This Day In Literary History
On June 17th, 1972, five men were caught burglarizing the Watergate building, a complex of offices, hotel rooms, and apartments in Washington, D.C.
The burglars had been caught breaking into the part of the Watergate that housed the offices of the Democratic National Committee - the national headquarters of the Democratic Party.
Ben Bradlee, Editor-In-Chief of the prominent Washington Post newspaper, assigned two young investigative reporters to cover the seemingly innocuous story of the Watergate burglary. Their names were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Woodward and Bernstein soon realized that there was nothing innocuous about the burglary at Watergate. In fact, the same offices had been burglarized before. Using their investigative skills, confidential sources, and a secret informant known only as Deep Throat, they broke the Watergate burglary story wide open.
The five burglars were really White House operatives whose mission was to spy on President Richard M. Nixon's opposition in the upcoming election. After breaking into the DNC offices, they stole information and bugged the telephones. Then they got caught.
Nixon denied involvement and won re-election in November, but Woodward and Bernstein continued their investigation and were able to prove that Nixon not only knew about the Watergate burglary, but was also attempting to block the investigation of it.
In 1974, in order to avoid impeachment and removal from office, Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace. He would later be pardoned by acting President Gerald Ford, a highly controversial move that cost Ford the presidency in the next election.
Woodward and Bernstein's work in exposing the Watergate conspiracy earned the Washington Post a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. They later wrote a famous book about it called All The President's Men.
Published in 1974, the book became a bestseller. Woodward and Bernstein had been toying with idea of writing a book, but didn't commit to it until actor-filmmaker Robert Redford contacted them with an offer to buy the movie rights.
The acclaimed feature film adaptation of All The President's Men, which starred Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, was released in 1976. That same year, Woodward and Bernstein published The Final Days.
A sequel to All The President's Men, it chronicled the last months of the Nixon presidency. In 1989, it was adapted as an acclaimed TV movie starring Lane Smith as Richard Nixon. It was nominated for five Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were real heroes, the kind of journalists that, sadly, no longer exist and are sorely needed.
In 2005, their famous and mysterious informant Deep Throat revealed his true identity. He was Mark Felt, a former FBI associate director and White House insider.
In recent years, Bob Woodward wrote several books covering the presidency of Donald Trump, the most corrupt and unhinged American president in history, including Fear: Trump in the White House (2018), Rage (2020), and Peril (2021).
In these books, Woodward depicted a White House led by a dysfunctional president hopelessly out of his league and dangerously unable and unwilling to recognize let alone accept the vast scope of his incompetence.
Ironically, Trump granted Woodward hours of recorded interviews for Fear: Trump in the White House, believing he was in control of Woodward's narrative. After the book was published, Trump derided it and its author.
Now, Donald Trump has been exposed as not only the most incompetent, but also the most narcissistic, hateful, depraved, deranged, and psychopathic individual ever elected president of the United States.
He makes Richard Nixon look like a Girl Scout.
Quote Of The Day "The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture."
- Carl Bernstein
Vanguard Video Today's video features Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on an episode of The Kalb Report marking the 40th anniversary of Watergate. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On June 16th, 1938, the famous American writer Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She was very close to her paternal grandmother, Blanche Oates, who lived with the family and planted the seeds of her future writing career.
When Joyce was a little girl, her grandmother gave her a copy of Lewis Carroll's classic Alice in Wonderland, which she credited as "the great treasure of my childhood and the most profound literary influence in my life." When Joyce turned 14, her grandmother gave her a typewriter, and she began writing.
Joyce Carol Oates described her family as average, happy, and close-knit. Many years later, after her grandmother died, Joyce learned some surprising secrets about her life.
Blanche Oates's father had committed suicide, after which, Blanche decided to conceal the fact that she was Jewish. Joyce used these and other details of her grandmother's life as the basis for her 2007 novel, The Gravedigger's Daughter.
As a young teenager, Joyce Carol Oates became an avid reader, devouring the works of William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry David Thoreau, Ernest Hemingway, and the Bronte sisters, whom she claimed were a strong influence on her writing.
After attending the same one-room school that her mother had gone to, Joyce transferred to bigger suburban schools. At Williamsville South High School, where she graduated in 1956, Joyce worked for the student newspaper. She was the first member of her family to graduate high school.
Joyce Carol Oates won a scholarship to Syracuse University, where she joined the Phi Mu sorority, a decision she came to regret. In college, Joyce read the works of D.H. Lawrence, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka, all of which she claimed were still strong and pervasive influences on her own writing.
When she was nineteen years old, she won a college short story contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. She graduated Syracuse as valedictorian in 1960 and received an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison a year later.
During her college years, Joyce taught herself to be a writer by "writing novel after novel and always throwing them out when I completed them." In 1964, when she was 26 years old, she published her first novel, With Shuddering Fall.
Two years later, she published a short story, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, loosely based on the life of serial killer Charles Schmid, the "Pied Piper of Tucson." The story was frequently republished in anthologies and was adapted in 1985 as a feature film called Smooth Talk.
Joyce Carol Oates would also use real life crimes and criminals as the basis of her novels, changing names, dates, places, and details, and adding fictionalized elements. Her 1995 novel Zombie, which won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel, was based on the life of the notorious and cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
The novel takes the form of the diary of Quentin P., a psychotic sex offender on parole who becomes a serial killer as he searches for the perfect "zombie" - a mindless, obedient, handsome young man to be his companion and lover.
The brilliant, cunning, and strangely child-like Quentin lures young men into his clutches and lobotomizes them with various weapons as he conducts experiments in creating a zombie. In addition to Quentin's diary entries, the book contains his bizarre sketches of objects such as weapons and staring eyes.
In her 2008 novel My Sister, My Love, Joyce Carol Oates presents a dark and scathing satire of the infamous JonBenet Ramsey murder case. It's told in the form of a memoir written by 19-year-old Skyler Rampike. When he was ten, his beloved six-year-old sister Bliss - a child ice-skating star - was found raped and murdered.
In his memoir, Skyler paints a grotesque picture of his family before and after the tragedy. His father, Bix, is a ruthlessly ambitious, money-hungry philanderer; his pathetic, neurotic mother Betsey is determined (to the point of obsession) to impress the snooty neighbors in their affluent community.
She's also obsessed with living out her childhood dream by turning her daughter into a figure-skating star, dressing her in provocative costumes and forcing her to practice and perform.
After Bliss's murder, the already dysfunctional Rampike family is plunged into tabloid hell, as suspicion falls on both Bix and Betsey - and even 10-year-old Skyler.Oates's powerful writing and fascination with violence and the dark side of the human condition earned her the respect of male peers such as Norman Mailer.
Her 1996 novel, We Were The Mulvaneys, was selected by Oprah Winfrey's book club in 2001. The Mulvaneys are a happy, close-knit, affluent model family living in upstate New York.
Then, on Valentine's Day, 1976, after attending her high school prom, teenage daughter Marianne Mulvaney goes to a party, gets drunk, and is raped by a fellow student whose father is a respected businessman and close friend of Marianne's father.
Her refusal to press charges against or name her attacker leads to the slow and painful disintegration of the once perfect Mulvaney family. Years later, at a family reunion, the Mulvaneys finally come to terms with the past and receive the closure that had eluded them.
An extremely prolific writer, Oates has written nearly five dozen novels, (plus 11 more under pseudonyms) with more coming. She has also written over 35 short story collections.
Her other writings include seven books for young adults and children, ten books of poetry, eight plays, and numerous nonfiction works. She will no doubt be remembered as one of the most gifted writers of her generation.
Joyce Carol Oates' most recent novel, Fox, was published last year. It proved that she's still the master of dark and disturbing fiction. The title character, Francis Fox, is a popular English teacher at an exclusive private middle school who has mysteriously disappeared.
He's also a sex offender named Frank Farrell who's been hiding in plain sight under an alias - a twisted pedophile whose modus operandi is drugging young girls so he can have his way with them. When he gets caught, generous settlements and non-disclosure agreements allow him to prey on more victims.
Now he's disappeared, and a dismembered body has been found in a remote part of the county. Was it an accident, a suicide, or did someone take justice into their own hands? This 650-page epic novel, a modern Gothic horror tale, may be Joyce's masterpiece.
Quote Of The Day "If you are a writer, you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework, you can still be writing, because you have that space."
- Joyce Carol Oates
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Joyce Carol Oates discussing her most recent novel, Fox, on a 78-minute live stream.
This Day In Literary History
On June 12th, 1929, the legendary German writer Anne Frank was born. She was born Anneliese Marie Frank in Frankfurt, Germany. Her father, Otto Frank, was a Jewish businessman and decorated veteran of World War I, where he served as an officer in the German Army.
In March of 1933, municipal council elections were held in Frankfurt, and Adolf Hitler won dictatorial control, becoming Chancellor of Germany. Anti-Semitic demonstrations began, and the Frank family feared for their safety.
Anne Frank, her older sister Margot, and their mother Edith went to stay with Anne's grandmother in Aachen. Later, after receiving an offer to start a company in Amsterdam, Otto moved the family to the Netherlands.
In February 1934, Edith and the girls arrived in Amsterdam. Anne Frank was enrolled in a Montessori school, where she showed advanced aptitude in reading and writing. Her friend, Hanneli Goslar, later recalled that Anne started writing in early childhood, but always kept her writings a secret and wouldn't discuss them.
In 1938, Otto Frank started a second company, Pentacon - a wholesaler of herbs, spices, and pickling salts used to make sausages. His spice adviser, Hermann Van Pels, was a Jewish kosher butcher who had also fled Germany with his family.
Edith Frank's mother came to Amsterdam to live with the family in 1939. Their quiet life would change forever when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May of 1940.
After defeating the Dutch army, the Nazis set up an occupation government and enacted discriminatory laws requiring Jews to register themselves and be segregated from the non-Jewish population.
In April of 1941, Otto Frank took steps to keep Pentacon from being confiscated as a Jewish-owned business, enabling him to earn a small income with which to support his family. Otto had the company liquidated and the assets transferred to his employee, Jan Gies. Jan and his wife Miep were close friends of the Frank family.
On June 12th, 1942, Anne Frank received a diary from her father as a gift for her 13th birthday. She had seen the handsome book, bound in red and green plaid cloth and with a small lock on the front, in a shop window. It was actually an autograph book, but Anne used it as a diary.
The following month, Margot Frank received a letter from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration ordering her to report for transportation to a work camp. So, on July 6th, the family fled after Otto planted a fake note to trick the Nazis into thinking they went to Switzerland.
(Ironically, if Otto had moved the family to Switzerland as he originally planned to do, his wife and daughters would have survived the Holocaust. His tragic determination to remain in the country he considered his adopted homeland would haunt him for the rest of his life.)
The Franks moved into a hiding place - a three-story space located above the offices of Otto Frank's previous company, the Opekta Works. Anne called it the Secret Annex. A week later, they were joined by Hermann Van Pels, his wife Auguste, and their 15-year-old son, Peter. In November, Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and Frank family friend, moved into the Secret Annex.
In her diary, (which she called Kitty, after the main character in her favorite series of children's novels) Anne wrote about the Van Pelses and Pfeffer, and their daily lives in the hiding place. She described Hermann Van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer as self-centered and foolish and Auguste Van Pels as a calculating sociopath.
She became friends with Peter Van Pels, developed a crush on him, and experienced her first kiss. Later, Anne questioned her feelings for Peter, wondering if she really loved him or if it was because there was no one else.
While in hiding, the Franks' only connections to the outside world were Jan and Miep Gies, and Otto's former employees Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, and Bep Voskuijl, and her father, Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl.
These contacts provided the Franks and their roommates with information, food, and supplies, all of them knowing that if they were caught, they would be executed for helping to hide Jews. The food and supplies had to be purchased on the black market.
Anne continued to write in her diary, expressing her feelings about her family and their roommates. She came to hate Fritz Pfeffer, with whom she had to share a room. She wrote of her strained relationships with her mother and sister, (her relationship with her cold, distant mother was especially strained) and she wrote about what it was like to be confined, hidden, and fearful of discovery.
The main theme of the book is Anne's coming of age - her transformation from a silly, immature, and timid schoolgirl into a wise, intelligent, strong, and empowered young woman full of confidence and hope. Which was bitterly ironic considering her tragic fate.
In August of 1944, two years after they went into hiding, someone betrayed the Franks and their roommates. On August 4th, the German Security Police raided the Secret Annex and arrested everyone.
When Miep Gies came for a visit, she found the Secret Annex vacant. She discovered Anne's diary and other writings (in notebooks and on looseleaf paper) and saved them, hoping that Anne would survive to reclaim them.
The hiders were ultimately sent to Auschwitz, where Hermann Van Pels was gassed and Edith Frank died of starvation and illness after giving her food rations to her sick daughters.
Before she died, Anne and Margot Frank and Auguste Van Pels were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen death camp. Fritz Pfeffer was sent to the Neuengamme camp, where he died of a gastrointestinal infection.
At Bergen-Belsen, Anne caught a bad case of scabies. When typhus swept the camp, Margot contracted the disease and Anne cared for her until she died. Auguste Van Pels also died of typhus. Then Anne got it. With her health in severe decline and believing that her father had also died, she lost her will to live.
Anne Frank died of typhus in March of 1945, just three months before her sixteenth birthday - and just one month before Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the Allies.
At the end of the war, as the Red Army was about to liberate Auschwitz and the Nazis were evacuating, Peter Van Pels and other prisoners were forced into a long march and hard labor in a mine. Exhaustion and illness landed Peter in the sick barracks. He never recovered and died at 18 - just a few days after the liberation.
In 1945, Otto Frank, the only member of the Secret Annex hiders who survived, returned home to the Netherlands. After the Red Cross confirmed the deaths of Anne and Margot Frank, Miep Gies gave Anne's diary and other writings to her father.
Impressed with Anne's writing talent, the depth of her thoughts and feelings, and the way she chronicled the family's life in hiding - and remembering how she longed to be a writer - Otto considered publishing the diary.
Anne herself had wanted to publish her diary; she'd heard a radio broadcast in March of 1944 by Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government-in-exile who planned (after the war ended) to create a public record of the Dutch people's oppression under Nazi occupation.
Anne prepared her diary for future publication by editing, rewriting, and using pseudonyms for her family and their roommates. The Van Pels family became the Van Daans, and Fritz Pfeffer's name was changed to Albert Dussell - Dussell being the German word for idiot.
After Anne's death, Otto Frank edited her diary himself, restoring the Frank family's names, but retaining the other pseudonyms. He cut some sections, including Anne's harsh criticisms of her mother and biting comments about her parents' strained marriage. He also removed sections dealing with Anne's growing sexual awareness and her experiences with puberty.
Otto gave the edited manuscript to historian Annie Romein-Verschoor, and she tried, unsuccessfully, to get it published. When her husband Jan wrote an article about the diary titled Kinderstern (A Child's Voice), which was published in the Het Parool newspaper in April 1946, it attracted the attention of publishers.
Anne Frank's diary was first published in the Netherlands as Het Achterhuis (The Diary) in 1947, then again in 1950. It was published in Germany and France in 1950, and then in the UK in 1952, though in the UK, it was unsuccessful and went out of print the following year.
Surprisingly, the diary's first edition was most successful in Japan, where it sold over 100,000 copies. The first American edition was published in 1952 as Anne Frank: The Diary Of A Young Girl. In the U.S., the book was just as successful and critically acclaimed as it was in Germany and France.
In October of 1955, The Diary Of Anne Frank, a stage play adaptation by Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett, premiered on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Producers had originally asked Lillian Hellman to adapt the diary for the stage, but she turned them down, fearing that her adaptation would be too bleak.
A feature film adaptation of the play, starring a badly miscast but earnest Millie Perkins as Anne Frank and Shelley Winters as Mrs. Van Daan, was released in 1959. More adaptations followed, including a TV miniseries.
Over the years, the book's popularity has grown exponentially, selling over 25,000,000 copies worldwide. It often appears on middle school English and social studies teachers' assigned reading lists. I first read this amazing book in eighth grade, at the age of thirteen.
In 1999, Cornelius Suijk, a former director of the Anne Frank Foundation and president of the U.S. Center for Holocaust Education Foundation, announced that he possessed the sections of Anne Frank's diary deleted by her father, Otto, prior to the book's initial publication.
Suijk claimed that Otto Frank had given them to him and claimed the right to publish the missing pages. He planned to use the proceeds to help fund his U.S. foundation.
After a court battle, Suijk agreed to turn over the pages to the Dutch Ministry of Education in exchange for a $300,000 donation to his foundation. He did so in 2001, and the diary has since been republished in an uncut special edition called the Definitive Edition.
A companion volume was also published - Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex (1949) - a collection of extra diary fragments plus short stories and an unfinished novel called Cady's Life, all written by Anne during her two years in hiding. It's a fascinating book that showcases her writing talent, which was considerable.
But her diary was her legacy, and it continues to inspire nearly 80 years after her death. It's a profoundly moving testament to the courage of an ordinary teenage girl trapped in extraordinary circumstances and a testament to the evils of racism and fascism - one of the most important documents of the Holocaust.
The Secret Annex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis and wrote her famous diary was turned into a museum called the Anne Frank House by the Dutch government. First opened to the public in 1960, it was rededicated by the Netherlands' Queen Beatrix after its second renovation in 1999.
In one year alone, over a million people visit the Anne Frank House. If you go there, you can still see the pictures of movie stars that Anne tacked up on her bedroom wall.
In January of 2022, a team of experts, including historians and an ex-FBI agent, identified the man they believe betrayed Anne Frank, her family, and their roommates. His name was Arnold van den Bergh, and he had been a member of Amsterdam's Jewish Council.
The team also claimed that Otto Frank knew that van den Bergh, who died in 1950, was the informer, but kept it a secret for two reasons: he didn't want to ruin the lives of the man's children, and he knew that like many other Jews, van den Bergh had been forced to make a Faustian bargain with the Nazis in order to save his family.
Otto was also concerned that revealing van den Bergh's identity to the world - revealing that Anne Frank was sold out and sent to her death by another Jew - would only serve to stoke the fires of anti-Semitism.
To this day, Holocaust deniers insist that Anne Frank's diary is a work of fiction - propaganda fabricated by her father or others - in a pathetic attempt to discredit it, despite the fact that handwriting analysis proved conclusively that it was Anne who wrote the diary.
Quote Of The Day "For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl."
- Anne Frank
Vanguard Video Today's video features a complete reading of The Diary of Anne Frank. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On June 11th, 1925, the famous American writer William Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia. His paternal grandparents were conservative slave owners, but his father and mother raised him to be liberal.
His father was a shipyard engineer who suffered from depression, an illness Styron would later struggle with himself. Styron's mother died when he was a boy, after a long battle with breast cancer.
When Styron was in third grade, his father took him out of public school and enrolled him in an Episcopal prep school, which he enjoyed immensely. He later enrolled in Davidson College, but dropped out to join the Marines near the end of World War II.
He was promoted to lieutenant, but Japan surrendered before his ship was to depart from San Francisco. The war over, Styron enrolled at Duke University, where he earned a degree in English and published his first short story in a student anthology. The story was heavily influenced by the writings of William Faulkner.
In 1947, after graduating from Duke, Styron took a job for the McGraw-Hill publishing house in New York City - a position he came to hate. Styron got himself fired and began writing his first novel, Lie Down In Darkness, which was published in 1951.
The novel, which received great critical acclaim, told the story (partly in a stream-of-consciousness narrative) of a troubled young woman named Peyton Loftis, whose emotionally distant, oppressive, and dysfunctional Virginia family ultimately drives her to suicide.
Lie Down In Darkness won William Styron the prestigious Rome Prize, which was awarded by the American Academy In Rome and the American Academy Of Arts And Letters. He couldn't go to Rome to accept the award - he was recalled to active duty in the Korean War.
Discharged a year later due to eye problems, Styron used his experience at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina as the basis for his novella The Long March, first published in a serial format in 1953. It would be adapted as a play for an episode of the famous Playhouse 90 TV series in 1958.
After his discharge from the Marines in 1952, Styron embarked on an extended trip to Europe. In Paris, he met and became friends with a group of writers including James Baldwin, Romain Gary, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, James Jones, Irving Shaw, and others.
The group founded the famous literary magazine The Paris Review in 1953. That same year, Styron went to Italy and finally accepted his Rome Prize for Lie Down In Darkness. At the American Academy, he was reunited with a young poet from Baltimore whom he had met before. Her name was Rose Burgunder, and he married her that same year.
Styron used his experiences in Europe as the basis for his novel Set This House On Fire, which was published in 1960. It told the story of a group of American expatriate intellectuals living on the Riviera. In the U.S., the novel received mixed reviews at best, but it was successful in Europe. The French translation was a bestseller.
Several years later, in 1967, Styron published his most controversial novel, The Confessions Of Nat Turner. It was a fictional memoir of Nat Turner, a real life historical figure who led his fellow slaves in a violent revolt against their evil white masters.
James Baldwin accurately predicted that the book would be controversial with black and white readers alike, saying that "Bill's going to catch it from both sides." Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, who were both prominent and respected black writers, defended Styron's novel publicly.
Despite this, several black critics assailed The Confessions Of Nat Turner for its allegedly racist stereotyping and a scene where Turner fantasizes about raping a white woman. Southern white readers weren't thrilled with the book, either. Nevertheless, it became a huge critical and commercial success, and won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In 1979, Styron published Sophie's Choice, another acclaimed novel that sparked controversy. Narrated by Stingo, a Southern writer Styron modeled after himself, the novel told the story of Stingo's love triangle with Sophie, a Polish Catholic who survived Auschwitz, and her Jewish lover Nathan, a paranoid schizophrenic.
Though he medicates himself with drugs (including cocaine) that he obtains from his employer, Pfizer, Nathan sometimes becomes frighteningly jealous, violent, and delusional. Haunted by her experiences during the Holocaust, Sophie finally reveals the secret that continues to torment her.
In Auschwitz, Sophie was forced to choose which of her two children would live. She sacrificed her daughter Eva so that her blond, blue-eyed, German-speaking son Jan could leave the death camp and be raised as a German.
Three years after its publication, Sophie's Choice was adapted as an acclaimed feature film that was nominated for five Academy Awards, with Meryl Streep winning the Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Sophie. In 1998, Styron's short story Shadrach was also adapted as a feature film.
In 1985, Styron won the Prix Mondial Cino Del Luca, a major international literary award. That same year, he suffered from severe depression. He wrote a memoir of his struggle with the mental illness called Darkness Visible: A Memoir Of Madness. It was first published in Vanity Fair magazine in December, 1989.
William Styron died in of pneumonia in 2006. He was 81.
Quote Of The Day
"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis."
- William Styron
Vanguard Video Today's video features a Paris Review interview with William Styron. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On June 10th, 1928, the legendary American children's book writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak was born in Brooklyn, New York. The youngest of three children, his parents were Polish Jewish immigrants.
Sendak lost most of his extended family to the Holocaust; his parents were often in a state of grieving. His mother constantly hovered over him to make sure that he was all right. A sickly child, he rarely went outside his apartment. Most of his knowledge of the world came from books.
In 1940, Maurice Sendak, then twelve years old, saw Walt Disney's classic animated feature film Fantasia and decided to become an illustrator. In 1947, when he was 19, his first published drawings appeared in a textbook.
The textbook was called Atomics for the Millions, written by Dr. Maxwell Leigh Eidenhoff. From there, Sendak worked as a illustrator for children's books, spending most of the 1950s drawing pictures for the works of other writers. Then he began writing his own stories.
In 1956, Sendak's first book, Kenny's Window, was published. His first sucessful book, The Sign On Rosie's Door, was published in 1960. It would be followed in 1962 by The Nutshell Library, a four-volume set of books.
This classic set included Chicken Soup With Rice (A Book Of Months), Alligators All Around (An Alphabet), One Was Johnny (A Counting Book), and Pierre (A Cautionary Tale). But it was Sendak's next book, Where The Wild Things Are (1963) that became his most famous. It was also controversial.
In Where The Wild Things Are, Max, a young boy wearing a wolf costume, makes mischief around the house and gets sent to bed without supper. In his room, he imagines a mysterious forest growing and goes on an adventure, traveling to the land of the Wild Things - grotesque and fearsome looking monsters.
Max stares them down and becomes the King of all Wild Things, but soon, lonely and homesick, he returns to his room, where he finds his supper waiting for him. Parents complained about the frightening monsters and denounced the book as too scary for children. But it went on to become an all-time children's classic.
In 1973, Where The Wild Things Are was adapted as an animated short film. It would later be adapted as a children's opera and a ballet. In 1983, Disney announced an upcoming animated feature film adaptation, but it didn't get past the planning stage.
The book was adapted as a musical play in 2004. Two years later, the Post Office issued a commemorative stamp. In 2009, Where The Wild Things Are would be adapted as a live-action feature film.
Directed by Spike Jonze, it featured the voices of James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker, and Paul Dano as the Wild Things, and in an incredible performance, newcomer Max Records as Max.
The film, which combined first-rate CGI special effects and animatronic puppetry, turned Sendak's 48-page picture book into a brilliant, intriguing, surreal 100-minute psychological study of a disturbed young boy trying to come to terms with his emotional problems.
As in the book, the Wild Things become externalized metaphors for the components of Max's psyche. Sendak loved the movie, as did most critics who praised its art house qualities, but many parents derided the film as too dark and too sad for children.
Maurice Sendak's follow-up book, In The Night Kitchen, was published in 1970. It proved to be more controversial than Where The Wild Things Are, but for a different reason. The book told the story of Mickey, a young boy awoken in the night by strange noises.
He finds himself floating in the air and drifts into a strange and surreal world called the Night Kitchen, where he falls into a giant mixing pot full of cake batter. Three lookalike bakers mix the batter, either unaware or unconcerned that a boy is trapped inside their pot.
As the bakers are about to put their cake into a "Mickey oven," the boy escapes and protests that he is not the milk for the batter. Covered in batter, Mickey builds a makeshift airplane out of bread dough.
He flies to the top of a giant milk bottle, and, after washing himself off, pours the milk into the cake batter. The bakers happily finish making their cake. Mickey slides down the bottle and returns to his bed.
In The Night Kitchen was - and still is - controversial for both its bizarre storyline and for the fact that for the most of the story, Mickey runs around naked and is drawn anatomically correct. As a result, the book faced bans and challenges.
It was challenged in several states, including New Jersey, Illinois, Minnesota, and Texas, with reports of school librarians defacing copies of the book by drawing pants on Mickey with markers or using whiteout to cover his genitals, making him appear to be wearing a diaper.
Sendak said that he never intended to be controversial. He had Mickey lose his pajamas to avoid messing them up when he fell into the cake batter. In The Night Kitchen still appears on the American Library Association's (ALA) list of frequently banned or challenged books.
In 1974, Maurice Sendak reworked his books The Sign On Rosie's Door and The Nutshell Library into a rock musical called Really Rosie, with music composed by legendary rock singer-songwriter Carole King.
The character of Rosie was based on a real little girl from Sendak's childhood in Brooklyn who would sing and dance on the stoop of her apartment building. Really Rosie was adapted as a classic animated TV special in 1975. Carole King sang all the songs and provided Rosie's voice.
In a 2008 interview in the New York Times, Sendak claimed that there were deliberate references to the Holocaust in In The Night Kitchen. The lookalike bakers had Hitler-like mustaches, and they attempted to bake Mickey in their oven.
He also came out as gay, saying that although he had lived with his partner (Dr. Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst) for fifty years, (Glynn died in 2007) his parents never knew that he was gay. "All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy," Sendak said. "They never, never, never knew."
Maurice Sendak died in May of 2012 at the age of 83. His last book, My Brother's Book, was published posthumously in 2013.
Quote Of The Day
"You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them."
- Maurice Sendak
Vanguard Video Today's video features Maurice Sendak being interviewed on an episode of University of Washington TV's Upon Reflection in 1991. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On June 9th, 1956, the famous American writer Patricia Cornwell was born. She was born Patricia Carroll Daniels in Miami, Florida, a descendant of the legendary writer and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Her father, Sam Daniels, was a prominent appellate lawyer. On Christmas Day, 1961, when she was five years old, he walked out on the family. Her mother moved Patricia and her siblings to Montreat, North Carolina.
Cornwell's mother suffered from severe depression and had to be hospitalized. Her children were placed in foster care. By her late teens, Patricia herself suffered from depression, was anorexic, and struggled throughout her life with bipolar disorder.
Her troubled relationship with her emotionally abusive father would later be reflected in her most famous character. In the late 1970s, after graduating Davidson College, Patricia married one of her English professors, Charles Cornwell, who was 17 years older.
He left his tenured position to become a preacher, and she began writing a biography of Ruth Bell Graham, wife of famous evangelist Billy Graham. In 1979, Patricia landed a job as a reporter for The Charlotte Observer and began covering crime.
Her book, A Time For Remembering, later renamed Ruth, A Portrait: The Story Of Ruth Bell Graham was published in 1983. It was Ruth who encouraged Patricia to become a novelist.
In 1984, Patricia Cornwell took a job at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia, working there for six years, first as a technical writer, then as a computer analyst. She also did volunteer work for the Richmond Police Department.
She and her husband Charles divorced in 1989. Though she had written three novels in the 1980s, they were rejected. But in 1991, her novel Postmortem - the first in her long running Kay Scarpetta series - was published and became a huge success.
In Postmortem, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Virginia, helps grizzled homicide detective Pete Marino track a brutal and elusive serial killer who appears to be choosing his victims at random.
The victims seem to have absolutely no connection to each other, but after extensively researching all their lives, Scarpetta discovers a connection that breaks the case wide open - and almost costs the doctor her life.
Following the success of Postmortem, Patricia Cornwell has written over two dozen more Kay Scarpetta crime thrillers. She has written other novels, as well as nonfiction, including cookbooks.
In 2002, she wrote a controversial book about the legendary 19th century English serial killer Jack The Ripper called Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed where she claimed to have solved the famous case.
The Ripper was really English impressionist painter Walter Sickert, who had been previously mentioned by others as possibly either a Freemason conspirator or a direct accomplice to the murders.
Cornwell's contention that DNA found on a letter written by Jack The Ripper belonged to Sickert - and proved that he was the Ripper - was loudly derided by experts on Sickert and the Ripper murders.
Patricia Cornwell's personal life twice imitated her crime thriller fiction. In 1991, while doing research for her Kay Scarpetta novels, she became friends with Margo Bennett, a married FBI agent and mother of two whose husband, Gene, was also an FBI agent.
The two women later embarked on an affair. When Gene Bennett discovered his wife's infidelity with another woman, he tried to kill Margo, then abducted her minister and threatened to blow up his church.
Gene Bennett was later convicted of a host of charges, including attempted murder and abduction. He was sentenced to a total of 23 years in prison. Patricia Cornwell denied any responsibility for the incidents, blaming the Bennetts' already troubled marriage.
She came out as a lesbian and later married her partner, Dr. Staci Ann Gruber, in Massachusetts. In a 2008 interview in the LGBT news magazine The Advocate, Cornwell credited lesbian tennis great Billie Jean King with inspiring her to come to terms with her sexual orientation and come out.
In 2000, Cornwell was stalked by a deranged writer named Leslie Sachs who claimed that in her 2000 Kay Scarpetta novel The Last Precinct, she plagiarized his 1998 novel, The Virginia Ghost Murders.
Sachs sent letters to Cornwell's publisher, established a web site dedicated to attacking her and placed stickers on copies of his novels alleging that Cornwell was a plagiarist.
Finding Sachs' plagiarism claims totally baseless, The United States District Court of Virginia granted Cornwell an injunction, shutting down Sachs' web site and ordering him to remove the stickers from his books. He fled to Belgium to escape the injunction.
He continued attacking her on the Internet, claiming that she was a neo-Nazi, had bribed judges, and was conspiring to have him killed. Cornwell won a libel suit against him and was awarded approximately $38,000 for legal costs, but Sachs never showed up for the trial.
Politically conservative and a personal friend of former President George H.W. Bush, whom she called Big George, Cornwell was greatly disappointed in the presidency of his son, George W. Bush, saying:
I was supportive of young George Bush because I liked his family. I thought he was going to be another Big George. Boy, was I ever wrong. It's not a democracy so much as a theocracy, and those are not the principles this country was founded on.
While doing research on the criminal mind for her 2005 Kay Scarpetta novel Predator, Cornwell, formerly an ardent proponent of the death penalty, shocked her conservative fans by denouncing capital punishment.
She concluded that the mind is developed by both nature and nurture acting upon each other, something she herself experienced during her struggle with bipolar disorder. Since monsters can be made by external factors such as childhood abuse, killing them in retribution is immoral. Also, capital punishment is not a deterrent.
Patricia Cornwell is without a doubt one of the great modern crime thriller novelists. Her most recent Kay Scarpetta novel, Sharp Force, was published last year. Earlier this year in March, the series Scarpetta, starring Nicole Kidman as Kay Scarpetta, premiered on Amazon.
Quote Of The Day "My friends call me Miss Worst Case Scenario." - Patricia Cornwell
Vanguard Video Today's video features Patricia Cornwell discussing her most recent novel, Sharp Force - with Jamie Lee Curtis - on a 60-minute Poisoned Pen Bookstore livestream.
This Day In Literary History
On June 5th, 1949, the famous English writer Ken Follett was born in Cardiff, Wales. As a boy, his Christian zealot parents forbade him from watching movies and television, so he developed an early passion for reading.
An average student at first, Follett eventually buckled down and devoted himself to his studies. He attended Poole Technical College, then in 1967, he was admitted to University College London, where he studied philosophy. In 1968, he married his first wife, Mary, and had his first child, a son named Emanuele.
After graduating in 1970, Follett took a post-graduate course in journalism and landed a trainee position in Cardiff as a reporter for the South Wales Echo. A few years later, he returned to London and became a general-assignment reporter for the Evening News.
Around this time, he began writing fiction as a hobby. Finding journalism unsatisfying, he quit and embarked on a career in the publishing business, becoming deputy managing director for a small publishing house in London called Everest Books.
At this time, he also became involved in liberal politics and the Labour Party, and met Barbara Broer, a Labour Party official who would later become Follett's second wife and an elected Member of Parliament.
In the early and mid 1970s, Follett wrote several competent novels, (mostly under pseudonyms) but they were undistinguished except for The Modigliani Scandal (1976) and Paper Money (1977) which received minor recognition.
He also wrote, under the pseudonym Bernard L. Ross, a novelization of Peter Hyams' screenplay for the 1978 Hollywood film Capricorn One, a suspense thriller about NASA staging a fake Mars landing, then attempting to assassinate the astronauts in on the hoax.
In 1979, Ken Follett would publish his first hugely successful novel, Eye Of The Needle. Set during the last year of World War II, the novel told the story of Henry Faber, a man whose boat is caught in a storm and shipwrecked on an island off the coast of Aberdeen.
Faber is taken in by Lucy Rose, a lonely British housewife whose bitter, crippled ex-RAF pilot husband, David, refuses to touch her or show interest in their three-year-old son. Lucy and Faber embark on a passionate affair.
What she doesn't know is that Henry Faber is really the cunning and deadly Nazi spy known as Die Nadel - The Needle! Eye Of The Needle was adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1981, starring Kate Nelligan as Lucy Rose and Donald Sutherland as The Needle.
Follett has since written numerous other bestsellers, including more espionage suspense thrillers such as The Key To Rebecca (1980) and The Man From St. Petersburg (1982) and historical novels, including The Pillars Of The Earth (1989) and Night Over Water (1991).
In the late 1990s, Follett ventured into Michael Crichton territory with his suspense thrillers The Third Twin (1996) and The Hammer Of Eden (1998).
In The Third Twin, Follett tells a tale of neo-Nazi conspiracy and genetic engineering technology being employed to create a master race. The Hammer Of Eden is about the title group, a cult of psychotic neo-hippie radicals whose leader is an illiterate, Manson-like figure called Priest.
When the California state government plans to build a dam on their land, the Hammer of Eden, with the help of a bitter young seismology student, steals a seismic vibrator truck from an oil company and threatens to use the machine to unleash a massive earthquake unless the governor agrees to abandon the dam project.
Ken Follett is without a doubt one of the world's great suspense novelists. More recently, he's been known for his English historical novels, such as his series of three epic novels called The Century Trilogy. The first novel, Fall of Giants, was published in 2010.
A work of historical fiction set between 1911 and 1924, its story is set around the famous events of the time, including the Great War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle of British women for their right to vote.
Winter of the World, the second novel in the trilogy, was published in September of 2012. Set around World War II, it follows characters from Fall of Giants as they witness the conflict from the rise of the Third Reich to the beginning of the atomic age and the Cold War.
The third and final novel in the trilogy, Edge of Eternity, was released in September of 2014. It covers the 1960s, 70s, and 80s - the tumultuous changing times and historical events such as the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, and the fall of the Soviet Union.
Ken Follett's most recent novel, The Armour of Light, the fifth and final book in his Kingsbridge series, was published in 2023. This one takes place between 1792 and 1824, with the Napoleonic Wars as a backdrop.
Quote Of The Day "The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying."
- Ken Follett
Vanguard Video Today's Vanguard Video features Ken Follett discussing his most recent novel, The Armour of Light, in a 77-minute live appearance for the National Writers Series. Enjoy!
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