Notes For March 10th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 10th, 1926, the Book of the Month Club published its first selection through Viking Press. The Book of the Month Club was a mail order service for book lovers, founded by ad copywriter Harry Scherman and his partners, Max Sackheim and Robert Haas.

They first broke into the mail order book selling business in 1916 with their Little Leather Library, of "30 Great Books for $2.98" (about $82 in today's money) - miniature reprints of classic novels "bound in limp Redcroft."

In its first five years, the Little Leather Library sold 40,000 copies. After that, business slowed down, and customers clamored for new additions to their "30 Great Books."

So, Scherman and his partners came up with an idea for a new mail order business, one that would automatically ship a new book to customers once a month for them to review. The customer could choose from the main selection or an alternate selection.

Both selections would be chosen by a panel of judges based on literary merit. If the customer didn't like a particular book after reviewing it for a period of time, he could mail it back and not be charged for it.

The new service was called the Book of the Month Club. To induce customers to join the Club, they would be given a list of available books and invited to chose a few of them for one ridiculously low price.

Then, as part of their membership, the customers would agree to purchase a few books "at regular Club prices" within a certain period of time. The so-called "regular" prices were always higher than other booksellers' prices.

The Club published a monthly newsletter that allowed members to send in their own book reviews for others to read. The service would have a lasting impact on the publishing industry and the way books were marketed.

The first selection offered by the Book of the Month Club proved to be a shocker for the Club's 4,000+ members. It was Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman, the first novel of English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner.

In it, Laura "Lolly" Willowes is a 28-year-old spinster who suffers from the suspicion and disdain with which Edwardian (early 20th century English) society viewed unmarried women.

In Edwardian England, unmarried women couldn't be independent and self-reliant. They couldn't go out and earn their own money to support themselves. Instead, they had to live with relatives and perform thankless chores to earn their keep.

Lolly Willowes faces just such a situation, as she lives with her brother Henry, his wife, and their children. When she finally tires of living a life dedicated to meeting other people's expectations, she rebels in a rather unique way.

She becomes a witch, adopts a black cat, and makes a pact with the Devil to be a self-reliant woman and enjoy a life of peace, quiet, solitude, and independence. Or so she thinks.

The novel is actually a dreamlike Jane Austen-esque dark comedy written in an elegant, lyrical prose style. When Lolly meets a man she thinks is the Devil, she's surprised to find that he's handsome, charming, intelligent, understanding, and a good neighbor!

Lolly Willowes is a clever, darkly funny, metaphorical, existentialist novel of feminist determination that was way ahead of its time. It outraged the members of the fledgling Book of the Month club in 1926 who failed to grasp its metaphors and symbolism.

They saw it as a mockery of Christian family values - the very fabric of proper society - and a glorification of witchcraft, even though the supernatural elements were very understated.

The author, Sylvia Townsend Warner, was a controversial figure herself - she was an openly lesbian, outspoken feminist with an interest and expertise in the occult. Needless to say, she was the object of scorn and gossip in Edwardian England.

Although its first selection shocked and outraged its members, the Book of the Month Club became a huge success. Twenty years after it was founded, the Club had nearly a million members and its stock was traded publicly for the first time.

The Club would later merge with Doubleday and become Bookspan. Its business model would be used by other mail order services, including music and movie clubs, most famously the Columbia House Record and Tape Club, aka the Columbia House Music Club.

These successor services would come under fire for their shady business practices, including charging customers' credit cards for items they didn't want and refusing to honor membership cancellation requests.

Ironically, the services would be scammed out of their own money - a lot of money - by clever customers engaging in fraud schemes of their own. Ultimately, many services went out of business for these reasons.

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Quote Of The Day

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"When I die, I hope to think I have annoyed a great many people."

- Sylvia Townsend Warner

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a lecture on Sylvia Townsend Warner and her classic novel Lolly Willowes - the Book of the Month Club's first title - recorded at the University of Glasgow. Enjoy!

Notes For March 6th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 6th, 1927, the legendary Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia. He was born Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez. His parents left him in the care of his maternal grandparents and moved away to seek their fortune.

Gabriel adored his grandparents. His grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, was a hero of the Thousand Days War, Colombia's civil war of 1899-1902, where the Liberal Party revolted against the country's thoroughly corrupt conservative government:

My grandfather the Colonel was a Liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government.

Gabriel's grandmother, Doña Tranquilina, was a storyteller, and she would regale him with tales of ghosts, premonitions, omens, curses, magic, and such. She was "the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality."

It was she who inspired his literary style of magical realism, in which magical elements and events are injected into ordinary, realistic situations.

While studying law at the University of Cartagena, Gabriel García Márquez switched gears and began a career in journalism, during which he would serve as a reporter, columnist, and editorial writer. In 1955, Márquez was working as a writer for the newspaper El Espectador when he uncovered a major scandal.

A Colombian Navy vessel had been shipwrecked in a storm in the Caribbean. The entire crew was washed overboard by heavy waves. After four days, the search was called off and all the men were declared dead.

However, several days later, the sole survivor of the shipwreck, Seaman Luis Alejandro Velasco Rodríguez, was found off the coast of Colombia. He had been drifting on the sea in a raft for ten days - without food. Rodríguez was given a hero's welcome, military honors, and tons of publicity.

When Gabriel García Márquez interviewed Seaman Rodríguez, a much different story came out than the one trumpeted by Colombia's conservative government and the media outlets that served it.

The Colombian Navy vessel had been shipwrecked not by a storm, but by its poorly secured secret cargo - illegal contraband goods - which had broken loose on the deck.

Márquez published a series of 14 news articles on the shipwreck story. These articles would be published in book form as a nonfiction work called The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.

The result was a huge public outcry over the fact that the government had lied about the shipwreck. Feeling the heat, Márquez's employers exiled him to Europe to serve as a foreign correspondent.

Around the same time he wrote The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Gabriel García Márquez had published his first novella, Leaf Storm, a work of experimental fiction that takes place in one room during a period of thirty minutes.

The story tells of an aging Colonel - modeled after the author's grandfather - who tries to give a proper Christian burial to a hated French doctor.

Márquez would go on write more great novels, including One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). Steeped deep in magical realism and Latin American history, his novels also featured experimental narrative structures and non-linear plots. In 1982, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Márquez was considered highly controversial. Although he had become the most famous and celebrated writer in Latin America, he was denounced by right wing critics around the world, especially in the United States.

Márquez was a vocal opponent of U.S. imperialism and the suffering it caused in Latin America. This earned him the friendship of many Latin leaders, including Fidel Castro. For years, Márquez was deemed a subversive and denied entrance visas by the U.S. Department of Immigration.

However, when Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, he overturned the ban and allowed Márquez to visit America, boldly declaring that the author's classic work One Hundred Years of Solitude was his favorite novel.

In 1999, Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. He received chemotherapy at a hospital in Los Angeles. It was successful, and he went into remission. His last work published during his lifetime, a novella called Memories of My Melancholy Whores, was published in 2004.

Five years later, in 2009, Márquez's literary agent, Carmen Balcells, told a Chilean newspaper that the then 82-year-old author would never write another novel. Márquez vehemently denied this, saying "Not only is it not true, but the only thing I do is write."

The following year, an editor at Random House revealed that Márquez was about to complete a new novel called We'll Meet in August. Conceived as a sequence of short stories, the book would go unfinished, as the author's health was deteriorating.

In addition to his other novels and novellas, Gabriel García Márquez also wrote short story collections, works of nonfiction, and movie screenplays. He died in April of 2014 at the age of 87.

A couple of the short stories from We'll Meet in August would be published on their own. Publishers are hoping to reach an agreement with the author's heirs to release all of the completed stories in book form.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."

- Gabriel García Márquez

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a 25-minute retrospective on the life and times of Gabriel García Márquez. Enjoy!

Noytes

Notes For March 5th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 5th, 1954, Under Milk Wood, the classic play by the legendary Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, was published in London, England - four months after the author's untimely death. The "play for voices" was originally written for BBC radio.

Under Milk Wood features an omniscient narrator who invites the audience to listen to the dreams and thoughts of the people who live in the small, seaside Welsh village of Llareggub.

The Welsh-sounding name Llareggub is actually a crude English phrase - bugger all - spelled backwards. It's a classic example of Thomas's humor and love of wordplay.

Who lives in Llareggub? The twice married Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard's husbands are both dead - so she nags their ghosts. The blind Captain Cat dreams of his seafaring adventures and his long dead love, Rosie Probert.

Dai Bread, the village baker, who has two wives, (one for the day and one for the night) dreams of harems. Polly Garter pines for her dead lover and dreams of babies. Meanwhile, Nogood Boyo can't be bothered to dream at all, and Organ Morgan is obsessed with his music.

Those are just some of the 60+ characters in the play, as Thomas paints funny, affectionate, sensitive, and sometimes disturbing portraits of people he had grown up with in the seaside Welsh village of his childhood.

Under Milk Wood had been commissioned and paid for in advance by the BBC. Thomas turned over his handwritten manuscript to a professional typist. After the typed copy was returned to him, he lost it.

He phoned his BBC producer to report the loss and told the man that if he could find the missing manuscript, he could keep it. The producer did find it - in a Soho pub - (imagine that) resulting in legal wrangling over the rightful ownership after Thomas died.

Not long after he lost and regained his manuscript for Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas embarked on his final American tour, where he participated in the first reading of his play on May 14th, 1953, at the Poetry Center in New York City. His health had already begun to deteriorate.

Several months later, he would die at the age of 39. At first, Thomas was thought to have died of a cerebral hemorrhage, but then there were reports that he had been the victim of a violent mugging.

Thomas had been an alcoholic notorious for his drinking binges, so some said that he drank himself to death. Others claimed that he died of drug addiction, or succumbed to diabetes complications.

Actually, Thomas died from a severe case of pneumonia, which resulted in swelling of the brain due to lack of oxygen. He had been plagued with breathing problems for some time and used an inhaler. The autopsy showed that his liver was in surprisingly good condition, but there were signs of alcohol poisoning.

In his book Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas?, author David N. Thomas (no relation) claimed that Dylan Thomas really died from medical malpractice at the hands of his personal physician, Dr. Feltenstein.

Feltenstein had misdiagnosed Thomas's severe pneumonia as delirium tremens and given him morphine. Then, to cover his tracks, he pressured other doctors to conclude that Thomas died from complications of alcoholism.

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Quote Of The Day

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"An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do."

- Dylan Thomas

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete performance of Dylan Thomas' classic play Under Milk Wood by actor Roger Worrod. Enjoy!

Notes For March 4th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 4th, 1952, the legendary American writer Ernest Hemingway completed the manuscript for his classic final novel, The Old Man and the Sea. The novel would first be published in Life magazine that year.

Written while Hemingway was living in Cuba, The Old Man and the Sea was his favorite work, and with good reason. His previous novel, Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) was savaged by the critics.

They said that Hemingway was washed up as a writer - he had become a parody of himself. The Old Man and the Sea proved them wrong. It was the comeback novel of the decade, a success he desperately needed.

Hemingway's thrilling tale of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman far out in the Gulf Stream who struggles to reel in a giant marlin, won him tremendous praise by critics, who compared his novel with Melville's Moby Dick and Faulkner's The Bear.

The Old Man and the Sea also won Hemingway the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. I first read it when I was thirteen and in the eighth grade. My English teacher assigned the class to read this amazing book. I loved it and became a big Hemingway fan. I still am.

The Old Man and the Sea was first adapted as a feature film in 1958, starring Spencer Tracy as Santiago. Tracy's performance earned him an Oscar nomination.

Still, the film was a disappointment to Ernest Hemingway, who believed that Tracy was miscast - he looked like a rich old white actor, not a poor, aging Cuban fisherman.

A 1990 TV movie adaptation, starring Anthony Quinn as Santiago, proved to be even worse, with Quinn's solid performance sunk by a bad script and a low budget.

The Old Man and the Sea would prove to be Ernest Hemingway's last great work of literature. Nine years after it was published, in July of 1961, Hemingway committed suicide with his hunting rifle after suffering from health problems and mental illness.

Ironically, even though he had previously voiced the Catholic belief that all suicides go to Hell, the Catholic Church ruled that Hemingway was not responsible for his suicide due to mental illness. He was therefore allowed to be buried in a Catholic cemetery.

Hemingway's father and two of his siblings had also committed suicide, and years later, his granddaughter, actress Margaux Hemingway, would take her life. Some believe that haemochromatosis, which ran in Hemingway's father's family, may have been the cause.

Haemochromatosis is a genetic disease that causes an excessive level of iron in the blood, resulting in damage to the pancreas and instability in the cerebrum - which can lead to depression and mental illness.

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Quote Of The Day

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"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

- Ernest Hemingway

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of The Old Man and The Sea. Enjoy!

Notes For March 3rd, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On March 3rd, 1926, the famous American writer James Merrill was born in New York City. His father, Charles E. Merrill, was a founding partner of the Merrill Lynch investment firm. As a young boy, James enjoyed a very privileged upbringing. He had a nanny who taught him French and German.

When Merrill was eleven years old, his parents separated. They would divorce two years later. As a teenager, Merrill attended the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where he met and became friends with future novelist Frederick Beuchner.

When he was sixteen, his father surprised him by privately publishing a collection of his short stories and poems under the title Jim's Book. James Merrill would later regard this collection as an embarrassment.

In 1944, Merrill found himself drafted into the Army. He served an eight month tour of duty. When he returned, he resumed his interrupted studies at Amherst College.

One of his professors, Kimon Friar, who was also his boyfriend, privately published a collection of his poems in Athens, Greece. Only fifty copies of The Black Swan (1946) were printed, making the book one of the most sought after literary rarities.

James Merrill's first commercially published book was a poetry collection titled First Poems (1951). In 1953, after a performance of Merrill's play The Bait in New York City, the author met David Jackson, who would become his partner of four decades.

By 1955, they settled in Connecticut. During the first two decades of their relationship, they would visit Greece every year, vacationing in Athens. Merrill's writings often featured Greek themes, locales, and characters.

As a poet, James Merrill's style was elegant and witty. He was a master of wordplay, puns, and traditional poetic forms and meter, but he also wrote many works of free verse and blank verse.

By the 1970s, he had established himself as one of the finest poets of his generation. In 1973, he won the Bollingen Prize. His seventh poetry collection, Divine Comedies (1976), which included his famous narrative poem Lost In Translation, won him a Pulitzer Prize. Divine Comedies also included The Book of Ephraim.

The Book of Ephraim was the first part of a three-book epic poem that would be published first in installments, then in one complete volume as The Changing Light at Sandover (1983).

The 560-page epic poem, sometimes referred to as a postmodern apocalyptic epic, was supposedly the result of twenty years of Merrill's transcriptions of spirit voices channeled through a Ouija board at seances held by Merrill and his partner, David Jackson.

Merrill's friends, admirers, and the literary world itself were quite shocked by his interest in the occult. Whether the epic poem really was dictated by spirit voices is debatable.

There can be no doubt that the books contained in The Changing Light at Sandover represent one of the most dazzling - and longest - epic poems ever written. It won Merrill the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983.

One volume, Mirabell's Books of Number (1979), won him the National Book Award for Poetry. The Library of Congress awarded him the first Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for his 1988 poetry collection, The Inner Room.

Although trust funds established during his early childhood provided James Merrill with great personal wealth, he preferred to live modestly and use his wealth to fund his philanthropic endeavors.

He created the Ingram Merrill Foundation, (named after his mother and father) which subsidized literature, the arts, and public television.

He also provided financial assistance to his close friends, poet Elizabeth Bishop and celebrated experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, as well as anonymous donations to other writers and artists.

Though he was best known as a poet, Merrill also wrote three plays, two novels, and works of nonfiction including a memoir, A Different Person (1993).

In this classic memoir, James Merrill painted a candid portrait of gay life during the 1950s and described his crippling bout with writer's block, for which he sought psychiatric help.

He died of AIDS-related complications in 1995 at the age of 68.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication."

- James Merrill

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a rare recording of James Merrill reading his poem Voices from the Other World. Enjoy!

Notes For February 27th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On February 27th, 1807, the legendary American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine. A child prodigy, he began his schooling at the age of three. At six, he was studying Latin and reading Miguel Cervantes' classic epic novel, Don Quixote.

Longfellow was thirteen when his first published poem, The Battle of Lovell's Pond, appeared in the Portland Gazette. Two years later, he enrolled at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. There, he met legendary writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who became his lifelong friend.

After graduating in 1825 at the age of eighteen, he was offered a job as professor of modern languages at Bowdoin, on the condition that he travel to Europe to learn more languages. So, he embarked on a three-year European tour, where he became fluent in French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese.

While in Madrid, Longfellow met legendary American writer Washington Irving, who encouraged him to become a professional writer. Longfellow based his second book, a travelogue called Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea (1835), on his European tour.

Back in America, when he wasn't teaching at Bowdoin, he translated French, Spanish, and German textbooks. His first book, published in 1833, was a translation of the works of medieval Spanish poet Jorge Manrique.

In 1831, Longfellow married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Storer Potter. She died three years later from illness following the miscarriage of their only child. Her husband was devastated. At the time, he had been teaching languages at Harvard and had become fluent in Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic.

After losing his wife, Longfellow threw himself into his work, mostly to escape his grief. He worked on more translations and began publishing the poetry collections that would make him famous, such as Voices in the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841).

To escape his loneliness, Longfellow socialized with fellow writers and scholars. In 1839, five years after he'd lost his wife, he found himself falling love again, with Frances "Fanny" Appleton, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. She wasn't interested in him.

Nevertheless, Longfellow determined to win her heart, writing to a friend, "Victory hangs doubtful. The lady says she will not! I say she shall! It is not pride, but the madness of passion." After a tumultuous seven year courtship, Fanny's dogged admirer won her heart.

It almost didn't happen when Longfellow published Hyperion, a Romance (1839), a novel inspired by their early courtship. The protagonist, Paul Flemming, a grief stricken American wandering through Germany, meets an Englishwoman named Mary Ashburton and determines to win her heart.

When Fanny learned that she was the inspiration for the character of Mary Ashburton, she was neither flattered nor amused. Longfellow wouldn't give up. When in a letter she finally agreed to marry him, he walked 90 minutes to her home rather than wait for a carriage.

The couple would remain together for eighteen years and have six children before tragedy struck again. In July of 1861, Fanny was trying to seal an envelope with hot wax when her dress caught fire. Her screams woke Longfellow from his nap, and he tried to save her.

Severely burned, Fanny was tended by a doctor who administered ether to her throughout the day and night. She died the next morning. Longfellow had been burned as well, but he would recover physically, growing a beard to hide his facial scars. Emotionally, he was destroyed.

Longfellow had used laudanum (a tincture of opium) to ease the pain of his burns; now physically healed, he used the drug to ease the pain of his depression. He feared that he might go insane and begged his family not to send him to an asylum. He determined to write again.

By now, Longfellow had become the most famous poet in America, and one of the richest writers as well. He continued to write poetry collections and novels. In 1867, he published his greatest work as a scholar - a translation of Dante Alighieri's classic poem, The Divine Comedy.

Longfellow also devoted his later years to social causes. A prominent abolitionist, he denounced slavery and supported the Union during the Civil War. He opposed a prewar compromise to allow slavery to preserve the union, but hoped that the Northern and Southern states could reconcile after the war ended.

As a poet, Longfellow was known as a master of lyric poetry. A versatile poet, he experimented with both traditional and free verse, using anapestic and trochaic forms, heroic couplets, ballads, sonnets, and blank verse - unrhymed iambic pentameter.

His greatest poems include Paul Revere's Ride, The Village Blacksmith, The Wreck of the Hesperus, and his classic epic poems, Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha, which was based on Ojibwe tribal legends.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow died of peritonitis in 1882 at the age of 75.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's classic epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha. Enjoy!

Notes For February 26th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On February 26th, 1802, the legendary French writer Victor Hugo was born in Bensancon, France. He grew up during an important time in French history; when he was two years old, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor. By the time Hugo turned eighteen, the Bourbon Monarchy had been restored.

The opposing forces that shaped French history during this time were reflected in Hugo's parents. His father Joseph was an atheist and a high-ranking officer in Napoleon's army, while his mother Sophie was an extremely devout Catholic and Royalist.

Although Victor Hugo was close to his controlling mother, against her wishes, he married his childhood sweetheart, Adele Foucher. They had five children. Their first, Leopold, died in infancy. Hugo's eldest daughter, Leopoldine, died suddenly at the age of nineteen - shortly after her wedding.

Leopoldine and her husband were aboard a boat that capsized; she drowned, and her husband died trying to save her. Hugo, traveling in the south of France with his mistress, was devastated when he read about Leopoldine's death in a newspaper. She had been his favorite daughter. He would write many poems about her life and death.

As a young writer, Victor Hugo's main influence was François-René de Chateaubriand, founder of the Romanticism movement in French literature. He vowed to be "Chateaubriand or nothing." Hugo's first book, a poetry collection titled Odes et Poésies Diverses, was published in 1822, when he was twenty years old.

It was well received and earned Hugo a royal pension from King Louis XVIII, but it was his 1826 poetry collection, Odes et Ballades, that established him as one of the greatest poets of his time.

Victor Hugo first made a name for himself as a novelist with his 1829 novella, Le Dernier jour d'un Condamné. (The Last Day of a Condemned Man). The story is narrated by a man condemned to death. He describes his life in prison and bears his soul to the reader.

He never identifies himself by name, nor reveals his crime, only hinting vaguely that he killed someone. On the day of his execution, he is reunited with his three-year-old daughter, who doesn't recognize him. The novella would have a profound influence on great writers such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Two years after his novella Le Dernier jour d'un Condamné was published, Hugo released what would become his first classic full-length novel. Notre-Dame de Paris, best known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), was a huge critical and commercial success.

The tragic love story dealt with social injustice - the recurring theme in Hugo's prose. Set in late 15th century Paris, the novel tells the tale of Quasimodo, a deformed hunchback who lives in the Notre Dame cathedral, where he serves as the bell ringer.

The townspeople despise and shun him because of his deformities, and his adoptive father, a depraved priest named Claude Frollo, cruelly mistreats him. Quasimodo soon falls in love with Esmeralda, a beautiful Gypsy dancer, who has captured the hearts of most men in town, including Claude Frollo.

Esmeralda's physical beauty is nothing compared to her inner beauty, as she is very kind and compassionate. When the lust-crazed priest sends Quasimodo to kidnap Esmeralda, he is caught, beaten, and ordered to remain out in the searing heat. Esmeralda brings him water.

When Esmeralda falls in love with Phoebus de Chateaupers, the captain of the King's Archers, the jealous Claude Frollo nearly murders him in a fit of rage, then frames Esmeralda for the crime. She is sentenced to be hanged, but Quasimodo saves her from the gallows and takes her to the cathedral.

There, she would be safe under the law of sanctuary, but then the King vetoes the law and commands his troops to take Esmeralda from the cathedral. Claude Frollo betrays her and hands her over to them, then watches her hang.

Quasimodo kills the evil priest, then goes to the graveyard, where he climbs into Esmeralda's grave and dies with her. A year later, the skeletons of Esmeralda and Quasimodo are found locked in an embrace.

Victor Hugo's greatest novel was his legendary masterpiece, Les Miserables (1862), a dazzling 1,200+ page epic novel that took the author 17 years to write. Originally published in five volumes, Les Miserables opens in Digne in 1815, as poor peasant Jean Valjean is released from prison.

He served nineteen years - five years for stealing bread to feed his starving sister, plus an additional fourteen years for his frequent escape attempts. Forced to carry a passport that identifies him as a convict, Valjean finds himself scorned by society.

He becomes so angry and bitter that when the kindhearted Bishop Myriel takes him in, he steals the man's silverware, and later, a young boy's silver coin. The Bishop saves Valjean from the police and inspires him to repent and make an honest man of himself.

Valjean decides to return the silver coin he stole, then finds that the theft has been reported. Another conviction would result in a life sentence, so he goes on the lam. Using the alias Monsieur Madeleine, Valjean follows the Bishop's advice and reinvents himself as an honest, productive citizen.

All the while, he is pursued relentlessly by police Inspector Javert. Later, Valjean reveals his true identity when Javert mistakenly arrests an innocent man named Champmathieu whom he thinks is Jean Valjean.

When Valjean has a chance to kill Javert and escape, he refuses to do so, and for the first time, the policeman recognizes the immorality of the law to which he has dedicated his life. It drives him to suicide.

In addition to the story of Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert, Les Miserables follows many other characters, who also face the specter of social injustice.

The novel, rightfully considered one of the greatest ever written, has been adapted numerous times for the stage, screen, and television. The most famous adaptation, a hit Broadway musical, was itself adapted as a film in 2012, starring Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean.

Victor Hugo became involved in politics, where he would fight the social injustices he had written about. In 1841, King Louis-Philippe elevated him to the peerage, and he entered the Higher Chamber as a pair de France, (nobleman) where he spoke out against the death penalty and other forms of social injustice. He advocated freedom of speech and a free press.

Hugo soon tired of the monarchy and became a supporter of the Republican form of government. Thus, when the Second Republic was formed in France following the 1848 Revolution, Hugo was elected to the Constitutional Assembly and the Legislative Assembly.

When Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) seized total power in 1851 and established an anti-parliamentary constitution, Hugo openly denounced him as a traitor to France. The writer went into exile, living in Brussels and Jersey before settling in with his family on the channel island of Guernsey, where he would live until 1870.

While in exile, Hugo used his influence to help fight social injustice in other countries. He also wrote and published his famous anti-Napoleon III pamphlets, which, although banned in France, made a huge impact there. When Hugo returned to France in 1870 to a hero's welcome, he was elected to the National Assembly and the Senate.

Victor Hugo's writings were also influenced by his religious views, which changed radically over the years. At first, he was a devout Catholic like his mother, but then he came to loathe the Church, which he perceived as being indifferent to the plight of the poor and the oppression of the monarchy.

That Hugo's novels made the Pope's official banned books list didn't help, and he saw over 700 attacks on Les Miserables by the Catholic press. Hugo developed a lifelong seething hatred of the Catholic Church.

When his sons died, they were buried without a crucifix or priest, and Hugo's will stipulated the same for his own death. Despite his deep hatred of the Church and religion in general, Hugo was known to be a very spiritual man who believed in the power of prayer.

His last great novel, Quatre-vignt-Treize (Ninety-Three) was published in 1874. He died in 1885 at the age of 83.

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Quote Of The Day

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"It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life."

- Victor Hugo

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading of Volume 1, Part 1 of Victor Hugo's classic epic novel Les Miserables. Enjoy!