Notes For September 8th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On September 8th, 1924, the famous American writer Grace Metalious was born. She was born Marie Grace De Repentigny in Manchester, New Hampshire, which at the time of her birth was a poor mill town.

Grace was born to an impoverished family, the daughter of French Canadian immigrants, but as a child, she had big dreams and longed to be a famous writer. She would go to her aunt's house, sit in the bathtub, and spend hours writing stories. Her parents divorced when she was ten years old.

As a teenager, Grace attended Manchester Central High School, from which she graduated. When she was 18, she married her boyfriend, George Metalious. Her parents opposed the marriage because George was Greek. She would bear him three children, but the marriage was rocky from the start.

With World War II raging, George enlisted in the military, which kept him away from home for a long period of time. When he came back from the war, he was appalled to discover that instead of saving money, Grace had spent most of her salary supporting her sister, mother, and grandmother.

When George became a schoolteacher, Grace, a fierce nonconformist, refused to play the part of faculty wife. At a time when most women wore dresses, girdles, and bullet bras, Grace wore flannel shirts and blue jeans. She wore no makeup and kept her hair in a pony-tail. She was also a terrible housekeeper.

She would later write "I did not like belonging to Friendly Clubs and bridge clubs. I did not like being regarded as a freak because I spent time in front of a typewriter instead of a sink. And George did not like my not liking the things I was supposed to like."

Grace Metalious continued to write stories in her spare time, as she tried to build a writing career. When the family moved to Gilmanton, New Hampshire, where George accepted a job as school principal, Grace struck up a friendship with Laurie Wilkens, a writer for The Laconia Evening News.

Laurie told her about a lurid murder case that was in the headlines: a young woman had murdered her father after being sexually abused by him since she was a child. Grace read all she could about the case and even researched local gossip. It gave her an idea for a novel.

After she completed her novel, Grace tried to get it published. After receiving numerous rejections, Grace Metalious' classic debut novel was published in 1956.

It was called Peyton Place, and it caused a sensation - and an uproar. The novel was set in Peyton Place, a seemingly quiet and respectable small mill town in New England that proves to be neither quiet nor respectable.

The novel rips the lid off this picture-postcard-perfect town and exposes its seedy underbelly. It tells the stories of several different characters. Constance MacKenzie owns a dress shop. When she was young, she had an affair with a married man and became pregnant.

She returned to Peyton Place, claiming to be a widow, and forged her daughter's birth certificate. Constance lives in fear that her daughter Allison, now a young woman herself, will discover that she's illegitimate.

Selena Cross comes from "across the tracks" - the poor and tough area of Peyton Place. Her stepfather, Lucas, has been sexually abusing her since she was 14. After he impregnates her, Selena tries to arrange an illegal abortion. She ends up murdering Lucas and is put on trial.

The wealthy Harrington family owns the town mill, and they have their own skeletons in the closet. Peyton Place became a huge bestseller; by 1960, it had sold over ten million copies, despite the fact that it was so controversial - or maybe because of it.

The reviews were mixed; critics either loved it or hated it. Described as "Tobacco Road with a Yankee accent," the sexually frank novel was denounced by the clergy as wicked and sordid trash. Libraries refused to stock it. Some bookstores refused to sell it.

The Canadian government banned it outright. But readers passed it on to their friends, and teenagers stole their parents' copies. Grace Metalious added to the controversy when she claimed that her husband George lost his job because of her novel.

While Grace had proved herself a capable novelist, she was a poor businesswoman. Her book contract gave her editor control of the final draft. As a result, Lucas Cross was changed from Selena's biological father to her stepfather, as the publisher feared that real incest would be far too shocking a subject for 1950s readers.

When Peyton Place was adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1957, Grace was shocked and repulsed by the heavily sanitized screenplay, which bore little resemblance to her novel.

Unfortunately, when she sold the movie rights, she had given up creative control of the adaptation, so there was nothing she could do. When the novel was adapted as a popular TV series - a prime time soap opera that ran from 1964-69 - it too was sanitized.

By the time that the feature film was released in 1957, Grace Metalious had become a major celebrity and was booked on a promotional tour. In those days, publishers didn't teach their writers how to deal with the media.

Terrified of all the attention and insecure about her looks, Grace started drinking heavily. Although she and her husband both had affairs during their marriage, it was her alcoholism that broke them up.

Grace continued to write. Her next novel was a sequel, Return To Peyton Place (1959), that got slammed by critics. It sold well, but nowhere near as well as the original.

While she wrote it, Grace was still drinking heavily - so heavily that she had to hire a ghostwriter to help her complete the manuscript. After her divorce, Grace met and married her second husband, T.J. Martin, but the marriage lasted barely a year, as he tried in vain to mold Grace into what a successful writer should be.

Grace later reconciled with her first husband, George, and they bought a motel which they named the Peyton Place Motel. No one wanted to stay there, and it went bust, along with Grace and George's relationship, this time for good - she was drinking a fifth of whiskey a day.

She published two more novels, The Tight White Collar (1960) and No Adam In Eden (1963), neither of which were as successful as Peyton Place.

In late 1963, Grace met a British journalist named John Rees, who had come to interview her. They became lovers, but the relationship ended in early 1964 when, while traveling in Boston, Grace fell ill and was rushed to the hospital.

Three days later, on February 25th, 1964, Grace Metalious died of a hemorrhage that resulted from cirrhosis of the liver - the classic drunkard's death. She was 39 years old.

After her death, it was discovered that she had changed her will, leaving everything to John Rees. Grace's children contested the will. When they found that Rees was actually married with five children, he dropped his claim to the estate. The fact that Grace Metalious had accrued far more debts than assets no doubt influenced his decision.

To this day, Peyton Place remains one of the great cult classic novels. In 2007, the University of Manchester honored Grace Metalious with an in-depth examination of her life and work.

The celebration included readings from her novels and screenings of the Peyton Place movie. It was the first time that the town of Manchester publicly acknowledged its native daughter.

The information in this article was sourced from the biography Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious by Emily Toth. You can find this book at Amazon or at a bookstore near you.

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Quote Of The Day

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"If I'm a lousy writer, then a hell of a lot of people have lousy taste!"

- Grace Metalious

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features an AMC documentary on Grace Metalious' classic novel, Peyton Place. Enjoy!

Notes For September 4th, 2026

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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 complete reading of Richard Wright's autobiography, Black Boy. Enjoy!

Notes For September 3rd, 2026

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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 Sir Jeremy Irons.

Notes For September 2nd, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On September 2nd, 1946, The Iceman Cometh, the classic play by legendary American playwright Eugene O'Neill, opened on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theater.

Directed by Eddie Dowling, the play ran for 136 performances before it closed. It would be revived in 1999 and nominated for a Tony Award for Best Revival.

The Iceman Cometh, considered to be O'Neill's finest work, contained all the distinctive elements of an O'Neill play: dingy, run-down sets, experimental use of light and sound, and the dialogue of the common man, peppered with slang.

Often compared to Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths, The Iceman Cometh tells the story of a tavern full of skid row bums who cling to illusion in order to cope with the reality of their despair.

It's 1912, the place is a grubby saloon and rooming house in Greenwich Village, and the people are the patrons of the establishment. All of them are men, except for three women who are prostitutes. All are skid row alcoholics who seek solace in each other's company - when they're not trying to mooch free drinks from the bartenders.

They await the arrival of their friend Theodore "Hickey" Hickman, a traveling salesman who always stops by the bar to buy drinks for everyone after returning from his sales route. He regales the bums with stories and jokes.

This time, the bums are also expecting Hickey to plan a surprise birthday party for Harry Hope, owner of the bar and main bartender. (Harry Hope - isn't that a great name for a bartender?) Also in the first act, we meet Don Parrit and Larry Slade.

Don's mother is involved with an anarchist group, and she used to date Larry. Joe Mott is the only black member of the group. He used to own a black casino, which he plans to re-open.

Cecil "The Captain" Lewis is a former British Army infantryman who fought against Piet "The General" Wetjoen during the Boer War, but now the two men are good friends who both insult and defend each other. They insist that they'll go back to their countries soon.

Willie Oban is a graduate of Harvard who claims that he'll soon have a job at the D.A.'s office. Pat McGloin is an ex-cop and convicted criminal who hopes to appeal his case when the time is right.

Rocky Pioggi, the night bartender, hates being called a pimp, even though he makes most of his living from the earnings of hookers Pearl and Margie, in exchange for letting them live and work at the bar.

Hugo Kalmar is an ex-anarchist who often quotes from the Old Testament - when he's not passed out drunk, which is most of the time. James Cameron, a former newspaper correspondent, always says that he'll get a job tomorrow, hence his nickname, Jimmy Tomorrow.

Chuck Morello is the day bartender and the boyfriend of hooker Cora. He keeps telling her that he'll marry her tomorrow. Meanwhile, Harry Hope hasn't left the bar since his wife died twenty years ago.

Harry says that he'll go for a walk on his birthday; his brother-in-law, Ed Mosher, is a former circus box office ticket seller and con man with an uncanny talent for short-changing people.

All of these characters cling to their illusions, especially Hickey, who insists that in his new found sobriety, he finally sees life clearly. He chides his former drinking buddies for clinging to their pipe dreams, but Hickey's own illusions lead to tragedy.

A compulsive adulterer, Hickey has grown tired of his wife always forgiving him for cheating on her. So, because he really loves her, he puts her out of her misery and is arrested for her murder. His illusions shattered, he doesn't want to live anymore.

Don Parrit is driven to suicide by guilt after he turns in his mother for her anarchist activities. Though he tries to convince himself otherwise, Don finally admits that he turned in his mother because he hated her.

When he was a boy, she cared more about her anarchist group than him, and either ignored him or was domineering. Informing on her was an act of revenge for his unhappy childhood.

Eugene O'Neill's brilliant, gut wrenching, heartbreaking play would be the last one produced on Broadway before his death. It was adapted as an acclaimed film in 1973.

Directed by John Frankenheimer, the film featured a stellar cast including Lee Marvin, Fredric March, Robert Ryan, Jeff Bridges, Bradford Dillman, Sorrell Booke, and Moses Gunn.

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Quote Of The Day

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"To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober."

- Eugene O'Neill

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a rare, complete 1960 live TV performance of The Iceman Cometh, directed by Sidney Lumet. Enjoy!

Notes For September 1st, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On September 1st, 1875, the legendary American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago, Illinois. As a young boy, he attended several different schools. In 1891, when he was a teenager, an influenza epidemic swept through Chicago, so he was sent to stay at his brother's ranch in Idaho for six months.

After the epidemic was over, Burroughs resumed his education. He attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, then the Michigan Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1895.

He applied to the United States Military Academy at West Point, but failed the entrance exam. So, Burroughs enlisted in the military and became a soldier with the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona territory.

His military career was cut short when he was diagnosed with a heart condition and discharged in 1897. For the next two years, Burroughs became a drifter, working primarily as a ranch hand.

Then, in 1899, he took a job at his father's firm. In 1900, Burroughs married his girlfriend Emma Centennia Hulbert. Four years later, he quit his job and worked at menial jobs in both Chicago and Idaho.

After spending the next seven years working at low paying jobs, he found decent work as a pencil sharpener wholesaler. By this time, he and Emma had two children, and he had begun writing part-time.

Burroughs read many pulp fiction magazines and believed he could do better than the other writers whose works were published in them. His first published story was Under The Moons Of Mars, (1912) a serialization that appeared in The All-Story magazine.

It proved to be so popular that Burroughs was paid a whopping $400 for the entire work - the equivalent of about $11,000 in today's money. By the time the last part of the serialization was published, Burroughs had written two novels.

One of these novels was published in October of 1912 and would be the first in a series of over 30 novels featuring Burroughs' most famous character. Tarzan Of The Apes told the story of a white man raised by apes after his parents die.

His parents were an English couple, Lord and Lady Greystoke, who found themselves marooned in the African jungle. Adopted as an infant by a female ape named Kala, the boy is given the name Tarzan, which means white skin in the ape language.

Tarzan grows up to become a man of formidable intelligence, strength, and speed - a great hunter. He discovers his parents' cabin, finds their books, and teaches himself their language. The jealous ape leader Korchak attacks Tarzan, who kills him and becomes the new lord of the apes.

An African tribe moves into the area, and one of their hunters kills Kala. Tarzan avenges her death, beginning a war with the tribe. The tribesmen believe that Tarzan is an evil spirit they have offended. They try to placate him.

When other whites are marooned on the African coast, Tarzan spies on them and helps them. One of the castaways is a woman named Jane - the first white woman Tarzan has ever seen. He saves her life.

Unfortunately, while Tarzan is away, Jane and the others are rescued and leave Africa. After Tarzan saves French Naval Officer Paul D'Arnot from the natives, D'Arnot teaches him how to speak French and behave around "civilized" white men.

Eventually, Tarzan leaves Africa and is reunited with Jane in the United States, where he discovers to his dismay that she is engaged to marry his cousin, William Clayton, who inherited Tarzan's parents' estate.

For the sake of Jane's happiness, Tarzan decides to conceal his true identity and not claim his rightful inheritance. Tarzan would become one of the most popular literary characters of all time and cross over into comic strips, comic books, movies, and television.

The first movie adaptation, Tarzan Of The Apes, was a silent film classic released in 1918, starring Elmo Lincoln as the ape man. But the best known adaptation was the first sound film adaptation, Tarzan The Ape Man (1932), which starred Olympic champion swimmer turned actor Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan.

The 1934 film Tarzan And His Mate featured a surprising underwater nude swimming scene, but it wasn't leading lady Maureen O'Sullivan. A body double was used - Olympic swimmer Josephine McKim, who had competed along with star Johnny Weissmuller in the 1928 games.

The nude scene was cut after the Production Code crackdown was imposed later in 1934. It would remain cut until Turner Entertainment restored the scene for the movie's first videotape release in 1986.

In addition to his Tarzan adventure novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs also wrote many science fiction novels. Two of his most popular science fiction books were The Lost Continent (1916) and The Land That Time Forgot (1918), both of which were adapted as feature films.

The Lost Continent was set in the distant future - the year 2137 - where Europe has descended into barbarism while the rest of the isolated Western Hemisphere has not. Civilized people are forbidden to enter Europe.

The Land That Time Forgot is set during World War I. While drifting through the ocean in a captured U-Boat, a crew of British sailors and their German prisoners get sucked into a subterranean passage. They resurface hoping to find fresh water. They find that and something else - a lost land where dinosaurs still exist.

In 1923, Burroughs set up his own production company - Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. - where he printed his own books through the 1930s. Around the time of the Pearl Harbor attack that led the U.S. into World War II, Burroughs was living in Hawaii.

Even though he was in his late sixties at the time, Burroughs applied for permission to become a war correspondent. Permission was granted, and Burroughs became one of the oldest war correspondents for the United States. After the war ended, he moved to Encino, California.

Edgar Rice Burroughs died of a heart attack in 1950 at the age of 74. All in all, he had written over seventy novels. Tarzan remains one of the most popular literary characters of all time. The towns of Tarzana, California and Tarzan, Texas, were named after him, and the Burroughs Crater on Mars was named after his creator.

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Quote Of The Day

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"I write to escape... to escape poverty." - Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic adventure novel, Tarzan Of The Apes. Enjoy!

Notes For August 28th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On August 28th, 1749, the legendary German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born. He was born in Frankfurt, Germany, where he lived with his family in a large house.

Goethe's siblings, except for his younger sister Cornelia, died at early ages. As a boy, Goethe received his education from tutors, as his father determined to give his children all the educational advantages he never had.

The young Goethe quickly developed an interest in literature, with Homer and the German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock among his earliest favorite authors. He was also devoted to the theater and particularly fond of the puppet shows staged in his home.

When he was sixteen, Goethe began studying law in Leipzig, but came to detest it. He fell in love with a girl named Käthchen Schönkopf and wrote her love poems, but failed to win her heart.

Three years later, in 1768, Goethe returned to Frankfurt, as his studies were going nowhere. In 1770, he published his first book anonymously. It was a poetry collection called Annette.

Goethe wrote prolifically, but soon fell seriously ill. His relationship with his father strained, he was nursed back to health by his mother and sister. Bored during his convalescence, he wrote in bed. After he recovered, his father sent him to Strasbourg to finish his studies.

In Strasbourg, Goethe met poet and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, and they became close friends. Herder got him interested in Shakespeare's plays and in volkspoesie - folk poetry.

After he finished his law studies, Goethe's thesis, based on his own ideas, was published. He was offered a job in the French government but rejected it and returned to Frankfurt, where he was certified to practice law.

Working for the local government, Goethe tried to make the law more humane and progressive. As a result, he was reprimanded and terminated from his position. Disgusted with law, Goethe decided to pursue a literary career.

This time, his father was supportive of his decision and even helped him out. Goethe became an editor for a literary magazine, but he couldn't support himself on his small salary. So, in 1772, he went to Wetzlar to practice law again.

Two years later, in 1774, he published his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. The tragic tale was an important novel of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) era of German literature.

Goethe's novel, which mostly takes the form of a collection of letters, tells the story of Werther, a young, sensitive aspiring artist.

While staying in the fictional village of Wahlheim, Werther meets a beautiful girl named Lotte, who has been caring for her siblings since their mother died. Werther falls in love with Lotte, even though she's already engaged to marry Albert, a man eleven years her senior.

Werther becomes close friends with both Lotte and Albert, but his love for Lotte causes him too much pain, so he goes to Wiemar, where he suffers more embarrassment. Returning to Wahlheim, Werther finds that Lotte and Albert have married.

Lotte, feeling both sorrow for her friend and respect for her husband, decides that Werther shouldn't visit them so often. He makes one final visit, where he delivers a memorable recitation of a portion of Ossian.

Werther ultimately realizes that this painful love triangle can only be dissolved by the death of himself, Albert, or Lotte, but he is unable to harm Albert or Lotte.

Seeing no other choice, Werther has Lotte send him two pistols. He commits suicide, dying twelve hours after shooting himself. Neither Lotte and Albert nor a clergyman attends his funeral.

Quite controversial for its time, The Sorrows of Young Werther was accused of romanticizing suicide, which was considered sinful by Christian doctrine. Suicides were denied Christian burial. Goethe always loathed the Church, whose history he described as "a hotchpotch of mistakes and violence." He had no use for its doctrines.

The Sorrows of Young Werther became a huge success for Goethe and made him world famous, but it didn't make him rich. Copyright law was virtually nonexistent at the time and pirated editions of literary works were common.

Goethe thwarted the pirates by periodically republishing "new" and "revised" editions of his works. His fame won him an invitation to the court of Carl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. So, he went to Weimar, where he lived the rest of his life and held several offices, eventually becoming the Duke's chief adviser.

As a writer, Goethe remained prolific and authored a large body of works, mostly poetry and plays, along with the occasional novel.

Some of his classic poems include Prometheus (1773), Hermann and Dorothea (1798), and Roman Elegies (1790). Roman Elegies, aka Erotica Romana, was a collection of poems written during Goethe's two year visit to Italy.

During his lifetime (and afterward) some of these poems were suppressed due to their sexual imagery. Goethe's poetry has inspired the works of legendary composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.

As a playwright, Goethe was best known for his masterpiece, Faust. It was written in two parts. The first, Faust Part One, was published in 1808, and the second, Faust Part Two, which Goethe completed shortly before his death in 1832, was published posthumously.

In the play, God bets Mephisto (the Devil) that he can't tempt His favorite scholar, Dr. Faust. So, Mephisto offers Faust a bargain - he'll do Faust's bidding on Earth if Faust will do his bidding in Hell when he dies.

Unsatisfied by his scientific studies, Faust has a clause added to the contract: Mephisto must provide him something that will satisfy him - a moment that Faust would want to last forever. Mephisto agrees, so Faust signs the contract in blood.

God allows Faust to be led astray so he can find the right path, teaching the scholar "man must still err while he doth strive." Faust's attempts to satisfy his desires have dire consequences for those he cares about.

Faust became Goethe's best known work, one that still influences popular culture today. Goethe's play has been adapted for the opera and for the screen.

The most famous movie adaptation was the 1926 German silent feature film classic directed by F.W. Murnau, starring the great German actor Emil Jannings as Mephisto.

In addition to his writing and practice of law, Goethe was also involved in scientific work. He had a keen interest in natural science and wrote scientific books on subjects such as insect morphology, homology, and color theory.

But he was best known for his fiction, poetry, and plays, with which he established himself as one of Germany's greatest writers. He died in 1832 at the age of 82.

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Quote Of The Day

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"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Goethe's classic play, Faust! Enjoy!

Notes For August 27th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On August 27th, 1871, the famous American writer Theodore Dreiser was born. He was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, the twelfth of thirteen children. The popular singer and songwriter Paul Dresser was his older brother.

In 1889, Dreiser entered Indiana University, but flunked out a year later. Several years later, Theodore Dreiser began his literary career as a journalist, writing first for the Chicago Globe, then for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

He wrote articles about famous writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and John Burroughs and interviewed public figures such as Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison. On December 28th, 1898, he married his girlfriend, Sara White. The couple separated in 1909, but never divorced.

In 1900, Theodore Dreiser's acclaimed first novel, Sister Carrie, was published. The controversial novel told the story of 18-year-old Caroline "Carrie" Meeber, a young girl living an unhappy life in rural Wisconsin.

So, Carrie takes a train to Chicago, where she has made arrangements to move in with her older sister Minnie and her brother-in-law, Sven. On the train, Carrie meets a traveling salesman named Charles Drouet. He is attracted to her and they exchange information.

Carrie finds life at her sister's apartment not much happier than it was in Wisconsin. To earn her keep, Carrie takes a job at a shoe factory. She finds her co-workers (both male and female) vulgar and the working conditions squalid. The job takes a toll on her health.

After getting sick, Carrie loses her job. She is reunited with Charles Drouet, who is still attracted to her. He takes her to dinner, where he lavishes her with money and asks her to move in with him. Tired of living with her sister and brother-in-law, she agrees to be Drouet's kept woman.

Later, Drouet introduces Carrie to George Hurstwood, the manager of his favorite bar. Hurstwood, an unhappily married man, falls in love with Carrie, and they have an affair. But she returns to Drouet because Hurstwood can't provide for her financially.

So, Hurstwood embezzles a large sum of money from the bar and persuades Carrie to run away with him to Canada. In Montreal, Hurstwood is trapped by both his guilty conscience and a private detective and returns most of the stolen money.

He agrees to marry Carrie and the couple move to New York City, where they live under the assumed names George and Carrie Wheeler. Carrie believes she may have finally found happiness, but then she and George grow apart.

After George loses his source of income and gambles away the couple's savings, Carrie, who has been trying to build a career in the theater, leaves him. She becomes a rich and famous actress, but finds that wealth and fame don't bring her happiness and that nothing will.

When it was first published, Sister Carrie sold poorly. Due to its controversial nature, even though Dreiser had cut some material himself and other parts had been altered by editors, the publisher initially reneged on his agreement to publish the novel. Fortunately, a new agreement was reached and the novel was published.

Unfortunately for Dreiser, the publisher refused to promote it and gave it a bland, red cover, with only the names of the novel and the author on it. When the publisher's wife complained that the novel was too sordid, he withdrew it from circulation.

Later, it was republished when Frank Norris, a reader for Doubleday & McClure, sent a few copies to reviewers. All the subsequent editions of the novel came from the first publisher's edited version of the manuscript.

Theodore Dreiser earned only $68.40 from the ill-fated first publication of Sister Carrie. The ordeal drove the writer to a nervous breakdown and turned him off writing for ten years. Ironically, it also ended up saving his life.

In 1912, Dreiser had originally planned to book passage home from England on the Titanic. Unable to afford a ticket for the ill-fated luxury ocean liner, he sailed home earlier on a less expensive passenger ship.

In 1981, Dreiser's original, unexpurgated manuscript of Sister Carrie was finally published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Still, even in its edited version, Sister Carrie was regarded as a classic American novel. In his 1930 Nobel Prize Lecture, Sinclair Lewis said of it:

Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie, which he dared to publish thirty long years ago and which I read twenty-five years ago, came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman.

Theodore Dreiser wrote more classic novels, including his Trilogy of Desire series, The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (1947). But his 1925 epic novel, An American Tragedy, became his first commercial success. It's also considered a classic novel.

Inspired by a real life criminal case and set in Kansas City, it tells the story of Clyde Griffiths, the son of poor, devoutly religious parents who force him to join in their street missionary work. Dreaming of better things, he takes a job as bellboy at a local hotel.

There, the other boys introduce him to alcohol and prostitutes. He falls in love with a girl, Hortense Briggs, and does everything he can to impress her. While driving a stolen car, Clyde accidentally kills a child. He flees Kansas City.

After staying briefly in Chicago, Clyde reinvents himself as a foreman at a collar factory in Lycurgus, New York, owned by his long-lost uncle. Clyde promised himself that he wouldn't let his passions cause his downfall again, but then he falls for Roberta Alden.

Roberta is a poor farm girl who works under him at the factory. He enjoys their secret relationship (which is forbidden by company rules) and manipulates Roberta into having sex with him.

Clyde is not about to marry a poor farm girl; later, he falls for Sondra Finchley, an elegant rich girl whose father is a friend of his uncle's. Just as his relationship with Sondra shows promise, Clyde learns that Roberta is pregnant.

His attempt at arranging an illegal abortion proves unsuccessful, and Roberta threatens to reveal their relationship unless Clyde marries her. He decides to murder her instead.

He takes her for a canoe ride and ends up hitting her with his camera. The narrative is deliberately unclear as to whether Clyde really attempted to kill her or just struck her out of anger.

The boat capsizes, and Clyde swims back to shore, refusing to save Roberta, who can't swim. Though she drowned, the circumstantial evidence suggests murder. The authorities, determined to convict Clyde, resort to manufacturing evidence to secure a conviction.

Despite a strong defense by lawyers hired by his uncle, Clyde is convicted and sentenced to death. In the novel's greatest scenes of pathos, an imprisoned Clyde corresponds with his mother until the day of his execution.

In addition to his novels, Theodore Dreiser also wrote short story collections and nonfiction books about political issues. A devout socialist, Dreiser wrote of his 1927 trip to the Soviet Union in Dreiser Looks at Russia.

He criticized American capitalism in Tragic America (1931) and America is Worth Saving (1941). But he was best known for his fiction and is rightfully considered to be one of the all-time greatest American novelists.

Theodore Dreiser died in 1945 at the age of 74.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail."

- Theodore Dreiser

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Theodore Dreiser's classic novel, The Financier. Enjoy!