Notes For June 12th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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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.

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Quote Of The Day

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"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

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of The Diary of Anne Frank. Enjoy!

Notes For June 11th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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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.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis."

- William Styron

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a Paris Review interview with William Styron. Enjoy!

Notes For June 10th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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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.

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Quote Of The Day

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"You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them."

- Maurice Sendak

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Maurice Sendak being interviewed on an episode of University of Washington TV's Upon Reflection in 1991. Enjoy!

Notes For June 9th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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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.

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Quote Of The Day

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"My friends call me Miss Worst Case Scenario." - Patricia Cornwell

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Vanguard Video

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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.

Notes For June 5th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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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.

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Quote Of The Day

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"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

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Vanguard Video

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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!

Notes For June 4th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On June 4th, 1940, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, the classic debut novel by the famous American writer Carson McCullers, was published.

Set in the Depression-era American South, the novel told the story of four ragtag misfits whose varied lives have several things in common - loneliness, isolation, and seemingly unattainable dreams.

The four people include Mick Kelly, a restless 14-year-old tomboy with androgynous looks and musical talent forced to be a mother to her siblings and go to work to support her family, and Jake Blount, an alcoholic itinerant laborer whose socialist convictions get him into trouble.

Dr. Benedict Copeland is a black physician who suffers from both tuberculosis and his desire to help free his people from racist oppression, and Biff Brannon is a married cafe owner whose masculine appearance masks his inner struggle to come to terms with his bisexuality.

All four characters are connected by a mutual friend, John Singer - an intelligent deaf-mute who can write, sign, and read lips. They all find solace in Singer's kindness, wisdom, and willingness to listen to and understand them. What they don't know is that Singer is just like them - suffering in silence.

His companion of ten years - a big Greek man and fellow deaf-mute named Spiros Antonapoulos - became mentally ill and was institutionalized by a relative. While Singer was there to listen to other people's problems and comfort them, there is no one to listen to Singer and comfort him, which ultimately leads to tragedy.

All the characters in the novel are sad and intriguing, though there is nothing sentimental about their sadness. In fact, one of the novel's main themes is the selfish nature of loneliness and emotional detachment. The most intriguing characters are Mick Kelly and Biff Brannon, with their sexual ambiguity.

At first, Mick dresses like a boy and acts like one, too. But after experiencing her first relationship with a boyfriend, (Harry, a Jewish neighbor boy) which results in her first sexual experience, Mick changes her appearance, dressing and acting like a woman.

Biff Brannon, impotent and emotionally distant from his wife, finds himself sexually attracted to the boyish-looking Mick, but rather than act on his desires, he keeps his emotional distance.

After Mick starts dressing and acting like a woman, Biff loses sexual interest in her, but warms up to her emotionally. After his wife Alice dies, Biff feels little grief - their marriage was loveless - but he starts wearing her clothes and perfume.

There is also a strong homoerotic tone to the relationship between John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos - in the beginning, the two deaf-mute men walk together arm in arm, and later, Singer longs for his institutionalized companion - but they aren't referred to as a gay couple.

Carson McCullers was only 23 years old when The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was published. For such a young writer to craft such a profoundly deep novel is amazing.

The book became an overnight success, with rave reviews from critics who admired McCullers' handling of racial issues - Dr. Copeland is angry with his fellow blacks who choose to accept their unequal status in society with aplomb rather than stand up and fight for their civil rights.

Critics also praised her depiction of the evils of anti communist hysteria and persecution. The novel would foreshadow the coming of both the civil rights movement and the anti communist witch hunts that took place a decade after its publication.

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was adapted as a feature film in 1968, (starring Alan Arkin as John Singer) and as a stage play in 2005.

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Quote Of The Day

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“The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without love and the struggle that goes with love?”

- Carson McCullers

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features an 86-minute reading from and discussion of Carson McCullers's classic debut novel, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. Enjoy!

Notes For June 3rd, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On June 3rd, 1926, the legendary American poet Allen Ginsberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey. His father, Louis, was a high school teacher and a lyric poet of minor recognition.

Allen's mother Naomi was a devout communist who took him and his brother Eugene to party meetings. As a young teenager, Ginsberg wrote letters to the New York Times where he discussed topics such as World War II and workers' rights.

Ginsberg's mother suffered from a rare form of schizophrenia that was never properly diagnosed. He once accompanied her to a session with her therapist, a disturbing trip for the teenage Ginsberg.

He would write about it later in his classic epic poem, Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956). He wrote the poem because the rabbi presiding at Naomi's funeral refused to read the traditional Kaddish in the presence of the Ginsberg family's non-Jewish friends.

In 1943, Allen Ginsberg graduated from Eastside High School and later attended Columbia University on a scholarship, which he supplanted by joining the Merchant Marine to earn some extra money.

While at Columbia, Ginsberg contributed to the Columbia Review literary journal and the Jester humor magazine. He also won the Woodberry Poetry Prize and served as president of the campus literary and debate group, the Philolexian Society.

In his freshman year, Ginsberg's classmate and friend Lucien Carr introduced him to some of the Beat generation's greatest writers, including William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, who would become his closest friends.

After graduating, Ginsberg took an apartment in New York City, where he hung out with Burroughs, Kerouac, and their friend, writer, drug addict, and street hustler Herbert Huncke. He also met ex-convict turned poet Gregory Corso at, of all places, New York's first openly lesbian bar, the Pony Stable.

Ginsberg, who was gay, found himself immediately attracted to Corso and awed by his poems, one of which was about a woman who, in an amazing coincidence, was a former girlfriend of Ginsberg's - one of his few heterosexual relationships.

Corso was bisexual, but he preferred women, so they didn't become lovers. They would become lifelong friends. After their first meeting, Ginsberg introduced Corso to his circle of friends, including Burroughs and Kerouac.

In 1954, Ginsberg went to San Francisco with a letter of introduction from his mentor, poet William Carlos Williams, and became involved with a group of poets and writers known as the San Francisco Renaissance. He also met and fell in love with Peter Orlovsky, who would become his lifelong partner.

Ginsberg did odd jobs to support himself while he wrote; his life changed forever when he wrote Howl, his most famous poem, which brought him international fame. Ginsberg's first public reading of Howl took place on October 7, 1955, at The Six Gallery Reading.

The Six Gallery Reading was an event promoted by Ginsberg and his friend, poet Kenneth Rexroth. It brought together the East and West Coast factions of the Beat generation's literati. Jack Kerouac included a fictionalized account of the event in his classic novel, The Dharma Bums (1958).

Howl, dedicated to Ginsberg's friend, fellow poet Carl Solomon, whom he had met in a mental hospital, (Ginsberg had committed himself to avoid jail time after he got caught riding in a stolen car) was a revolution in American poetic voice.

These gut wrenching opening lines would forever be imprinted in the American consciousness:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking
for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...

Shortly after Howl And Other Poems was published in 1956, the book was banned as obscene, as Ginsberg's poems contained profane language and sexual imagery more daring than the works of other poets of the time.

The censorship of Ginsberg's book became a cause celibre among defenders of the First Amendment. The ban was eventually overturned by a judge who found that Howl And Other Poems was not obscene because it possessed redeeming artistic value.

Ginsberg's writing career took off, and his public readings always drew standing-room-only crowds. In 1957, he surprised the literati by leaving San Francisco and traveling to Tangier, Morocco to see his old friend and ex-lover, William S. Burroughs.

From there, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky moved to Paris, renting a room at a shabby boarding house that came to be known as the Beat Hotel, because it was frequented by Beat writers and artists. Sometimes, the house manager, Madame Rachou, would accept paintings or manuscripts from her tenants if they couldn't pay the rent.

Joined by old pal Gregory Corso, Ginsberg completed work on his second most famous epic poem, Kaddish, while Corso wrote his classic poems Bomb and Marriage. Burroughs joined them later, and they helped him edit the manuscript for his landmark novel, Naked Lunch (1959).

Ginsberg never claimed to be the leader of any movement, but he ended up forming the bridge between the Beat generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s, and in doing so, became a leader and icon of the late 1960s counterculture.

In the early 60s, he went to India, where a chance meeting with Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Chögyam Trungpa led to a spiritual rebirth. Ginsberg also studed Krishnaism with its founder, Swami Prabhupada, and helped introduce Eastern spirituality to the American counterculture.

In September of 1968, Ginsberg appeared as a guest on William F. Buckley's TV show, Firing Line, and chanted the Mahamantra while accompanying himself on the harmonium, a portable musical instrument best described as a laptop accordion.

Though powered by air, the harmonium looks more like a miniature organ than an accordion. Invented in France in the 19th century, it became the accompanying instrument of choice for performing bhajans - Hindu songs of praise.

Ginsberg was also an anti-Vietnam War and free speech activist in the U.S. during the late 1960s, and appeared at demonstrations on college campuses. Once he ran into the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang when they attacked a particular anti-Vietnam War protest in 1965 at the Oakland-Berkeley city line.

The bikers slashed banners and screamed, "Go back to Russia, you fucking communists!" Ginsberg befriended them and gave them LSD as a gesture of goodwill. The Hell's Angels were so impressed by the courage of Ginsberg and his friend, legendary writer Ken Kesey, that they vowed not to attack the next day's protest.

In between antiwar and free speech protests, Ginsberg helped found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he frequently taught, as did his old friend William S. Burroughs and other famous writers.

The Internet Archive hosts a collection of over 800 high quality recordings of readings, lectures, performances, seminars, panels and workshops made at Naropa, including lectures and readings by Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and other great writers.

In the early 1970s, Ginsberg's neo-Marxist views and connection to the American communist party (though he himself was never an official member) earned him invitations to visit usually restricted communist countries such as China, Cuba, and Czechoslovakia.

So he visited them and gave lectures, but because he was a strong free speech and drug legalization advocate, and also a homosexual, the communist countries eventually deemed him a troublemaker and expelled him.

In the 1980s, Ginsberg, like William S. Burroughs, developed a cult following among punk rock musicians. Ginsberg appeared on stage with the legendary British punk band The Clash, singing and reading his poetry.

He took up songwriting and wrote and recorded a collection of memorable songs, including the haunting anti Vietnam War ballad September On Jessore Road and the humorous, satirical CIA Dope Calypso.

Allen Ginsberg died of liver cancer in 1997 at the age of 70. Just five months earlier, he had given what would be his last public reading at The Booksmith in San Francisco. Ginsberg left behind a large body of work that continues to influence generations of poets.

Bob Dylan once said of him, "Ginsberg is both poetic and dynamic, a lyrical genius, con man extraordinaire, and probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman."

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Quote Of The Day

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"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."

- Allen Ginsberg

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Vanguard Video

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Today's Vanguard Video features Allen Ginsberg performing a live show of readings and songs, A Night With Allen Ginsberg, at Loyola University in 1990. Enjoy!