and isn't about to be nice to him. So he constantly follows her around, and like an evil Uncle Remus, tells her stories about forensics and how the state has special little electric chairs for children who kill - a blue one for little boys and a pink one for girls like her. She discovers that he naps on a makeshift mattress in his shed when he's supposed to be working.

Meanwhile Christine, who recalls other strange deaths surrounding Rhoda - the puppy who fell out of a window after Rhoda got bored with it, an elderly babysitter who fell down the stairs to her death after promising to leave Rhoda a fancy trinket in her will - asks Reggie Tasker for his crime case histories.

Especially interested in the Bessie Denker case, she learns that beginning when Bessie was a little girl, all of her family members were mysteriously killed, leaving her the sole owner of the family's farm and bank account. Later, she married and had children, but murdered her husbands and kids, either for money or to start a new life.

When she was finally caught, Bessie had murdered her current husband and all but one of their children with an axe. The surviving child's name? Christine Denker, Bessie's youngest daughter. Arrested, tried, and convicted of multiple murders, Bessie died an agonizing death in the electric chair.

The man Christine thought was her biological father, the famous journalist Richard Bravo, best known as a war correspondent, was working as an investigative reporter when he saved Christine from her murderous mother. Then he and his wife, unable to have children of their own, adopted her.

They never told Christine any of this to spare her the knowledge and stigma of being a serial killer's daughter. Remembering Reggie Tasker's discussion of the psychopathic mind and how psychopathic tendencies can be inherited, she fears that Rhoda may be a psychopath like her biological grandmother.

Then she finds Claude Daigle's penmanship medal in Rhoda's treasure box. A hysterical Rhoda confesses to killing Claude in a fit of rage. Satisfied that her mother isn't going to turn her over to the police, she returns to her calm and charming self. Not knowing whether to love or hate her daughter, Christine blames herself for "carrying the bad seed" and passing it on to Rhoda.

Then Leroy Jessup makes the mistake of teasing Rhoda by telling her that he has incriminating evidence against her - the cleated shoes she'd beaten Claude with and disposed of down the furnace chute. She sneaks in when Leroy's sleeping and sets his mattress on fire. He runs out of the shed engulfed in flames. While she watches him burn to death, Rhoda giggles and says, "You're silly!"

Racked with guilt over Claude Daigle's death, unable to stop Rhoda from killing Leroy, and fearful that the little girl will grow up to follow her grandmother's path to the electric chair, Christine tricks Rhoda into taking an overdose of sleeping pills, then commits suicide with a handgun. Monica Breedlove arrives on the scene just barely in time to get Rhoda to the hospital.

With all the evidence of Rhoda's crimes destroyed by her mother, (to avoid scandalizing her husband and his prominent family) Kenneth Penmark is left griefstricken and confused, but thankful that his daughter survived. The novel ends with Rhoda uttering her famous line, "What will you give me for a basket of kisses?"

A hugely influential novel, its title, The Bad Seed, would enter the American psychological lexicon as a theory used to explain how a person raised in a loving, stable family could be a psychopath with violent tendencies. In the 70+ years since its publication, the bad seed theory has been largely debunked.

While psychopathic tendencies can be inherited, modern technology for scanning the brain has shown that the root cause of the psychopathic personality is a defect in the temporal lobes, which control the personality - a defect that renders a person's natural capacity for empathy retarded to nonexistent. The defect can also result in sociopathic or borderline personality disorders.

Of course, nature and nurture still play a part in the development of a psychopath. A child with risk factors for sociopathic or psychopathic personality disorders may not develop them if raised in a loving and stable environment, and not all psychopaths have violent or sexually deviant tendencies. (Psychopaths make the best CEOs.) And yes, there have been violent child psychopaths.

In 1968, a 10-year-old English girl named Mary Bell was arrested for strangling two small boys. A sadistic psychopath, Mary expressed no remorse and was found guilty but with diminished mental capacity. Her father had been a violent alcoholic and criminal, her mother a prostitute who repeatedly tried to kill her and allowed her clients to sexually abuse Mary for extra money.

The same year it was published, The Bad Seed was adapted as a hit Broadway play by playwright Maxwell Anderson. It starred Nancy Kelly (who won a Tony Award for her performance) as Christine Penmark, Henry Jones as Leroy Jessup, and child actress Patty McCormack in a chilling performance as Rhoda.

The play was itself adapted as a classic film two years later, with Kelly, Jones, and McCormack reprising their Broadway roles. Unfortunately, the stifling Hollywood Production Code was still in effect and it forbade showing criminals getting away with their crimes. Director Mervyn LeRoy was forced to change the ending somewhat.

To get the Code Seal and placate other censors, (at the time, states and cities had their own film censorship boards) in an obviously tacked on final scene after Rhoda survives her mother's murder attempt, she sneaks out on a rainy night to look for the penmanship medal and is struck by lightning and killed. This is followed by a cutesy "curtain call" scene - a nod to the film's Broadway origins.

In this scene, the cast members come out to take a bow, the actors introduced to the audience. After little Patty McCormack takes her bow, Nancy Kelly, who played her mother, takes the girl over her knee and playfully spanks her while Patty laughs hysterically.

This pointless scene isn't just a nod to the play that the film is based on - it's another attempt to placate censors and soothe horrified filmgoers, as the film was a real shocker for the time. Modern viewers who appreciate the movie stop watching before the final scene begins.

The film, which made Patty McCormack a horror icon, was remade twice, first as a made-for-TV movie in 1985 that starred Blair Brown as Christine Penmark, David Carradine as Leroy Jessup, and a talented child actress named Carrie Wells as Rhoda, who is renamed Rachel Penmark here. Panned when it first aired, this movie now has its fair share of admirers.

The second remake was released in 2018, and aired on the Lifetime cable channel. It's pretty much an "in name only" adaptation of the novel and play, but it's still worth watching for the performances of the very talented young actress Mckenna Grace as Rhoda (renamed Emma Grossman) and Rob Lowe (who produced and directed) as her anxiety-racked and overmedicated single dad.

A grown-up Patty McCormack appears as a child psychologist who assures Lowe that his daughter is "one hundred percent perfectly average. In fact, I told her that she reminds me of myself!" A sequel, The Bad Seed Returns, with Mckenna Grace reprising her role as a now teenage Emma, premiered on Lifetime in May of 2022.

Legendary horror director Eli Roth said that he plans to make a new feature film adaptation of The Bad Seed. Roth, who invented the "torture porn" subgenre of horror films with his 2005 horror classic Hostel and its 2007 sequel, Hostel: Part II, said that his version will be darker and gorier than the novel and its previous adaptations.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Everybody must seem crazy if you see deep enough into their minds."

- William March

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete live performance of the stage play adaptation of William March's novel, The Bad Seed. Enjoy!

Notes For April 7th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 7th, 1770, the legendary English poet William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. He had two older brothers, a younger brother, and a younger sister.

Of his four siblings, Wordsworth was closest to his younger sister Dorothy, whom he would live and travel with. Only a year younger than her brother, she was a poet and a noted diarist.

As a young boy, Wordsworth would frequently stay with his mother's parents in Penrith. He loved the moors and the landscape, which would influence his poetry, but he hated his grandparents and uncle, whose harsh treatment nearly drove him to suicide. To avoid them, he would spend hours communing with nature.

Wordsworth's mother, who had taught him how to read and write, died when he was eight years old. His father tutored him in poetry and gave him access to his large collection of books.

Later, he sent young William to a boarding school for children of upper class families. His beloved sister Dorothy went to live with relatives in Yorkshire. He wouldn't see her again for nine years.

At boarding school, Wordsworth's headmistress, Ann Birkett, instituted a curriculum of mostly biblical studies for her students. She also encouraged them to partake in local activities, especially the festivals of Easter, May Day, and Shrove Tuesday.

During his time at boarding school, he would meet his future wife, Mary Hutchinson. In 1787, at the age of 17, Wordsworth enrolled at St. John's College, Cambridge. That same year, his poetry debuted in print when one of his sonnets was published in The European Magazine.

He graduated in 1791. A year earlier, he spent his holidays taking walking tours across Europe. He toured the Alps extensively and visited France, Switzerland, and Italy. After graduating, Wordsworth made a return visit to France, which was mired in revolution.

He supported the revolution and fell in love with a French girl named Annette Vallon, who gave birth to his illegitimate daughter, Caroline. Though he wanted to marry Annette, financial trouble and growing tensions between France and Britain led Wordsworth to return home alone.

The ensuing war between the two countries prevented Wordsworth from returning to France for almost ten years. Meanwhile, in 1793, Wordsworth's first two poetry collections, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, were published, establishing him as a major talent.

Two years later, he received a £900 legacy so that he could write full time. That same year, in Somerset, he met writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who became his closest friend. He bought a house in Somerset, near Coleridge's home, and moved in along with his sister Dorothy.

Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on a poetry collection called Lyrical Ballads, which was published in 1798. It featured Wordsworth's classic poem Tintern Abbey and Coleridge's classic epic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The book was considered a seminal work of English Romantic poetry. For the second edition of the book, Wordsworth wrote an essay, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, where he discussed Romantic literary theory.

In the fall of 1798, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge traveled to Germany. During the harsh German winter, while living with Dorothy in Goslar, Wordsworth wrote to escape his stress and homesickness.

He began an autobiographical piece called The Prelude and wrote many of his famous poems, including his "Lucy poems." The trio returned to England and settled in Grasmere in the Lake District, where Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their new friend Robert Southey would come to be known as the Lake Poets.

After the Peace of Amiens treaty ended the war between England and France, British subjects were once again allowed to travel to France. So, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy went to see Annette Vallon to discuss mutually acceptable terms of financial support.

Wordsworth was happy to see his daughter Caroline again and to be able to provide for her and her mother financially. He returned to England and married his childhood sweetheart Mary Hutchinson, who would bear him four children.

Wordsworth continued to write. He published another poetry collection, Poems in Two Volumes, in 1807. Seven years later, he published his epic poem, The Excursion. Before it came out, Wordsworth became estranged from his opium-addicted friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

In 1812, Wordsworth lost two of his children, Thomas and Catherine. The following year, he was appointed as the Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, for which he would earn £400 per year.

Financially secure, he moved his family, including his sister Dorothy, to a new home in Ambleside, where he would live the rest of his life. In 1823, Wordsworth and Coleridge reconciled when they toured the Rhineland together.

Wordsworth retired in 1842 after the British government awarded him a pension of £300 a year. When his friend Robert Southey died in 1843, Wordsworth became the new Poet Laureate of England, but when his daughter Dora died four years later in 1847, he stopped writing poetry.

William Wordsworth died of lung disease in April of 1850 at the age of 80. Several months later, his wife Mary published his epic poem The Prelude. It attracted little attention at the time, but later came to be recognized as Wordsworth's masterpiece.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart." - William Wordsworth

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of William Wordsworth's classic epic poem, The Prelude. Enjoy!

Notes For April 3rd, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 3rd, 1957, Endgame, the classic play by the legendary Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, premiered in London. Although Beckett was an Irishman, he originally wrote Endgame and other works in French.

Beckett had become hugely famous for his classic avant garde play Waiting For Godot, which had been written four years earlier, in 1953. Endgame would prove to be just as avant garde, if not more so.

Endgame is a four-character play. The cast includes Hamm, a blind man who is unable to stand. His servant, Clov, is unable to sit. Nagg and Nell are Hamm's parents. They have no legs and live in adjacent garbage cans.

All four characters live by the sea, but the dialogue implies that there is actually no sea at all - or clouds or sun, for that matter. Hamm and Clov, trapped in a mutually dependent relationship, bicker endlessly.

Clov always wants to leave, but for some reason, is unable to. Meanwhile, Hamm's legless parents Nagg and Nell spend their time asking for food and getting into inane arguments. The dialogue suggests that the characters had a past, but have no future.

A major theme is the hell of repetition - how humans keep repeating their mistakes and bad habits, never learning from the past to create a better future, and instead becoming devoted to pointless traditions and rituals.

When Samuel Beckett's play Waiting For Godot premiered in Paris, it created an international sensation. But Endgame was so avant garde that no company in France was willing to take a chance on producing it.

The Royal Court Theatre in London contacted Beckett with an offer to produce Endgame, and he agreed to travel to England. However, he was very skeptical about the Theatre company's abilities after they'd botched the English language premiere of Waiting For Godot.

To insure that Endgame would be produced properly, Beckett made sure to include precise stage and acting directions in his script:

HAMM     What's happening?

CLOV      Something is taking its course. (Pause)

HAMM     Clov!

CLOV      (Impatiently) What is it?

HAMM     We're not beginning to... to... mean something?

CLOV      Mean something! You and I, mean something! 

(Brief laugh)
Ah, that's a good one!

HAMM      I wonder.
(Pause)
Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn't he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough.
(Voice of rational being)
Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they're at!
(Clov starts, drops the telescope and begins to scratch his belly with both hands)
(Normal voice)
And without going so far as that, we ourselves...
(with emotion)
... we ourselves... at certain moments...
(Vehemently.)
To think perhaps it won't all have been for nothing!

CLOV     (anguished, scratching himself) I have a flea!...

Working with the Theatre's producer and director was once again agony for Beckett. The reviews for the French language production of Endgame weren't good. Still, the playwright agreed to come to London again in eighteen months for the English language premiere of Endgame.

The English premiere's reviews weren't any better. Critic Kenneth Tynan's famous bad review of Endgame took the form of a parody of the play:

Foreground figure a blind and lordly cripple with superficial mannerisms... Sawn-off parents in bins, stage right, and shuffling servant all over the stage...

Slamm   Is that all the review he's getting?

Seck      That's all the play he's written.

Slamm   But a genius. Could you do as much?

Seck      Not as much. But as little.

Despite the inability of critics to understand Endgame, it would go on to become one of Samuel Beckett's most celebrated plays and is still staged to this day.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear, and does not make clear."

- Samuel Beckett

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete performance of Samuel Beckett's classic play Endgame, starring Michael Gambon and David Thewlis. Enjoy!

Notes For April 2nd, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 2nd, 1805, the legendary Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark. The Andersens were a working class family, but speculation (which persists to this day) suggests that Hans's father was of a different lineage.

The senior Andersen may have been an illegitimate son of the Danish royal family. When he was a boy, King Frederick VI took a special interest in him and paid for part of his education. His son wasn't so fortunate.

Hans Christian Andersen had to leave school at 13 and work to support himself. He first found employment as an apprentice weaver, then as a tailor's apprentice. A year later, at the age of 14, he moved to Copenhagen, hoping to become an actor.

However, it was Andersen's excellent soprano singing voice, not his acting, that gained him entrance into the Royal Danish Theatre. When his voice changed, his theatrical career faltered. When one of his theater colleagues pointed out his talent for poetry, he decided to become a writer.

In a chance meeting, Andersen encountered Jonas Collin, a director for the Royal Danish Theatre, who became very fond of him. Collin decided to help Hans become a writer. He sent him to school and paid for his education.

Hans attended schools in Slagelse and Elsinore, but because of his dyslexia, he was a fair student at best. Older than his classmates, he felt alienated from them. At one school, he lived with the headmaster, who beat him frequently "to improve his character."

His teachers discouraged him from becoming a writer, driving him to depression. For these reasons, he would describe his school years as the darkest and most bitter years of his life. Despite his teachers' discouragement, Hans Christian Andersen did become a writer.

He burst onto the literary scene in 1824 with his short story A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager. He also published a poetry collection and a comic play. In 1833, he received a traveling grant from the King and embarked on the first of many travels throughout Europe.

During his traveling years, Andersen wrote his first novel, The Improvisatore, which would be published in early 1835. It became an overnight sensation. That same year, he also published a short story collection, Eventyr, the first of several volumes, known in English as Fairy Tales.

The book sold poorly, as the brilliance and beauty of the stories had yet to be recognized. Andersen returned to novel writing, and his next two novels, O.T. (1836) and Only A Fiddler (1837), were just as successful as his first.

The year his third novel was published, Andersen made his first visit to Sweden. Inspired by Scandinavism, he decided to write about the Scandinavian brotherhood shared by the Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians.

The result was his classic poem Jeg er en Skandinav (I am a Scandinavian), which would be set to music by Swedish composer Otto Lindblad. Andersen continued his travels throughout Europe. He would write travelogues about his experiences in countries such as Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal.

In 1847, he made his first visit to England. His writing career was then at its peak, and his volumes of fairy tales were celebrated throughout Europe - except in his native Denmark, where at the time, they still received a lukewarm reception.

In England, Andersen became a noted guest at the famous parties of Marguerite Gardiner, the Countess of Blessington, who was a writer herself. Her parties were known as gathering places for writers, intellectuals, and other illuminati.

Andersen was a hit at the parties - a big social success. At one party, he got to meet his literary idol, the legendary Enlgish novelist Charles Dickens. He was thrilled. During one of his later visits to England, Andersen stayed with Dickens for five weeks, oblivious to his host's blatant hints that he had worn out his welcome.

The friendship between the two men soured, and Dickens was said to have modeled the character of Uriah Heep, from his classic novel David Copperfield (1849), after Hans Christian Andersen.

As for Andersen's personal life, he was openly bisexual. He preferred women, but was very shy and awkward around them. He would fall in love with unattainable women, and their inevitable rejection of him would result in great heartbreak.

His most famous paramour was the legendary Swedish opera singer, Jenny Lind. He fell madly in love with her, and his fairy tale The Nightingale was a tribute to her singing. Her famous nickname, "the Swedish Nightingale," was inspired by Andersen's story.

Hans proposed to Jenny, but she turned him down. She had come to love him like a brother, and referred to him as her brother in a dear john letter. Andersen's failures with women would be repeated in his gay relationships; he would become attracted to unattainable men who failed to reciprocate his love.

Ultimately, he never married or had any children. He gave up on love and most likely patronized brothels; shortly before his death, in the throes of severe illness, he dictated journal entries recalling memories of his many relationships with "loose women."

In 1872, Hans Christian Andersen fell out of bed and injured himself severely. He never recovered and his health began to deteriorate. Three years later, he died of liver cancer. At that time, he had finally been recognized in his native Denmark for his legendary fairy tales.

Over 150 years later, his classic stories, such as The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, The Little Match Girl, The Princess and the Pea, The Ugly Duckling, The Red Shoes, Thumbelina, and The Emperor's New Clothes, continue to enchant readers of all ages. They would be adapted as plays, ballets, and feature films.

Readers are quite surprised that, like the original Brothers Grimm fairy tales, Andersen's stories are quite different from the retellings and adaptations they spawned. The Little Mermaid, for example, ends on a tragic note.

The little mermaid makes a deal with the Sea Witch to become human so she can marry the Prince, but he marries another girl whom he discovers is his true love - the girl who had saved him from drowning.

Heartbroken, the little mermaid can only return to mermaid form if she kills him with a dagger given to her by the Sea Witch. She sneaks up on the Prince asleep with his new wife, but can't bring herself to kill him, and commits suicide instead, throwing herself into the sea.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale."

- Hans Christian Andersen

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading of a collection of Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairy tales. Enjoy!

Notes For April 1st, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 1st, 1841, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the classic short story by the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe, was published. Appearing in Graham's Magazine, it's considered to be the first detective story.

It also incorporates elements of horror, as its author was famous for his horror fiction, which made up the bulk of his writings. Horror elements also appeared in his poems, such as the classics Annabel Lee and The Raven.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue opens with a bizarre and brutal double murder that took place in the Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris. The victims, Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, were found dead in an inaccessible room that had been locked from the inside.

Madame L'Espanaye's throat was slashed so deeply that her head was nearly severed. Her daughter was strangled and stuffed in the chimney. Parisian detective C. Auguste Dupin and his unnamed friend, who narrates the story, read an account of the murders in the newspaper.

Dupin's interest in the case is piqued, especially when a man named Adolphe Le Bon is arrested for the horrible crime and imprisoned, despite the fact that there is no evidence to prove his guilt. Dupin offers his services to the prefect (chief) of police.

The plot thickens as Madame L'Espanaye's neighbors, who heard the murders take place, give contradictory statements, each claiming to have heard the killer speak a different foreign language - a language that none of them could recognize.

This leads Dupin to conclude that the witnesses weren't hearing a human voice. His theory is proven correct when he finds a hair at the crime scene that is not human. It belongs to an orangutan.

Dupin places an ad in the newspaper asking if anyone has lost an orangutan. A sailor shows up at his home to answer the ad. He had been keeping a pet orangutan he'd acquired in Borneo, but the animal escaped. Dupin interrogates the sailor and solves the crime.

When the orangutan escaped, it made off with the sailor's straight razor. When it got into Madame L'Espanaye's apartment, it attempted to shave her, mimicking its owner. The resulting bloodbath incited the orangutan to a frenzy.

It strangled Madame L'Espanaye's daughter, and, fearing its owner's whip, stuffed her body in the chimney to hide it. When the sailor learned of the "murders," he panicked and fled, allowing the orangutan to escape again.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue was a huge hit with both readers and critics. A review in the Pennsylvania Inquirer proclaimed that "it proves Mr. Poe to be a man of genius... with an inventive power and skill, of which we know no parallel."

Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, would return in The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842), and The Purloined Letter (1844). The Murders in the Rue Morgue would be adapted several times for the radio, screen, and television.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue would also start a new subgenre - the locked room mystery. A locked room mystery involves a logically impossible crime, a crime where no evidence exists to prove that a crime was committed, or a crime where a person is convicted by evidence proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but the sleuth doubts it and proves his innocence.

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Quote Of The Day

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"It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic."

- Edgar Allan Poe, from The Murders in the Rue Morgue

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Enjoy!

Notes For March 31st, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 31st, 1836, The Pickwick Papers - the classic first novel by legendary English writer Charles Dickens, was published. Like most novels of the time, it first appeared in a serialized format, published in twenty monthly installments.

When the first installment was published on this date, only 400 copies were printed. By the time the 15th installment came out, it was being published in press runs of 40,000 copies.

Originally titled The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, the novel had originally been commissioned by publishers Chapman and Hall as captions to accompany humorous drawings by illustrator Robert Seymour.

The members of the Pickwick Club, founded by a wealthy old gentleman named Samuel Pickwick, travel through remote areas of the English countryside by coach, then report back on their adventures when they return. Alfred Jingle, an English mangling actor, charlatan, and practical joker, joins them and plays tricks on them.

Charles Dickens wasn't the publishers' first choice to write the book, but their senior editor had been impressed by his earlier collection of serialized writings, Sketches by Boz, which had also been written to accompany illustrations.

Sketches combined nonfiction articles with short stories. Dickens was just 21 years old when he wrote them. His Pickwick writings were also originally published under the pseudonym Boz, which was the childhood nickname Dickens had given his brother Augustus.

Robert Seymour had conceived the original idea for Pickwick, but creative control of the series went to Charles Dickens, who took the idea and improved on it vastly. Seymour had previously suffered a nervous breakdown after a nasty row with Gilbert A'Beckett, editor of Figaro in London magazine.

The conflict, over money owed Seymour and the illustrator's parody of another writer's work, resulted in Seymour resigning and A'Beckett mounting a cruel public smear campaign against him. The illustrator returned to work after A'Beckett was replaced as editor.

Now, Seymour found himself in another bad situation. His original idea for Pickwick had been given to someone else, who made it his own and improved it. Seymour was never given credit for his creative input.

To add insult to injury, he wasn't even credited as illustrator. The publisher listed the byline as "Edited by Boz with Illustrations." Before the second installment of Pickwick was completed, a distraught Seymour committed suicide with his shotgun.

Seymour's widow publicly blasted Charles Dickens and the publishers, claiming that the first two installments of Pickwick were her husband's idea, i.e., that he told Dickens what to write. Actually, the opposite was true; Dickens had creative control.

Robert Seymour had struggled to come up with illustrations to complement Dickens' writing, frustrating the author to the point that he advertised for a new illustrator. After Seymour's death, Dickens took over as editor of the publication and saved it from bankruptcy.

Scholars have agreed that although Robert Seymour came up with the original idea for The Pickwick Papers, if he'd had creative control over the series, the final product would have been completely different and nowhere near as successful.

It was Charles Dickens' distinctive style of writing that made the novel what it was. When The Pickwick Papers was issued in book form, the publishers defended themselves and Dickens with the following disclaimer:

Mr. Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word to be found in this book. Mr. Seymour died when only twenty-four pages of this book were published, and when assuredly not forty-eight were written... all of the input from the artist was in response to the words that had already been written.

Taking a final pot shot at the troubled illustrator, the disclaimer goes on to say “that he took his own life through jealousy, as it was well known that Seymour’s sanity had been questioned."

Suicide was considered a scandalous act by Victorian society and a felo de se (felony to self) by the law, so Seymour was denied a Christian burial. His estate went to the government, and his widow couldn't receive any royalties for his work on The Pickwick Papers.

Despite the controversy surrounding its conception, The Pickwick Papers made Charles Dickens' name as a novelist. His second novel would make him a legend. It was named after its main character - a poor orphan boy called Oliver Twist.

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Quote Of The Day

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"'I am ruminating,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'on the strange mutability of human affairs.' 'Ah! I see — in at the palace door one day, out at the window the next. Philosopher, Sir?' 'An observer of human nature, Sir,' said Mr. Pickwick. 'Ah, so am I. Most people are when they've little to do and less to get.'"

- Charles Dickens, from The Pickwick Papers

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Charles Dickens' classic first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Enjoy!

Notes For March 27th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 27th, 1923, the famous poet Louis Simpson was born. He was born in Jamaica to a Scottish father and a Russian mother. He emigrated to the United States at the age of 17, settling in New York City.

Louis soon enrolled at Columbia University, where he majored in English. One of his professors was the famous writer and critic, Mark Van Doren. In 1943, Simpson cut his education short to enlist in the U.S. Army, as World War II was raging.

He became a member of the Army's 101st Airborne Division. He served as a courier for the company captain, which required him to deliver orders from company headquarters to officers at the front. Thus, he saw action in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.

While stationed in France, Simpson's company fought a fierce and bloody battle against Nazi forces which had ambushed them on the west bank of the Carentan France Marina. The battle would inspire Simpson to write his classic poem Carentan O Carentan, which included these memorable verses:

There is a whistling in the leaves,
And it is not the wind,
The twigs are falling from the knives
That cut men to the ground.

Tell me, Master-Sergeant,
The way to turn and shoot.
But the Sergeant's silent
That taught me how to do it.

O Captain, show us quickly
Our place upon the map.
But the Captain's sickly
And taking a long nap.

Lieutenant, what's my duty,
My place in the platoon?
He too's a sleeping beauty,
Charmed by that strange tune.

Carentan O Carentan
Before we met with you
We never yet had lost a man
Or known what death could do.

After the war ended, Louis Simpson enrolled at the University of Paris and continued his studies. He then returned to New York City, where he worked as a book editor while doing his graduate studies. He earned a PhD from Columbia University.

He would become a respected professor of English and poetry, teaching at not only Columbia University, but also at the University of California - Berkeley and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Simpson's first poetry collection, The Arrivistes, was published in 1949. In the beginning, he was strongly devoted to traditional verse and was acclaimed for this work. However, as the years passed, he moved away from traditional styles and embraced free verse.

Whether he worked in formal or free verse, as a poet, Simpson was always known for both his strong sense of narrative and for his lyricism, which was never compromised by his narrative voice.

Louis Simpson's 1963 poetry collection, At the End of the Open Road, won him a Pulitzer Prize. Edward Hirsch, critic for the Washington Post, described it this way:

A sustained meditation on the American character... the moral genius of this book is that it traverses the open road of American mythology and brings us back to ourselves; it sees us not as we wish to be but as we are.

In this poem from At the End of the Open Road, titled In California, Simpson tips his hat to one of his favorite writers of free verse, the great Walt Whitman:

Here I am, troubling the dream coast
With my New York face,
Bearing among the realtors
And tennis-players my dark preoccupation.

There once was an epical clatter --
Voices and banjos, Tennessee, Ohio,
Rising like incense in the sight of heaven.
Today, there is an angel in the gate.

Lie back, Walt Whitman,
There, on the fabulous raft with the King and the
Duke!
For the white row of the Marina
Faces the Rock. Turn round the wagons here.

Lie back! We cannot bear
The stars any more, those infinite spaces.
Let the realtors divide the mountain,
For they have already subdivided the valley.

Rectangular city blocks astonished
Herodotus in Babylon,
Cortez in Tenochtitlan,
And here's the same old city-planner, death.

We cannot turn or stay.
For though we sleep, and let the reins fall slack,
The great cloud-wagons move
Outward still, dreaming of a Pacific.

In addition to his poetry collections, Louis Simpson also wrote nearly a dozen works of nonfiction including studies of famous poets from T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams to Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath.

He lived on Long Island until his death in September of 2012 at the age of 89.

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Quote Of The Day

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“The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.”

- Louis Simpson

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Louis Simpson reading one of his poems. Enjoy!