Friday, February 7, 2025

Notes For February 7th, 2025


This Day In Literary History

On February 7th, 1867, the famous American children's book writer Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in Pepin, Wisconsin. She was born in a log cabin built by her father, Charles Ingalls. Many years later, a replica of the cabin would be built on the same plot of land and turned into a museum dedicated to Laura.

Laura grew up with her sisters Mary, Carrie, and Grace. Her baby brother, Charles Frederick, died in infancy. Laura's parents, Charles and Caroline, were pioneers with restless spirits. From Wisconsin, they moved West, first settling on the Kansas prairie in an area considered Indian territory.

A few years later, they would settle in a town that Laura would make famous - Walnut Grove, Minnesota. From there, they would stay with relatives in South Troy, Minnesota, then move on to Iowa, and ultimately, to South Dakota.

Charles Ingalls worked at many different jobs. In Walnut Grove, when he wasn't farming, he served as the town's butcher and its Justice of the Peace. In Iowa, he helped run a hotel. When he settled in South Dakota, he worked for the railroad.

As for Laura Ingalls, she first became a schoolteacher, landing her first teaching position two months before her 17th birthday. She taught in one-room schoolhouses. A year later, at the age of eighteen, Laura married her boyfriend Almanzo Wilder, who was ten years her senior. She bore him a daughter, Rose. She also had a son who died shortly after he was born.

Laura didn't care much for teaching, and employment opportunities for women were very limited at the time, so after she married, she devoted her time to building a home with her husband. After their daughter Rose was born, the couple's prospects seemed bright, but then they suffered several disasters.

First, Almanzo Wilder was stricken with a nearly fatal case of diphtheria. He survived, but was left partially paralyzed. He would regain almost full use of his legs, but walk with a cane for the rest of his life.

On top of that, Laura's newborn son died, the couple's home and barn burned down, and a severe drought destroyed their crops and left them in debt, unable to grow anything on their 300+ acres of land.

Laura Ingalls Wilder would chronicle these early hardships in The First Four Years, a long lost manuscript discovered after Rose Wilder's death in 1968 and published in 1971.

After staying with Almanzo's affluent parents in Spring Valley, Minnesota, the couple moved to Florida, hoping that the climate would be good for Almanzo's health. Instead, he and Laura couldn't stand the Southern heat and humidity - or the locals.

So, they moved to DeSmet, South Dakota, where Almanzo became a day laborer and Laura found work as a seamstress. The couple saved their money, and four years later, in 1894, they bought land in Mansfield, Missouri, which they christened the Rocky Ridge Farm.

It would take several years before the farm provided a decent income for the Wilders. At first, the only money they made came from selling firewood Almanzo had chopped while clearing out the land. So, he had to work at other jobs while Laura took in boarders and served food to railroad workers.

By 1910, the Rocky Ridge Farm had become a huge success. In addition to a wheat farm, it also served as a poultry farm and a dairy farm, and contained a huge and abundant apple orchard. The Wilder family was able to move out of their small rented home and into a ten-room dream farmhouse on their own land.

The following year, intrigued by her daughter Rose's budding writing career, Laura Ingalls Wilder, then 44 years old, decided to try her own hand at writing. She accepted an offer to submit an article to the Missouri Ruralist magazine. Her article would lead to an offer to write a column and work as an editor for the magazine.

Laura's column, As a Farm Woman Thinks, became a huge hit thanks in part to her expertise in farming and rural living. She was also well educated and well read, and concerned about what was going on in the world.

Though her column was popular, Laura never did make the leap to larger markets like her daughter, whose writings were being published by national magazines. But she was happy just writing her column.

By the late 1920s, Laura and Almanzo had scaled back their farm's operations considerably and were preparing to enjoy a comfortable retirement, having invested most of their savings in the stock market. Then, in September of 1929, the market crashed, wiping them out and ushering in the Great Depression.

The Wilders were left penniless and dependent on their daughter for support. Rose was able to support them with her writings, but Laura wanted to earn money writing as well. She also wanted to preserve her memories of a time long forgotten, when she was the young daughter of pioneers. So, she decided to write a children's novel based on her own childhood.

With Rose's blessing and help from her surviving sister Carrie, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her first book, When Grandma was a Little Girl, which would be published as Little House in the Big Woods in 1932. It won her the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.

This book follows Laura at the age of five, and takes place when the Ingalls family was living in their log cabin in Pepin, Wisconsin. Little Laura begins learning her homesteading skills, everything from making butter, cheese, and maple syrup to preserving meat and harvesting the garden.

Little House in the Big Woods became a hit. Over the next decade, Laura published seven more books in the series, each chronicling a different period in her life. The most famous book was the third, Little House on the Prairie (1932), which found the Ingalls family living in Kansas before being forced to move to Walnut Grove, Minnesota.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's memorable series of children's novels would win her Newbery Awards and bring her international fame. They also made the formerly penniless author a huge amount of money.

After her seventh book, These Happy Golden Years, was published in 1943, Laura quit writing fiction and devoted the rest of her years to writing about and promoting her libertarian philosophy. She died in February of 1957 - three days after her 90th birthday - of diabetes complications.

Some time after Laura's death, a controversy brewed about who really wrote the Little House series of children's novels. Some scholars believe that Laura's daughter Rose, a professional editor and ghostwriter, actually wrote them. Others reject this theory completely.

Most believe that the truth lies in between. Rose Wilder always served as her mother's editor, even back when Laura was writing her column for the Missouri Ruralist magazine. The stories told in the Little House novels were always Laura's, but Rose edited her mother's original manuscripts and prepared them for publication.

Laura herself would probably say that her novels were a collaborative effort. She loved working with her daughter and trusted Rose's editing skills.

In September of 1974, a series premiered on American TV called Little House on the Prairie. Though it was named after the third book in Laura Ingalls Wilder's series and mostly based on the Ingalls family's time spent living in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, it would include elements from all of her books, including the time when Charles Ingalls helped run a hotel in Iowa.

Featuring executive producer, director, and head writer Michael Landon as Charles Ingalls and Melissa Gilbert as Laura, the Little House on the Prairie TV series would run for nine years and become one of the most popular and beloved TV series of all time.


Quote Of The Day

“The real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.”

- Laura Ingalls Wilder


Vanguard Video

Today's video features a full length presentation on the life and legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Enjoy!

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Notes For February 6th, 2025


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!

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Notes For February 5th, 2025


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 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 late 19th century 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!

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Notes For February 4th, 2025


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 Leatherstocking Tales 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!

Friday, January 31, 2025

Notes For January 31st, 2025


This Day In Literary History

On January 31st, 1923, the legendary American writer Norman Mailer was born in New York City. He enrolled at Harvard University in 1939 (at the age of 16) to study aeronautical engineering. During his freshman year, his first short story was published.

After Mailer graduated in 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he served as a cook for the 112th Cavalry in the Philippines. Though he wouldn't see much combat during World War II, his experience in the Army would inspire him to write his classic debut novel.

The Naked and the Dead (1948), set during an Allied invasion of a fictional island in the South Pacific, was a breakthrough novel that painted an incredibly realistic, warts-and-all portrait of American soldiers at war. Not only were the horrors of war graphically depicted, so was the language of the men fighting it.

Mailer's original draft was peppered with numerous uses of the word fuck and its variants. Fearing legal trouble, his publisher demanded that he censor the manuscript. Rather than cut out the word, Mailer famously changed it to fug and its variants instead. It sounded exactly like the obscenity, though it wasn't an obscene word.

Ironically, fellow writer James Jones's classic 1951 World War II novel From Here To Eternity, which also contained numerous uses of the word fuck, wasn't censored by his publishers. The legendary 1960s rock band The Fugs, featuring poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, took their name from Mailer's replacement for the F-bomb.

With his fourth novel, An American Dream (1964), Mailer paid tribute to the legendary writers of the past by publishing it first in a serialized format, over an eight month period, in Esquire magazine.

Featuring a poetic narrative rich in metaphor, the novel told the story of Stephen Rojack, a war hero and ex-congressman turned sensationalist talk show host. Estranged from his wife, a society woman, Rojack ends up murdering her in a drunken rage. He stages the crime scene to look like a suicide.

From there, Rojack descends into a sleazy, surreal world of jazz clubs and bars, and gets mixed up in mafia intrigue as he tries to avoid the suspicion that's closing in on him. He also begins to lose his mind. This nightmare is a metaphor for the so-called American dream.

An American Dream was blasted by feminist critic Kate Millett in her famous book Sexual Politics (1970), a groundbreaking study of the treatment of women in literature. She accused Norman Mailer of misogyny and leveled the same charge against Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence. Millett's book received mixed reviews.

Another of Mailer's memorable novels was The Executioner's Song (1979), which was based on the true story of Gary Gilmore, the first man executed after a conservative Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

Gary Gilmore was a career criminal who robbed and murdered two people in two separate incidents on the same night in July of 1976. Convicted of both murders, Gilmore, who was 35 years old at the time, declared to the court that he wanted to be executed rather than spend the rest of his life in prison.

Gilmore was sentenced to death, but the legal process entitled him to appeal the sentence and his conviction. When his court-appointed attorneys began working on an appeal, Gilmore fought them for his right to be executed. The attorneys continued to defy and defend their client.

Gilmore would get his wish. Though his attorneys had won three stays of execution for him, their appeals were ultimately denied, and Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad in January of 1977. The Executioner's Song would win Norman Mailer a Pulitzer Prize.

In 1991, after not publishing a novel in seven years, Mailer returned in style with Harlot's Ghost, a whopping 1,300+ page epic. In it, senior CIA agent Harry Hubbard learns that his mentor, agent Hugh Montague, code named Harlot, is dead. He either committed suicide or was assassinated. Hubbard's wife then tells him that she's in love with another man.

Emotionally drained, Hubbard goes to Russia, where he rereads the manuscript of his autobiography, tentatively titled The Game. It's an incredibly detailed account of Hubbard's life in the CIA, beginning at the end of World War II. The manuscript ends in 1984, with the words "To be continued."

Although Harlot's Ghost received mixed reviews, some of Mailer's famous literary colleagues, including Salman Rushdie, Anthony Burgess, and Christopher Hitchens, declared it to be the best novel he'd written so far. He planned to write a sequel called Harlot's Grave, but other projects got in the way and he never wrote it.

Mailer's last novel, The Castle in the Forest, was published in 2007 - the year he died. It was based on the life of Adolf Hitler. In this novel, Dieter, a demon from Hell, is sent to guide the young Hitler on his path of destruction. Rather than being part Jewish, as historians believed, here Hitler is the product of incest.

In addition to his literary career, Norman Mailer was a political activist. He covered the Democratic and Republican political conventions of 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1992, and 1996. His account of the 1996 Democratic convention was the only one not published.

In 1969, Mailer ran for Mayor of New York City. The legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin was his biggest supporter. He lost the election, some say because his platform included advocating the secession of New York City from New York State. Others believe it was because he advocated the release of Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party.

In 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, (two years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks) Mailer spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, where he said:

Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.

A vocal advocate for freedom of speech, Mailer was a key witness in the famous 1965 censorship trial of William S. Burroughs's classic novel Naked Lunch (1959), which had been banned in Boston.

The ban would be reversed by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Mailer famously described Burroughs as “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.”

Norman Mailer died of kidney failure in November of 2007. He was 84 years old.


Quote Of The Day

"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."

- Norman Mailer


Vanguard Video

Today's video features a 2003 interview with Norman Mailer. Enjoy!

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Notes For January 30th, 2025


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!

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Notes For January 29th, 2025


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!