Notes For August 7th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On August 7th, 1934, the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that Ulysses, the classic novel by the legendary Irish writer James Joyce, was not legally obscene.

To be specific, the Court of Appeal upheld a lower court's ruling declaring that Ulysses was not legally obscene. It was a major First Amendment victory, one that British Joycean scholar Stuart Gilbert called "epoch making."

Beginning in 1918, Ulysses was published in serialized form in the American literary magazine The Little Review. In 1920, the magazine published the novel's controversial thirteenth episode, Nausicaä.

This outraged a moralist group called The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) which objected to the content and determined to keep Ulysses from being published in America in any format.

The NYSSV was founded in 1873 by the notorious Anthony Comstock and his supporters in the Young Men's Christian Association. (Yes, that YMCA.) Comstock was a United States Postal Inspector.

The same year that he founded the NYSSV, Comstock persuaded Congress to pass the Comstock Act, which made it illegal to send allegedly obscene materials through the mail.

The passage of the Comstock Act resulted in the enacting of "Comstock Laws" at the state and federal level. The last of these laws wouldn't be struck down by the Supreme Court until 1965.

The Comstock Act was a nightmare. Comstock's definition of obscenity was so vague that he even used the law and his power as a Postal Inspector to block the shipment of some medical textbooks to medical students.

When Comstock had copies of George Bernard Shaw's classic play Mrs. Warren's Profession blocked, calling Shaw "an Irish smut dealer," the furious playwright said:

Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all.

Although Comstock enjoyed a public reputation as a devout Christian guardian of morality, privately, he was corrupt - and notoriously so. As a moralist, he destroyed the lives of many innocent people.

Comstock proudly admitted to being responsible for 4,000 arrests and 15 suicides. In his later years, he suffered from poor health after having suffered a severe blow to the head from an unknown attacker.

Before he died in 1915, Comstock attracted the attention of an admirer - a young law student named J. Edgar Hoover who agreed with Comstock's political beliefs and was interested in his shady methods of investigation, prosecution, and conviction, bringing them to the FBI.

Comstock's NYSSV was successful in its prosecution of The Little Review for publishing the offending episode from Ulysses.

At the first trial in 1921, the literary magazine was ruled legally obscene, and as a result, Ulysses was banned in the United States. The ruling was a product of its time. The Nausicaä episode contained a scene which must have been shocking to 1920s sensibilities.

At the beach, Leopold Bloom (one of the main characters) meets Gerty MacDowell, who has come to watch a fireworks display. Gerty notices Bloom staring at her. Her passion stirred by both Bloom and the fireworks, Gerty deliberately exposes herself to him.

Bloom becomes aroused and starts to masturbate, which arouses her in return. They both reach orgasm as a Roman candle explodes overhead, gushing out "a stream of rain gold hair threads." Afterward, Gerty leaves and reveals herself to be lame, leaving Bloom to contemplate her lameness.

With Joyce's playful punning, the erotic scene becomes a parody of the Catholic Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament ceremony, with Bloom acting out his own version of an Adoration where Gerty's body serves as the body of Christ. The revelation of her lameness is Joyce's biting metaphor for the Catholic Church.

The trial that resulted in Ulysses being banned in the United States drew a huge amount of publicity. As a result, pirated editions of the novel were published and sold either on the black market or under the counter in some bookshops.

Joyce's novel became a runaway bestseller, but he didn't earn a penny from the sale of those pirated books. In 1933, after twelve years of frustration, Joyce's official U.S. publisher, Random House, decided to set up a test case.

The publisher imported a shipment of uncensored French editions of Ulysses and had Customs confiscate a copy after the ship was unloaded.

That year, the case of United States vs. One Book Called Ulysses came to trial. On December 6th, 1933, U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey ruled that Ulysses was not legally obscene.

The NYSSV was outraged and appealed the decision. The case reached the United States Second Court of Appeal, which affirmed the lower court's ruling on August 7th, 1934. Ulysses was finally published uncensored in the United States.

Since then, most U.S. editions of the novel - including the one that I have - feature the text of the Woolsey ruling as part of the foreword. Woolsey ruled that Ulysses was not pornographic because it contained no "dirt for dirt's sake."

Also, the novel was so hard to understand that people would be unlikely to read it for the purpose of titillation. The ruling changed the standard for literary obscenity and made it impossible for an entire novel to be declared obscene because of a few offending lines or passages.

When the Second Court of Appeal affirmed Woolsey's decision, they called Ulysses a "sincere portrayal" and said it was "executed with real art." I couldn't agree more.

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Quote Of The Day

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"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."

- James Joyce on his novel Ulysses.

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a lecture on the legacy of James Joyce's classic novel, Ulysses. Enjoy!

Notes For August 6th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On August 6th, 1809, the legendary English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. Although his father, George Tennyson, was a rector, (who married a vicar's daughter) the Tennyson family were descendants of King Edward II.

George Tennyson's skill at money management made him far more affluent than the typical country clergyman, and the family was thus able to spend summers vacationing at Mablethorpe and Skegness on the East coast of England.

Alfred Lord Tennyson was the fourth of twelve children. When he and his older brothers Charles and Frederick were teenagers, they began writing poetry. By the time he was 17, they had published a collection of their poems.

Charles Tennyson would later marry the younger sister of Alfred's wife. Another one of Alfred's brothers, Edward Tennyson, would end up institutionalized at a private asylum, where he died.

First educated at Louth Grammar School, Tennyson entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where he would join an intellectual secret society called the Cambridge Apostles. While studying at Cambridge, he met poet Arthur Henry Hallam, who became his best friend.

The same year, his first commercially published book, Poems by Two Brothers, came out. It also contained works by his older brother, Charles. In 1829, Alfred Lord Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for his poem Timbuctoo.

A year later, his first solo poetry collection, Poems Chiefly Lyrical, was published. It contained two of Tennyson's most celebrated poems, Claribel and Mariana.

Although some critics derided it for being too sentimental, Tennyson's verse proved to be very popular with readers. It also caught the attention of fellow writers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

When Tennyson's father died in the spring of 1831, he had to leave Cambridge before obtaining his degree. He lived at the rectory and took responsibility for his widowed mother and his siblings.

His friend Arthur Henry Hallam came to live with the Tennyson family, and later became engaged to Alfred's sister, Emilia. In 1833, Tennyson published his second book of poetry, simply called Poems.

This collection, which included his famous poem, The Lady of Shalott, met with such critical scorn that Tennyson wouldn't publish another for ten years, though he continued to write.

That same year, Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly of a stroke while on vacation in Vienna. His death had a profound effect on Tennyson, who composed a poem in tribute to his friend called In Memoriam A.H.H.

Considered one of Tennyson's masterpieces, it included the famous lines "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Then never to have loved at all." The poem became a favorite of Queen Victoria, who found solace in it after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861. In 1862, she requested a meeting with Tennyson.

In 1842, while living in London, Alfred Lord Tennyson published two more volumes of his Poems series of poetry collections. Unlike the first volume, they met with immediate success. They featured Tennyson classics such as Locksley Hall, Tithonus, and Ulysses.

His writing career back on track, he continued to write and publish poetry collections. By 1850, Tennyson reached the pinnacle of his career. That year, he finally published his masterpiece In Memoriam A.H.H..

On top of that, he was appointed Poet Laureate following the death of William Wordsworth. Also in 1850, at the age of 41, Alfred Lord Tennyson married his childhood sweetheart Emily Sellwood, who bore him two sons, Hallam and Lionel.

In 1855, Tennyson wrote another one of his classics, The Charge Of The Light Brigade. The poem is a tribute to the British cavalrymen who were involved in an ill-fated charge on October 25th, 1854, during the Crimean War.

In 1884, Queen Victoria - a huge fan of his work - bestowed on Tennyson the title Baron Tennyson of Aldworth, and he took a seat in Parliament's House of Lords.

Alfred Lord Tennyson continued to write into his 80s. Near the end of his life, he revealed that he had pretty much rejected religion and become an agnostic. It was a shocking revelation, even in the waning years of the Victorian era, but not a surprise.

He'd blasted Christianity in Maud, writing that "the churches have killed their Christ," and in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, he wrote that "Christian love among the churches look'd the twin of heathen hate."

Tennyson died in October of 1892 at the age of 83. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. He is rightfully considered one of the greatest poets of the English language.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within."

- Alfred Lord Tennyson

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading of Alfred Lord Tennyson's classic poem, The Lady of Shallott. Enjoy!

Notes For August 5th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On August 5th, 1850, the legendary French writer Guy de Maupassant was born in Dieppe, France. He grew up in Normandy, where he collected in his photographic memory a lot of information he would use in his short stories, which often dealt with the Norman people.

Maupassant's parents separated when he was eleven years old. He lived with his mother, to whom he was very close. They lived in the Villa de Verguies, which was located between the sea and the countryside.

In these surroundings, the young Maupassant developed a passion for outdoor adventure. He would fish with the local fishermen off the coast. In 1868, when he was eighteen years old, Maupassant saved poet Algernon Swinburne from drowning off the coast of Eterat.

That wasn't the first writer he met; when he started junior high school, Maupassant met the legendary novelist Gustave Flaubert, a childhood friend of his mother. Her father was Flaubert's godfather.

After receiving his primary education, Guy de Maupassant entered a seminary, but he got himself expelled, as he came to hate religion and the prospect of joining the clergy. He went to university instead.

Shortly after he graduated in 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Only twenty years old, he volunteered for military service and fought bravely. After the war ended, he returned home and moved to Paris.

Maupassant joined Gustave Flaubert's literary circle. He became Flaubert's protege and was introduced to famous writers such as Emile Zola, Henry James, and Ivan Turgenev. From Flaubert, he learned the craft of writing.

He set out to start his own writing career, supporting himself by working as a civil servant in two different positions. He hated the jobs. For recreation, he canoed on the Seine and pursued women.

In 1880, Maupassant established himself as a short story writer when he published Boule de Suif (Ball of Fat) in the anthology Les Soirees de Medan (Evenings at Medan) along with works by Zola and other writers.

Set during the Franco-Prussian War, "Boule de Suif" is the nickname of a well-known prostitute traveling in a coach with some bourgeois passengers. The coach is detained by a Prussian officer who demands that Boule de Suif sleep with him. She refuses, and he continues to detain the coach.

The other passengers grow restless and demand that she sleep with the Prussian. She swallows her pride and agrees. Afterward, he allows the coach to leave. The other passengers treat her like she had the plague.

Remembering how these hypocrites had devoured the food and drink in the basket she brought with her, all Boule de Suif can do is weep. Although Guy de Maupassant had written six novels, he was best known as the master of the short story.

He wrote over 300 stories, one-tenth of which were horror stories. His most famous horror story was Le Horla (1887). In this disturbing tale, a wealthy young Norman believes that he has unwittingly summoned a horla.

Horlas are invisible monsters, cousins to vampires, and they are said to eventually bring about the downfall of Man. As the young Norman grows more fearful of the horla he has summoned, he tries to destroy it.

He eventually burns his house down, killing all of his servants. Believing that the horla is still alive, he decides to commit suicide. Was the horla real or just in his mind?

Madness is a recurring theme in Maupassant's stories; in A Night In Paris, the paranoid narrator suffers from a compulsion to walk the streets. In A Madman, a judge commits murder just to see what it feels like to kill, then sentences an innocent man to death for the crime.

And in The Inn - which may have inspired Stephen King to write his classic novel The Shining - two caretakers are living at a remote inn in the French Alps that becomes snowed in and unreachable. When one of them goes missing, the other starts to go mad. Or is the inn haunted by an evil presence?

Ironically, Guy de Maupassant's fascination with madness in his writings would soon cross over into real life, as an undiagnosed case of syphilis, contracted in his 20's, progressed over the years and eroded his sanity.

In middle age, Maupassant developed a desire for solitude, a fear of death, and growing paranoia. In January 1892, he attempted suicide by cutting his throat. He was committed to the famous celebrity asylum of Dr. Esprit Blanche, where he died in July 1893, a month before his 43rd birthday.

One of the great masters of the short story, Maupassant's work has inspired the writings of W. Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, and other great writers. H.P. Lovecraft credited Maupassant's horror tales - especially Le Horla - as the inspiration for his classic The Call Of Cthulhu.

All writers of short stories owe it to themselves to read Guy de Maupassant.

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Quote Of The Day

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“You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.”

- Guy de Maupassant

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Guy de Maupassant's classic short story, The Horla. Enjoy!

Notes For August 4th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On August 4th, 1792, the legendary English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in Horsham, England. His father was Sir Timothy Shelley, a Whig Member of Parliament.

His mother was a landowner in Sussex. As a young boy, Percy Bysshe Shelley received his education at home from a tutor. At the age of 10, Shelley entered the Syon House Academy of Brentford.

Two years later, in 1804, Shelley entered Eton College. He did poorly as a student due to daily harassment by a gang of sadistic bullies. Their torments, called "Shelley-baits," included tearing the books out of his hands and literally ripping the clothes off his back.

In 1810, at the age of eighteen, Shelley matriculated at University College, Oxford. Legend has it that Shelley only attended one lecture during his time at Oxford and chose to educate himself by reading for as long as 16 hours a day.

By all accounts, Shelley was unpopular with both the students and the faculty. He did make one friend, however - a fellow student named William Jefferson Hogg, who would later write a memoir of their friendship.

During his first year of college, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote and published his first book, a Gothic novel called Zastrozzi. (1810) In this book, Shelley vented his anti-religious convictions through his villain Zastrozzi, who abducts his enemy Conte Verezzi, and chains him to a wall in a cavern.

There, Zastrozzi extracts his revenge by tormenting Verezzi and ultimately manipulating him into committing suicide, a sin resulting in eternal damnation, according to Verezzi's Christian faith. Why? In retribution for Verezzi's father (also a devout Christian) abandoning a young woman he had impregnated - Zastrozzi's mother.

The same year he published Zastrozzi, Shelley collaborated on a book of poetry with his sister Elizabeth, which they published as Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. In 1811, Shelley published his second Gothic novel, St. Irvine, or The Rosicrucian.

He collaborated again on a poetry book, this time with his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, called Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson - a ribald and subversive collection of verse.

Shelley also published a pamphlet called The Necessity Of Atheism. When it caught the attention of the faculty, including the Dean, he was ordered to appear before them at a hearing. The faculty offered Shelley a deal.

If he agreed to recant the views he expressed in the pamphlet, he could remain at college. Shelley refused, and they expelled him. His father intervened to try and get him reinstated. The faculty offered him the same deal, and again he refused, angering his father.

Four months after he was expelled from college, Percy Bysshe Shelley, then nineteen years old, went to Scotland to marry his 16-year-old girlfriend, Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a pub owner.

They were married on August 28th, 1811, and Shelley's father disinherited him as a result. When Shelley offered to let his old college friend William Jefferson Hogg live with them, Harriet objected. So, he took her to Keswick in Northern England, intending to begin a writing career.

Shelley was distracted by the political events of the time, and went to Ireland, where he wrote and performed his Address to the Irish People at Nationalist rallies, (he was stridently anti-war and anti-monarchy) earning him the wrath of the British government.

Three years later, Shelley's marriage to Harriet had become unhappy. He often left her alone with their daughter, Ianthe. When he went to visit the writer, philosopher, and journalist William Godwin at his home and bookshop in London, Shelley also met his daughter, Mary Godwin.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin had been named after her mother, a writer, philosopher, and feminist who wrote the 1792 feminist philosophy classic, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. She would later be known as Mary Shelley, author of the horror classic Frankenstein.

On July 28th, 1814, Shelley left his pregnant wife and ran off with Mary, taking Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, along for company. They sailed to Europe, wandered through France, and settled in Switzerland. Six weeks later, broke and homesick, they returned to England.

In the fall of 1815, while living near London with Mary, Shelley wrote his epic poem Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude. It attracted little attention when it was published, but has since been recognized as his first major work.

In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary made another trip to Switzerland, at the behest of Claire Clairmont, who wanted them to meet the legendary poet Lord Byron - her ex-lover, whose affections she hoped to recapture.

The Shelleys and Byron rented neighboring houses on Lake Geneva. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron became good friends, and their conversations got Shelley's creative juices flowing again; he began writing prolifically.

When he and Byron took a tour of Chamonix in the French Alps, it inspired Shelley to write the poem Mont Blanc. In December of 1815, not long after the Shelleys returned to England, Percy's estranged wife Harriet committed suicide, drowning herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London.

A few weeks after Harriet's body was recovered, Percy and Mary Shelley were properly married, partly so Percy could regain custody of his children. Unfortunately, the court refused to grant him custody of his children because he was an atheist. They went to Christian foster parents.

The Shelleys then moved to Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where Percy became part of Leigh Hunt's literary circle and soon met poet John Keats. During this time, Shelley wrote his second major work, Laon and Cythna; or The Revolution of the Golden City.

It was a long narrative poem that attacked religion and featured a pair of incestuous lovers. It was withdrawn after only a few copies were published. It would later be edited and republished as The Revolt of Islam in 1818.

That same year, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont left England for Italy to take Claire's daughter Allegra to her father, Lord Byron, who was living in Venice. When Percy reconnected with his old friend, Byron again inspired him to write.

He began work on Prometheus Unbound, a play in verse, which he would complete in Rome, as the Shelleys moved around Italy during the next couple of years. Tragedy struck when first their son William, then their infant daughter Clara died.

On December 27th, 1818, a third child was born - a daughter named Elena, but the identity of her mother is a mystery. Some scholars believed that Percy Shelley fathered her with either Claire Clairmont or the family nursemaid, Elise Foggi.

Other scholars believe that Percy adopted Elena in the hopes of distracting Mary from her grief. He would refer to Elena as his "Neapolitan ward" and place her with foster parents not long after her birth when he and Mary moved again. Elena would die when she was just 18 months old.

In 1820, when he heard of John Keats' illness, Percy Shelley wrote to him, inviting him to join him at his home in Pisa. Keats replied that he hoped to see Shelley, but his plans changed, and he instead went to Rome with artist Joseph Severn.

When Keats died the following year, Shelley wrote a poem for him called Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats. In 1822, Shelley invited his old friend and supporter Leigh Hunt to come to Italy with his family.

Shelley intended for himself, Hunt, and Lord Byron to create a literary magazine called The Liberal. Hunt would be the editor, Shelley and Byron would have an outlet for their controversial writings, and the magazine would serve as a counterpoint to conservative periodicals such as Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly Review.

Sadly, on July 8th, 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley died at sea while sailing from Livorno to Lirici on his schooner, the Don Juan, which got caught in a violent storm. He was 29 years old. At the time, he was returning after having set up The Liberal with Leigh Hunt.

The boat, which was custom made for Shelley in Genoa, sank after being pounded by the sudden storm. Shelley claimed to have had a premonition of his death. Mary Shelley would later claim that her husband's boat wasn't seaworthy.

Most believe that the boat was seaworthy and sank as the result of both the storm and the poor seamanship of Percy Shelley and his two mates. Some claimed that Shelley had been depressed and committed suicide at sea.

Others believe that Shelley's boat was attacked by pirates who mistook it for Lord Byron's ship. There is also evidence, albeit scattered and contradictory, that Shelley may have been murdered for political reasons by an agent of the British government.

When Shelley's body washed ashore, he was cremated on the beach as per the requirements of the quarantine laws of the time. His heart was rescued from the pyre by his friend, writer / adventurer Edward Trelawny, and given to Mary Shelley, who kept it with her until the day she died, after which, it was interred next to her grave.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's classic poem, Ode To The West Wind. Enjoy!

Notes For July 31st, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On July 31st, 1919, the famous Italian writer Primo Levi was born in Turin, Italy. He was born to a liberal, intellectual Jewish family. His father worked for a manufacturing firm in Hungary, his mother played piano and spoke fluent French.

He had a younger sister, Anna Maria, to whom he was always close. As a young boy, Primo Levi was thin, shy, and sickly. When he entered the Massimo d'Azeglio Royal Gymnasium at the age of eleven, he was a year ahead of his schoolmates.

He was shorter than his peers, smarter than them, and the only Jew in school, which resulted in bullying. Despite his chronic illness, he passed his high school entrance exams at 14. Like all Italian schoolboys, he was required to join the Opera Nazionale Balilla.

The Opera Nazionale Balilla was the Italian Fascist equivalent of the Hitler Youth. Unlike the Nazis, Italian fascism did not include racist ideology. The National Fascist Party even had Jewish members. But this would change in a few years.

The teenage Primo Levi attended the Liceo Classico Massimo d'Azeglio, a high school known for its antifascist teachers, including philosopher Norberto Bobbio and novelist Cesare Pavese. Then, while he was studying chemistry in university, everything changed.

In 1938, a group of prominent Italian fascist scientists and intellectuals published the Manifesto of Race, a collection of theories in line with Nazi ideology. It declared Italians part of the Aryan race and Jews the enemy.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini personally had no anti Semitic convictions and was criticized by Hitler for not ridding Italy of its Jews. After the publication of the Manifesto of Race, the criticism intensified.

Believing it was necessary to strengthen the alliance between Italy and Germany, he passed the infamous Racial Laws, which stripped Italian Jews of their civil rights, public positions, and assets. Books by Jewish authors were banned.

This was a huge mistake on Mussolini's part, as many non-Jewish Italians - including his own supporters - hated the Racial Laws, which would be the catalyst that led to Mussolini's overthrow and public execution after the war.

As Primo Levi had matriculated a year earlier, he was allowed to remain in university, but had difficulty finding a supervisor for his graduation thesis. Still, he obtained his degree, though the Racial Laws blacklisted him.

So he took clandestine jobs, often using a fake name and fake papers. In 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III deposed and imprisoned Mussolini, prompting the Nazis to invade Italy and liberate him. By then, Levi was fighting for the Italian Resistance.

After he and his comrades were arrested by the fascist militia, Levi was sent to the Fossoli internment camp. When the Nazis took it over, he was sent to the Auschwitz death camp. Fortunately, as a professional chemist, he was useful to the Nazis.

This kept Levi alive - barely, as he subsisted on starvation rations. Then he met a man named Lorenzo Perrone. Neither a Jew nor a prisoner, Perrone was an Italian civilian laborer who had been forced by his employers to work at Auschwitz.

A master bricklayer, Perrone was horrified by what he witnessed in the camp. He struck up a friendship with Primo Levi and smuggled him a soup ration every day, which kept him from starving to death. He would never forget this act of kindness.

During his time in Auschwitz, Levi worked in a laboratory on a project to produce synthetic rubber. He saw his fellow Jews brutalized and exterminated en masse while he survived. It haunted him for the rest of his life.

Primo Levi had spent nearly a year in Auschwitz when the death camp was liberated by the Red Army in January of 1945. Malnourished and suffering from scarlet fever, he returned home a living corpse with a bloated face and traumatic memories.

Unable to find work in his hometown of Turin, he took long train trips to work in Milan. He would tell people he met on the train stories about Auschwitz. He decided to write about these experiences. His first book, a memoir, was published in 1947.

If This Is a Man opens with Levi's arrest by the Italian fascist militia and ends with the liberation of Auschwitz. He wrote the book in calm, sober prose, which made the horrors he described even more vivid and haunting.

At the time If This Is a Man was published, Levi had quit his job and started an independent laboratory with his old friend Alberto Salmoni. He had just married his wife Lucia. She gave birth to their daughter Lisa the following year.

That year, Primo Levi was reunited with Lorenzo Perrone, the bricklayer who saved his life. Unable to cope with what he'd seen inside Auschwitz, Perrone became a homeless alcoholic wreck and was suffering from tuberculosis when Levi rescued him from the streets.

Levi would close his laboratory, which had been located in Alberto Salmoni's parents' house, after it became too dangerous to produce chemicals there. He worked as a chemist for various companies while he wrote. He also became a Holocaust education activist.

Over the years, he visited over 130 public schools to talk about his experiences in Auschwitz and was stunned by the historical revisionism being employed by the conservative government's schools, which downplayed the scope of the Holocaust and Italy's role in it.

Levi also took Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to task for falsely claiming that the number of Russians killed in the Soviet gulags was the same as the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. The numbers were not even close.

Approximately 30% of prisoners in the gulag died, while the Nazis exterminated between 90 and 98% of their prisoners. Solzhenitsyn, who won the Nobel Prize, was later exposed as a lifelong virulent anti Semite, a fact that he deliberately hid from the Nobel committee.

Primo Levi's writings would include a second memoir, The Truce (1963), two novels, a poetry collection, several short story collections, and several essay collections, with the Holocaust and his work as a chemical engineer being major themes.

In April of 1987, a few months before his 68th birthday, Levi was killed in a fall from his third story apartment. His death was ruled a suicide. His biographers agreed with this, as he was suffering from depression and the stress of caring for his elderly mother and mother-in-law.

Other factors included his traumatic memories of Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, his fellow writer and fellow Holocaust survivor, said that "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later," but Levi's friends disputed the suicide ruling as he left no note and there were no warning signs.

They believe that Levi's death was an accident. He had plans for the short and long term future, and a few days before his death, he had complained to his doctor that he was suffering from dizzy spells.

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Quote Of The Day

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“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

- Primo Levi

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features an 89-minute tribute to Primo Levi, recorded live at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. Enjoy!

Notes For July 30th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On July 30th, 1818, the legendary English writer Emily Brontë was born in West Yorkshire, England. Her sisters Charlotte (author of the classic novel Jane Eyre) and Anne were also poets and novelists. Her brother Patrick Branwell Brontë was a poet and painter.

Their father was a poor Irish clergyman, but he did have an impressive collection of classic literature. Emily and her siblings educated themselves by reading all of his books. As children, they created imaginary worlds and filled notebooks with stories about them.

Emily attended Miss Patchett's Ladies Academy at Law Hill School near Halifax, then later, a private school in Brussels. When her sister Charlotte discovered her own talent as a poet, they decided to collaborate on a book of poetry, along with sister Anne.

Due to the prejudice against women writers in the Victorian era, the Brontë sisters, like other female authors, published their poetry undaer male pseudonyms. Emily took the name Ellis Bell, Charlotte became Currer Bell, and Anne's nom de guerre was Acton Bell.

Their first book, published in 1846, was titled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The following year, Emily Brontë published her classic novel, Wuthering Heights, as Ellis Bell.

Originally published in two volumes, (Anne Brontë later wrote a third volume called Agnes Grey) Wuthering Heights is rightfully considered one of the greatest Gothic novels of all time.

It told the unforgettable story of the intensely passionate, yet ultimately doomed love affair between childhood sweethearts Heathcliff and Catherine, soul mates who are ultimately separated by cruelty and snobbery, their unresolved emotions threatening to destroy them.

When it was first published, Wuthering Heights received mixed reviews due to its stark and brutal depictions of mental and physical cruelty. It has since been recognized as one of the all-time classics of English literature.

Unfortunately, Emily Brontë would never write another novel. After her brother died of tuberculosis, Emily contracted the disease herself, a result of a cold she caught during his funeral. She died in December of 1848, at the age of thirty. Her sister Anne died of tuberculosis the following year.

After Emily Brontë's death, her sister Charlotte edited her two volumes of Wuthering Heights into a standalone novel, and republished it under Emily's real name. Charlotte also died young of tuberculosis, or so her death certificate stated.

Some biographers have claimed that she actually died from either typhus or dehydration, as well as malnutrition from excessive vomiting brought on by severe morning sickness.

Although Emily Brontë's life was tragically cut short, her literary legacy lives on. Wuthering Heights continues to inspire readers to this day, and has been adapted numerous times for the stage, screen, radio, and television.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves."

- Emily Brontë

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Vanguard Vide

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Today's video features a complete reading of Emily Brontë's classic novel, Wuthering Heights. Enjoy!

Notes For July 29th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On July 29th, 1965, the famous Korean-American writer Chang-Rae Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea. When he was three, Lee's father moved the family to the United States so he could finish his psychiatric training. The family moved first to Pittsburgh, then to New York.

As a young Korean-American boy, Chang-Rae Lee struggled to learn English. His parents only spoke to him and his older sister Eunei in Korean, so they could learn to speak English without a Korean accent. In his mind, Chang-Rae found himself trapped between two very different languages.

He didn't speak at all when he entered kindergarten, but by the time he was ten years old, he had become fluent in both languages and served as a translator for his mother, who had even more difficulty learning English.

Chang-Rae Lee's experiences as the son of Korean immigrants would shape his future writing career. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive East Coast prep school, then went to Yale. Instead of following the path of most children of Korean immigrants and studying medicine or law, Lee majored in English. During college, he began writing fiction.

After graduating, he became an equities analyst for Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, a Wall Street investment bank, which he found unfulfilling, so, taking a cue from his old friend and prep school roommate, novelist Brooks Hansen, he quit to write full time.

Lee's unpublished early novel, Agnew Belittlehead, won him a scholarship and entrance to the creative writing program at the University of Oregon. After graduating in 1993, he was hired as an assistant writing professor by the University. That same year, he married his wife, Michelle Branca. She bore him two daughters.

In 1995, Chang-Rae Lee's first novel, Native Speaker, was published. In Lee's offbeat tale, Henry Park is a young Korean-American man who suffers from identity issues, alienation, and an inability to grieve for his seven-year-old son, who was accidentally killed by his white playmates in a freak mishap. The novel opens with Park's wife, who is also white, leaving him.

In an intriguing twist, Henry Park works as an operative for a shadowy detective agency whose clients hire it to dig up dirt on people. His psychological problems begin to affect his job, so he seeks therapy. Henry suffers from alienation because he was unable to fit in with either his parents' Korean culture or mainstream American culture.

As he struggles to find himself, he asks his employers for a second chance and is assigned to infiltrate the campaign of John Kwang, a popular Korean-American politician and candidate for mayor of New York City - a task made difficult by the fact that Kwang reminds Henry of his father.

Native Speaker earned Chang-Rae Lee both the prestigious PEN / Hemingway Award and the distinction of being the first Korean-American novelist ever published by a major American press. His second novel, A Gesture Life (1999), also dealt with identity and immigrant issues.

The novel, which won Lee the Asian American Literary Award, told the story of Doc Hata, a Korean who served in the Japanese Army during World War II. As a child, he had been adopted by a wealthy Japanese couple.

While serving as a soldier, Hata meets and falls in love with a Korean woman, who, like over 200,000 others, was forced to become a "comfort woman" for Japanese soldiers. After the war, Hata moves to America. A successful businessman, he fits in with his neighbors, but he is unable to connect emotionally with anyone.

He suffers from an identity crisis and is always at odds with his rebellious, mixed-race adopted daughter, Sunny. He adopted her when she was seven. Now a pregnant teenager, Hata forces her to have an abortion, hoping to save her from the failure that his life has become.

Lee's fourth novel, The Surrendered, published in 2010, was nominated as finalist for the 2011 Pultizer Prize. A gut wrenching antiwar novel, it followed three war ravaged characters.

June Han is a young girl who loses her family during the Korean War. Hector Brennan is the psychologically damaged American soldier who brought June to an orphanage, and Sylvie Tanner, wife of the orphanage's minister, witnessed the murder of her parents at the hands of Japanese soldiers in Manchuria as a little girl.

Lee's 2014 novel, On Such a Full Sea, is a work of dystopic, post apocalyptic science fiction set in a future America where there are only two classes of people: the extremely rich ruling class and the extremely poor working class.

With China so polluted that it's become uninhabitable, a large population of Chinese refugees now lives in America, where, like other working class people, they reside in formerly abandoned cities which have been turned into self-contained labor colonies.

The main character is Fan, a petite young Chinese woman who, like other other members of her class, works to produce food for the elite. She's a fish tank diver. When her boyfriend disappears, Fan embarks on a surreal, philosophical, and poetic quest to find him.

Chang-Rae Lee's most recent novel, My Year Abroad, was published in February of 2021. It tells the story of Tiller, an ordinary college student with heart but little ambition who meets Pong Lou, a brilliant and colorful Chinese-American entrepreneur.

Pong Lou sees something in the bored student and takes him on as a protege. He brings Tiller along on a wild trip across Asia in this novel that combines satire, caper comedy, romance, and bildungsroman.

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Quote Of The Day

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"People still vote for what they think they want; they're calling on a bright memory of a time that has gone, rather than voting for and demanding what they need for their children."

- Chang-Rae Lee

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Chang-Rae Lee discussing his most recent novel, My Year Abroad, on a New York Public Library livestream. Enjoy!