Notes For September 6th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On September 6th, 1963, the famous American writer Alice Sebold was born. She was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia. After graduating from Great Valley High School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, Alice enrolled at the University of Syracuse.

Her professors, including Raymond Carver, Tess Gallagher, and Tobias Wolff, would become her literary mentors. It was during her freshman year at university that a horrific event occurred that changed her forever.

Late one night, on May 8th, 1981, Alice Sebold was walking through a park en route to her off-campus apartment when she was attacked by a rapist. She survived the attack and reported the crime to police.

The police told her that a young woman had been raped and murdered in the same area. They suspected that the murderer was the same man who had raped Alice. She was lucky to be alive.

Five months after her rape, while the investigation was still ongoing, Alice was walking down a street near her campus when she spotted a man whom she recognized as her rapist. He smirked at her and quipped that he knew her "from somewhere."

She immediately informed the police, who found the man and arrested him. At the trial, Alice bravely testified against her rapist. He was convicted and given the maximum sentence. After the conviction, someone broke into Alice's off-campus apartment and raped her roommate.

After graduating from the University of Syracuse, Alice Sebold moved to Texas to do her graduate work at the University of Houston. Still traumatized by her rape, she dropped out of school.

She fell into drug addiction, using heroin on and off for two years. After leaving Houston, she moved to Manhattan, where she lived for ten years. She determined to kick her drug habit. She also determined to become a writer.

Alice got off drugs and worked as a waitress to support herself. She wanted to tell her own story, to give other rape victims encouragement and hope. She moved to Southern California.

For a time, she worked as caretaker of an arts colony, living in a cabin in the woods. It had no electricity, so she wrote by the light of a propane lamp. Later, in 1995, she enrolled at the University of California, Irvine to finally finish her graduate work.

By 1999, her first book, a memoir of her experience as a rape victim, was published. Remembering how the police had told her how lucky she was to be alive, she titled her book Lucky. In it, she poignantly described how the rape affected not just her, but her family and friends as well.

She speculated that the rape of her roommate at their apartment, committed shortly after the conviction of her own rapist, was an act of retaliation - a theory that the police were never able to prove.

After the publication of Lucky, Alice Sebold began working on another book - her first novel. In it, she told the story of another victim of a horrible crime, but with an intriguing twist.

Narrated by the spirit of a recently murdered teenage girl, The Lovely Bones (2002) opens in December of 1973 with 14-year-old Susie Salmon walking home from school. Along the way, she takes a shortcut through a cornfield.

There, Susie runs into her neighbor, George Harvey - a 36-year-old loner who builds dollhouses for a living. He lures her away, then rapes and murders her. Then he dismembers her body, dumping her remains in a sinkhole.

Meanwhile, Susie's spirit ascends to Heaven - a surreal, tranquil afterlife seemingly customized for each individual soul - where she watches how her murder affects her family and friends.

Despite the strong circumstantial evidence, Susie's parents refuse to believe that she's dead until her remains are discovered. While investigating Susie's murder, the police question her killer, George Harvey. He strikes them as a weirdo, but they don't suspect him of murder.

However, Susie's father, Jack, and her younger sister, Lindsey, do suspect that Harvey is the killer. Susie's four-year-old little brother Buckley can sometimes see her watching from her heaven.

When Lindsey sneaks into Harvey's house and finds some incriminating evidence, the police still refuse to arrest him, satisfied with his explanation. This enables him to leave town before the police can close in on him.

By the time evidence is discovered proving conclusively that Harvey murdered Susie Salmon and had killed other girls before her, he has fled to stalk more young victims.

Susie meets some of Harvey's other victims in Heaven. Curious as to why he killed her and them, Susie looks into his past and experiences his horrific childhood memories. She also sees how he has struggled to resist his compulsion to kill and failed miserably.

As she watches over her family, Susie witnesses the destruction of her parents' marriage, as her mother, Abigail, has an affair with the police detective in charge of Susie's case.

Later, Abigail walks out on her husband and children, ultimately moving to California. Her mother, Grandma Lynn, moves in to help care for the children. Buckley is deeply hurt and angered by his mother's selfishness.

When Susie is granted the ability to return to life briefly, she temporarily switches places with her former classmate Ruth Connors so she can make love to Ruth's boyfriend, Ray Singh - Susie's childhood sweetheart, the first boy she ever kissed.

Eventually, Susie decides to move on to another part of Heaven, watching her family occasionally over the years, hoping that they'll be able to come together and help each other heal and move on.

The novel ends with Susie's family finally beginning to heal. Her killer, George Harvey, who was never caught by the police, is killed in a freak accident while stalking his latest victim. But was it really an accident?

Unlike Lucky, which had only been modestly successful, The Lovely Bones became an overnight sensation and runaway bestseller. It sold over a million copies and stayed on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for over a year.

It won Alice Sebold the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award, as well as the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. Christian fundamentalists complained about the author's concept of the afterlife.

They agreed with critic Philip Hensher, who said it was, "a very God-free heaven, with no suggestion that anyone has been judged, or found wanting." Most readers felt that Sebold's concept of the afterlife was fascinating.

In 2009, The Lovely Bones was adapted as a feature film by director Peter Jackson, best known for his Lord of the Rings series and his dreadful remake of the classic film, King Kong.

The reviews for the film adaptation of The Lovely Bones were largely negative. Most fans of the novel hated the movie, which took great liberties with the story. They hated the cinematography, the special effects, and Jackson's inept yet pretentious direction.

Stephanie Zacharek, film critic for Salon.com, opined that the movie was "an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood and the poetry of its source material, [with] good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects."

The late, legendary film critic Roger Ebert gave it 1.5 out of 4 stars, calling it "Deplorable... the makers of this film seem to have given slight thought to the psychology of teenage girls... and none at all to the likelihood that if there is [an afterlife,] it will not resemble a happy gathering of new Facebook friends."

In November of 2021, Anthony Broadwater, the man who had been convicted of raping Alice Sebold, was exonerated of the crime, which came as a shattering revelation to her. Released in 1999 after serving 16 years, Broadwater had always maintained his innocence.

It turned out that Broadwater, a black man, was the victim of racist malicious prosecution. Sebold had actually identified someone else in a lineup as her rapist. The prosecutor then lied to Alice, telling her that Broadwater and the similar looking man she identified were friends and trying to trick her.

Also, Sebold had written in Lucky about how the prosecutor coached her into changing her identification. This and the only other evidence against Anthony Broadwater, a type of forensic hair analysis long since discredited as unreliable, resulted in his exoneration.

Sebold publicly apologized to Broadwater, saying that the case left her struggling "with the role that I unwittingly played within a system that sent an innocent man to jail," and that Broadwater, who said that he felt no anger toward her, "became another young Black man brutalized by our flawed legal system. I will forever be sorry for what was done to him."

She and her publisher pulled her now discredited memoir Lucky out of print in all formats until they decide how, if at all, it can be revised. A planned feature film adaptation of the book was scrapped.

Alice Sebold's most recent novel, The Almost Moon, was published in 2007. Beginning with the line "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily," it told the story of Helen Knightly, an artist's model and divorcee, who murders her mother - an agoraphobic now suffering from severe dementia - by smothering her with a towel.

What at first seems like an almost unconscious act committed to end her mother's suffering may really be the fulfillment of a long buried desire for vengeance. After killing her mother, Helen recalls memories of her entire life and her desperate attempts to win the love of a woman who, despite giving birth to her, never had any love for her.

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Quote Of The Day

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"I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't."

- Alice Sebold

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Alice Sebold discussing her classic debut novel The Lovely Bones on The Charlie Rose Show. Enjoy!

Notes For September 5th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On September 5th, 1957, On the Road, the classic novel by the legendary American writer Jack Kerouac, was published. Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, had been published several years earlier in 1950.

Like On the Road, The Town and the City also received mixed, mostly positive reviews from critics, but its style was completely different - a mainstream novel seasoned with Kerouac's unique vision and poetic prose.

Getting the book published was a nightmare. His publisher, Harcourt, demanded that he cut hundreds of pages and change the narrative to make it more commercial. The reviews may have been mostly good, but after all that editing, sales were poor.

In the seven years that passed between his first and second novels, frustrated by the commercial failure of The Town and the City, Kerouac vowed that he would never again compromise his true vision for commercial success.

He outlined that vision in his classic essay, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose (1950), likening it to his favorite music, bebop jazz, which possessed a remarkably expressive fluidity despite its experimental, improvised nature. Not everybody got it; Truman Capote famously said of it, "That's not writing, that's typing."

Kerouac began writing On the Road in 1951. He would complete the first draft in just three weeks, in a wild, benzedrine fueled dance marathon with the muse. He wouldn't let annoying things like having to load new sheets of paper into his typewriter get in the way.

He typed his entire manuscript on a 120-foot long scroll of paper, which he cut and spliced together during the editing process. The novel's original format was one long, single-spaced paragraph, with no breaks or margins.

At first unable to get On the Road published, Kerouac took off on another road trip that would take him around the U.S. again and to Mexico. He kept writing, and began developing material which he turned into ten more novels.

Finally, in 1957, Viking Press agreed to publish On the Road. Fearing libel suits, Viking demanded that Kerouac use pseudonyms for his famous friends who appeared in the autobiographical novel. They also demanded that he cut some graphic sexual content that might be deemed legally obscene.

Although On the Road received mixed reviews from critics, it would become commercially successful beyond Jack Kerouac's wildest dreams - and worst nightmares. It became the bible of a counterculture of disillusioned American youths known as the Beat Generation.

What exactly was the Beat Generation and what did they see in On the Road? Some say Beat meant "beaten down." Kerouac defined it as beatific, or saint-like. The Beats were the generation of youth whose parents were the architects of World War II. The kids' hopes for a better postwar world were immediately dashed.

A new war was declared by the older generation, a Cold War against the Soviet Union. The home front proved even more frightening and uncertain than during the conflict that preceded it. American youth lived under the terrifying specter of the atomic bomb, as nuclear war between the Soviets and the West seemed inevitable.

The Cold War also brought with it the Red Scare, a climate of distrust, anticommunist paranoia, and persecution. One could actually be denounced and arrested for thinking the wrong thoughts and expressing them in a country founded on the principles of free speech and expression.

On the Road was published during an era of numbing cultural banality and relentless conformity. It spoke to the young generation in a way that nothing else did. It was an existential Homeric odyssey where the heroes reject the establishment and embark on a quest to find themselves.

Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac's alter ego) and his hyperkinetic best friend Dean Moriarty (Beat icon Neal Cassady) hit the road in December of 1948. Along the way, they make friends including the young poet Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg) and grizzled, eccentric writer Old Bull Lee. (William S. Burroughs)

As they follow the road across the country and south of the border in search of themselves, Sal and Dean drink wine, smoke grass, make love to women, and of course, listen to lots of jazz. They make a few bucks here and there to keep the trip going.

After their last great party at a bordello in Mexico, Sal and Dean part ways. Sal has found himself and achieved a Zen-like inner peace, taking pleasure in simple things. He settles down with his true love, Laura. Dean, however, can't settle down and hits the road again for more kicks.

Sal knows that his best friend Dean is really a self-centered rat at heart, but he can't help feeling affection for him. The novel ends with Sal rhapsodizing:

Old Dean's gone, I thought, and out loud I said, "He'll be all right." And off we went to the sad and disinclined concert for which I had no stomach whatever and all the time I was thinking of Dean and how he got back on the train and rode over three thousand miles over that awful land and never knew why he had come anyway, except to see me. So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

It didn't take long before every self respecting Beatnik and aspiring hipster had a copy of On the Road on his coffee table, along with Allen Ginsberg's celebrated poetry collection Howl and Other Poems (1956) and William S. Burroughs's classic novel, Naked Lunch (1959).

The works of these legendary Beat authors would influence generations of writers and inspire the 1960s hippie counterculture. Despite the worldwide fame his novel brought him, Kerouac never wanted to be a celebrity - he just wanted to be a respected writer.

Jack Kerouac, the rebellious, free spirited hipster who was once savagely beaten outside of a bar by a group of conservative men claiming that On the Road was a bible of immorality corrupting the youth of America, had himself become conservative.

He was able to avoid being infected by the virulent anti-Semitism of his French Canadian immigrant parents, but not by their fanatically devout Catholicism, though he became a Buddhist for a time and wrote a biography of the Buddha called Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha (1955).

He incorporated Buddhist teachings and philosophy into his novels, including The Dharma Bums (1958), his classic follow-up to On the Road. When respected American Buddhist leaders dismissed his take on Buddhism, a hurt and bitter Kerouac returned to Catholicism and became a recluse.

The once great writer spent his final years drinking heavily and ranting about hippies and communists. He once said, "I'm Catholic, and I can't commit suicide, so I'm going to drink myself to death," and he did just that, dying from an esophageal hemorrhage - a complication of cirrhosis of the liver - in 1969 at the age of 47.

In recent years, scholars have speculated that Jack Kerouac's downfall was the end product of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) resulting from multiple head injuries. When he played football in college, he suffered a concussion so severe that he was knocked unconscious. When he woke up, he didn't know who or where he was, or what he was doing on the field.

It wasn't until after he'd taken that horrific beating outside the bar in New York, which included having his head slammed repeatedly into the pavement by the conservative thugs who attacked him, that his friends began to notice startling changes in his behavior.

The formerly shy, quiet, fun loving and sweet-natured writer began suffering severe mood swings which ranged from sudden outbursts of rage to crippling depression with unexplained crying jags that could last all night. He was coming apart at the seams and it only got worse. His alcohol and drug use escalated alarmingly.

In a letter to a friend, Kerouac himself wrote, "I think I got brain damage."

In 2007, Viking Press finally published the uncensored version of On the Road as a 50th anniversary edition and Kerouac's original unedited manuscript for the novel as On the Road: The Original Scroll.

After numerous failed attempts to bring On the Road to the screen, a feature film adaptation was finally produced. Directed by Walter Salles and starring Sam Riley and Garrett Redlund as Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, the film was released theatrically in December of 2012 and is currently available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and streaming.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain."

- Jack Kerouac

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Jack Kerouac's classic novel, On the Road. Enjoy!

Notes For September 4th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On September 4th, 1908, the legendary African-American writer Richard Wright was born. The grandson of former slaves, Wright was born on the Rucker plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, after which, his family moved to Memphis, Tennessee.

Unable to find work, Wright's father abandoned the family. Wright's mother, a schoolteacher, supported herself and her children. When she fell ill in 1914, Richard Wright and his brother were sent to a Methodist orphanage.

After Wright's mother recovered, she and her sons moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with relatives. First, they lived with Wright's maternal grandmother, Margaret Wilson, then they went to stay with an aunt and uncle in Elaine, Arkansas.

After Wright's uncle was murdered by whites, the family fled to West Helena, Arknsas, where they lived in hiding in rented rooms. After moving back and forth between West Helena and Elaine, Wright's mother had a stroke.

In 1919, Richard Wright reluctantly decided to live with another aunt and uncle, Jody and Clark, in Greenwood, Mississippi, so he could be near his ailing mother. Unfortunately, Aunt Jody and Uncle Clark turned out to be fanatically religious Seventh Day Adventists.

Making his life miserable with their extreme strictness and maniacal devotion to their faith, their fanaticism nearly drove Wright to a nervous breakdown, so he was allowed to move back with his grandmother. Unfortunately, she was also a Seventh Day Adventist.

When she refused to let him work on Saturdays - the Adventist Sabbath - Wright threatened to leave home. This atmosphere of religious fanaticism and family conflict would instill in him a lifelong seething hatred of religion.

As a teenager, Richard Wright attended a public high school and excelled in academics. At the age of fifteen, he wrote his first short story, The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre, which was published in a local black newspaper called The Southern Register.

In 1923, Wright became his high school's sophomore class valedictorian, but he refused to deliver the speech written for him by the assistant principal - a speech specifically designed not to offend the school's white officials in any way.

Willing to make a few compromises, Wright was able to convince the black administrators to allow him to give the speech that he had originally written for the graduation ceremony.

The following year, Wright attended the newly built Lanier High School in Jackson, but dropped out to work to support his family. His childhood in Tennessee and Mississippi exposed him to the horrors of racism and shaped his view of white America, which would later be reflected in his writing.

Although he had to leave school, Wright was determined to educate himself. In 1927, he moved to Chicago, where he took a job as a postal clerk. In his spare time, he became a voracious reader and studied the styles of other writers.

In 1931, Wright lost his job to the Great Depression and was forced to go on relief. A year later, he began attending meetings of the John Reed Club, an organization of left-leaning artists and writers.

Since most of the Club's members also belonged to the Communist Party, in late 1933, Wright joined the party, too. He became a revolutionary poet, and his proletarian poems, such as I Have Seen Black Hands, We of the Streets, and Red Leaves of Red Books, were published in The New Masses and other leftist magazines and newspapers.

In 1935, Richard Wright completed his first novel, Cesspool. This early work would be published posthumously in 1963 as Lawd Today.

When he wasn't publishing short stories, he worked with the National Negro Congress and chaired the Southside Writers' Group. He also served as an editor for Left Front magazine until 1937, when, despite his protests, the magazine was shut down by the Communist Party.

Although Wright enjoyed generally good relations with communists in Chicago, his insistence on giving young communist writers an outlet for their talents and his work with a black nationalist communist led to a falling out with the party and its top black leader, Buddy Nealson.

Wright found himself denounced as a bourgeois intellectual by other black communists, threatened at knifepoint by his communist sympathizer co-workers, denounced as a Trotskyite by strikers, and beaten by his former comrades when he tried to join them in their 1936 May Day march.

In 1937, Richard Wright finally left Chicago and moved to New York City, where he was humiliated when some fellow communists reneged on their offer to help find him an apartment after learning that he was black.

Wright was nonetheless able to forge new ties with the Communist Party after he became an established writer in New York. He worked on the New York Panorama (1938), the WPA Writers' Project's guidebook to the city, which included his essay on Harlem.

From there, Wright became the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker newspaper, for which he wrote over 200 articles. He also served as an editor for a short-lived literary magazine called New Challenge.

1938 proved to be an important year for Wright. He met and became friends with the prominent black writer and scholar Ralph Ellison, and his short story Fire and Cloud won first prize and $500 from Story magazine.

After he received the prize, Wright shelved his early novel Cesspool, fired his literary agent, and hired a new, prominent one. Harper agreed to publish a collection of all of Wright's prize entry stories. This collection was titled Uncle Tom's Children.

It brought Wright national fame and improved his relations with the Communist Party. It sold well, too, which provided him with financial security, and he began work on his classic first published novel, Native Son (1940).

Native Son tells the tragic story of Bigger Thomas, (his first name is a deliberate play on the racial epithet nigger) a black teenager who lives in a rat infested one room apartment with his brother, his sister, and their mother.

Bigger's life is a bleak maze of poverty, pool halls, and petty crime. That is, until he gets a job as chauffeur for the Daltons, a wealthy white family. The job requires him to live in the Dalton home. He loves having his own room.

Still, he's always on edge because he has no idea how to behave around white people and he's terrified of losing his job. The Daltons have a rebellious, left-leaning teenage daughter, Mary, whose boyfriend, Jan, is a communist.

One night, while Bigger is driving Mary around, they pick up Jan. The couple has Bigger take them to a diner where Jan's friends are. Bigger is asked to join the group and told to call everyone by their first names.

Bigger has never called a white person by his first name, which adds to his awkwardness and fear. Later that night, he drives around the park while Jan and Mary fool around in the back seat and drink rum.

After Jan leaves, Bigger drives Mary home. Since she's unable to walk because she's so drunk, Bigger carries her into the house, fearful that someone will see her in his arms. They pass by Mrs. Dalton, who is blind.

Afraid that she'll sense his presence, Bigger covers Mary's face with a pillow to keep her quiet. Mrs. Dalton smells the alcohol on Mary, scolds her, and leaves the room. Unfortunately, Bigger doesn't realize that Mary is suffocating under the pillow.

After her mother leaves the room, Bigger removes the pillow and finds that Mary is dead - he accidentally killed her. Terrified, Bigger panics, realizing that white people will never believe that Mary's death was an accident. He ultimately decides to stuff Mary's body in the furnace.

Later, Bigger visits his girlfriend Bessie. When she mentions a famous kidnapping case, Bigger decides to write a fake ransom note to make it seem that Mary has been kidnapped. The note works.

The Daltons hire a private detective. Later, the police take over the investigation. Reporters arrive at the Dalton house. After one of them finds Mary's bones in the furnace, Bigger flees. He goes to Bessie and confesses, and the two of them go on the lam.

Bessie is so terrified that Bigger has to literally drag her around with him. One night, he rapes Bessie, then realizes that he'll have to kill her to stay free. After bludgeoning her with a brick and throwing her through a window, he takes off.

In the newspapers, Bigger is vilified by both the white and black communities. The whites call him a murderous ape and the blacks hate him for giving the whites an excuse for their racism.

After leading the police on a wild chase over the rooftops of the city, Bigger is caught and arrested. Even though he caused Mary's death, her boyfriend Jan arranges for Bigger to be defended by a lawyer - a fellow communist named Max.

Max delivers a brilliant and eloquent defense wherein he explains how white society oppresses black people from the day they're born. Nevertheless, Bigger is convicted and sentenced to death. While on death row, Bigger finally calls Jan by his first name.

Native Son proved to be a huge critical and commercial success for Richard Wright. Within its first three weeks of publication, it sold 250,000 copies, making Wright the wealthiest black writer of his time.

The novel was one of the earliest attempts to portray the racial divide in America in terms of the socioeconomic conditions imposed on blacks by the dominant white society. Most of Wright's fellow black writers praised it, but some did not.

When in an essay, legendary African-American writer James Baldwin deemed the novel "protest fiction" rather than art, Wright was deeply hurt by the assessment. It would end their close friendship. Baldwin never meant to hurt Wright, but was unable to convince him of that.

In March of 1941, a stage play adaptation of Native Son, co-written by Richard Wright, opened on Broadway. The production was directed by Orson Welles and received mostly good reviews.

As a communist, Wright was blacklisted by Hollywood, but in 1951, a feature film version of Native Son was produced in Argentina. Richard Wright played the teenage Bigger Thomas himself, despite the fact that he was 42 years old at the time.

In 1945, Wright published his second-most-famous book, a classic autobiography called Black Boy. It was more an autobiographical novel than a straight autobiography, which was exactly the author's intention.

The following year, disgusted with America, Richard Wright moved his family to Paris, France, where he met and became friends with writers and philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. This resulted in Wright's classic existential novel, The Outsider (1953).

It told the story of a black man, Cross Damon (whom Wright modeled after himself) whose status as a Negro intellectual alienates him from whites and blacks alike. Damon has a "habit of incessant reflection" wherein he ponders the meaning of life.

Having rejected religion, mainstream society, the communist alternative, and his self-destructive behavior as the product of his own free will, Damon sees love as his last hope. But even that proves futile when his mistress commits suicide.

Throughout the 1950s, Wright continued to produce quality novels and stories, but none of them matched the raw power of Native Son. He returned to poetry when he fell in love with the Japanese haiku and wrote over 4,000 of his own haiku.

In 1957, while on a visit to Africa, Wright contracted amoebic dysentery. Despite receiving various treatments for the disease, his health deteriorated over the next three years. On November 28th, 1960, Richard Wright died of a heart attack in Paris. He was 52 years old.

After his death, as the civil rights movement in America gained momentum, Richard Wright became one of the most influential black writers in the country, his classic novel Native Son becoming essential reading again some twenty years after it was first published.

Many of his unpublished writings were published posthumously. In 1991, the original, uncensored versions of Native Son, Black Boy, and other works by Richard Wright were finally published in the United States.

Today, Native Son is best known as one of TV legend Oprah Winfrey's favorite novels. It remains one of the top selections of her book club. Winfrey co-starred as Bigger Thomas's mother in an acclaimed 1986 TV movie adaptation.

The novel would be adapted again as an HBO movie in April of 2019. It drew sharply mixed reviews due to the great liberties taken with the source material, including an alternate ending.

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Quote Of The Day

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"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all."

- Richard Wright

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading from Richard Wright's autobiography, Black Boy. Enjoy!

Notes For September 3rd, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On September 3rd, 1802, the legendary English poet William Wordsworth wrote his classic sonnet, Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.

Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were riding in a coach on their way to Calais, France, to meet with his French girlfriend, Annette Vallon, and Caroline, the illegitimate daughter he fathered with her. Wordsworth hadn't seen Annette since 1791.

He wanted to marry her then, but because France and England were teetering on war, he was forced to return to Britain. In 1802, the Treaty of Amiens allowed British subjects to travel to France, so Wordsworth and his sister went to see Annette and Caroline.

The idea was to reach an agreeable settlement of Wordsworth's financial obligations to them, so that he could marry his childhood sweetheart Mary Hutchinson with a clear conscience.

While on its way to France, Wordsworth and Dorothy's coach stopped for a moment on Westminster Bridge, giving the poet and his sister a surprising view of London, which at the time was a dirty place that had grown considerably since the Industrial Revolution.

London had grown exponentially in both wealth and population, but country folk were starving and dying in poverty, as they were afraid to move to an ominously large, dirty, and dangerous city that they barely knew.

Despite the dirtiness of the city, the surprisingly beautiful view of London in the early morning sunlight that Wordsworth saw inspired him to write the following sonnet:

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did the sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

This sonnet is a Petrarchan sonnet, (with an ABBAABBA CDCDCD rhyme scheme) and makes use of paradoxical metaphors such as "touching in its majesty" and "that mighty heart is lying still."

While Petrarchan sonnets employ iambic pentameter, the lines in this poem aren't exactly that. But they do have a kind of iambic rhythm. In his depiction of the scenery, Wordsworth shows us his skill as a Romantic poet. His sister, Dorothy, would describe the same view of London in her journal:

It was a beautiful morning. The city, St. Paul's, with the river, and a multitude of little boats, made a most beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge. The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke, and they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly, with such a fierce light; that there was something like the purity of one of nature's own grand spectacles.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."

- William Wordsworth

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading of William Wordsworth's classic poem Daffodils, performed by actor Sir Jeremy Irons. Enjoy!

IWW Members' Publishing Successes For The Week Ending 9/1/24

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Pamelyn Casto

Coop: Chickens of Our Poetry has published my prose poem, Gertrude Stein and a Socratic Wind Egg, in Zine #8. I had so much fun writing this one. I loved linking Stein, Socrates, Asclepius, and chickens together. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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Notes For August 30th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On August 30th, 1944, the famous American writer, journalist, and humorist Molly Ivins was born. She was born Mary Tyler Ivins in Monterey, California, but grew up in Houston, Texas.

Molly's father, Jim Ivins, was an oil company executive, and the family lived in Houston's affluent River Oaks community. Growing up under the thumb of a father known as General Jim because of his ferocious strictness, she developed a strong rebellious nature.

While in high school, Molly cultivated her interest in journalism and became an editor of the student newspaper. In 1963, while studying at Smith College, a liberal arts college for women, she became involved with Hank Holland, a family friend and student at Yale.

In Hank, Molly found a soul mate. She referred to him as "the love of my life." Sadly, he was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1964. Unable to find anyone who could replace Hank in her heart, she never married.

Molly would spend her junior year studying political science in Paris. After returning to the U.S. in 1967, she earned a Master's degree in journalism at Columbia University.

After earning her Master's degree, Molly moved to Minnesota, where she took a job as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune. Her editor assigned her to cover "militant blacks, angry Indians, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers."

By 1970, Molly had quit her job and returned to Houston, where she became a co-editor and political reporter for the Texas Observer. She covered the Texas state legislature from a liberal, populist perspective, employing the sparkling, scathing wit that would make her famous.

Her snappy, witty style of writing caught the eye of national publications. Soon, she was writing op-ed pieces and feature stories for The New York Times and The Washington Post.

In 1976, fearing that its writing style was becoming too stale, The New York Times hired Molly Ivins away from the Texas Observer. During her five year tenure, Molly established herself as one of the paper's finest writers.

When legendary rock singer Elvis Presley died in 1977, it was Molly Ivins who wrote his obituary for The New York Times. Ultimately, her colorful writing style would prove to be too colorful for her editor.

In 1980, when she covered a "community chicken-killing festival" in New Mexico, she referred to the event as a "gang pluck." Her irate editor, Abe Rosenthal, accused her of using a double entendre to arouse "dirty thoughts" in her readers' minds. Molly quipped, "Damn if I could fool you, Mr. Rosenthal!"

The following year, she left the The New York Times after accepting an offer from the Dallas Times Herald to write a column which she would have full creative control of. She would remain with the paper for ten years.

While she wrote her column for the Dallas Times Herald, Molly Ivins' fame would grow, as she also wrote freelance pieces for national publications and became a popular speaker on the lecture circuit.

In 1991, Molly published her first book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? - a compilation of some of her best pieces from the Dallas Times Herald, covering the redneck politics of Texas with her scathing wit and pointed criticism. The book spent 22 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.

Rival newspaper The Fort Worth Star-Telegram made Molly an offer to write a column for them, and she accepted. Her column would be syndicated, appearing in nearly 400 newspapers across the country. She wrote for the The Fort Worth Star-Telegram from 1992-2001, after which, she became an independent journalist.

When George W. Bush became President in the controversial 2000 election, Molly went after him with a vengeance. She gave him the famous nickname Shrub and wrote three scathing books about him and the spectacular failure of his presidency.

Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (2000), The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President (2001) and Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America (2003) delighted liberals and outraged conservatives.

Molly's disdain for George W. Bush is best summed up in this classic quote: "Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention."

Molly Ivins would write nearly a dozen books and win numerous awards for journalism. She died in 2007 at the age of 62, after a long battle with breast cancer.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful."

- Molly Ivins

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Molly Ivins speaking at Tulane University in 2004. Enjoy!

Notes For August 29th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On August 29th, 1833, Britain's Parliament passed the Mills and Factory Act, the first of many reforms enacted to improve the "health and morals" of child laborers - the most exploited members of the working class.

The Mills and Factory Act made it illegal for children under nine years old to work, limited the work week of children aged 9-12 to a maximum of 48 hours and limited the work week for teenagers to a maximum of 68 hours.

The Act also included minimum provisions for facilitating the education of child laborers and for protecting their health and safety. Although woefully inadequate by today's standards, the law was revolutionary for its time.

Why would Parliament, then notorious for its extreme reluctance to regulate British businesses in any way, pass the Mills and Factory Act, which for the first time ever granted national government inspectors unprecedented, unlimited access to factories?

And why, over the years, were more regulatory acts passed by Parliament - acts that were increasingly stricter, leading to the total outlawing of most forms of child labor?

It was all due to the efforts of England's greatest writers, whose works brought the horrific nature of unregulated child labor to national attention, sparking national outrage and demands for reform.

In 1789, the legendary poet William Blake published his classic poem The Chimney Sweeper, in which a child laborer tells of his unhappy plight:

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue,
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep.
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep...

Blake died in 1827 - six years before the Mills and Factory Act was passed. He spent his last years living in rooms off the Strand, near the alleyways where a child laborer named Charles Dickens walked en route to the job he detested.

Another great English writer who brought the horrors of child labor to national attention was Frances Trollope, whose classic novel, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy was published in 1840.

To ensure the accuracy of her novel, Trollope thoroughly researched child labor, combing through contemporary documents and reading the testimony of the victims of unregulated child labor. Most influential was a memoir written by a man named Robert Blincoe.

Blincoe became a workhouse orphan at the age of four. When he was seven, he and eighty other workhouse children, both boys and girls, were taken to work in a horrific textile mill in Nottingham. He would later testify before a Parliamentary committee investigating child labor abuses:

I have seen the time when two weights have each been screwed to my ears. Then three or four of us have been hung on a beam over the machinery, hanging by our hands. Mind, we were apprentices without a mother or father to take care of us. Then we used to stand up, in a skip, without our shirts, and be beat with straps. Then they used to tie up a 28-pound weight to hang down our backs.

Of course, the English writer who contributed the most to reforming child labor was the aforementioned Charles Dickens, who exposed the horrors of child labor in classic novels such as Oliver Twist (1837) and David Copperfield (1850).

As a child laborer himself, he saw these horrors firsthand. Dickens, a child prodigy, had lived a comfortable upper middle class life. Like other children of his class, he had felt a sense of superiority and entitlement.

Then, when he was twelve, his father went broke and was sent to debtor's prison. Charles was forced to work to pay off his father's debts. Angrily bemoaning his situation at first, he soon developed a deep, lifelong compassion for the poor and oppressed of all ages.

The passage of the Mills and Factory Act in 1833 and subsequent reforms to end the suffering caused by unregulated child labor is proof that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

The Mills and Factory Act was passed not because of a violent revolution at the workplace, but because England's greatest writers had the courage to speak out against the suffering of child laborers and use the power of their words to bring about change.

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Quote Of The Day

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"In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice."

- Charles Dickens

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Charles Dickens' classic novel, David Copperfield. Enjoy!