Notes For June 26th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On June 26th, 1892, the famous American writer Pearl S. Buck was born. She was born Pearl Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Her parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, were missionaries for the Southern Presbyterian Church. After they married, they went to China and set up a mission.

Three out of their four previous children, who were born in China, died from cholera and other ailments shortly after their birth, so the Sydenstrickers returned to the United States so Pearl's mother could give birth to her there.

The family returned to their mission in China when Pearl was three months old. She was given a Chinese name - Sai Zhen Zhu - and Chinese was her primary language.

She was tutored in Chinese language and history by a Confucian scholar, Mr. Kung. Her mother later taught her English. Pearl loved China and the Chinese people.

When she was eight, the Boxer Rebellion took place. It was a revolt against foreign imperialists and the Christian missionaries who were interfering with Chinese culture in their pursuit of converting and Westernizing the Chinese.

Pearl and her family were evacuated to Shanghai, where they spent almost a whole year living as refugees. The family then left China for San Francisco, only to return a year later, when the Boxer Rebellion had ended.

In 1911, Pearl left China again, this time to attend a women's college in America. After graduating in 1914, she returned to China and served as a missionary until 1933. In 1917, she married fellow missionary John Buck.

She later became a major figure in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy of the 1920s and 30s - a schism within the Presbyterian church that pitted liberals (modernists) against conservatives (fundamentalists).

In a 1932 article published in The Christian Century magazine, Pearl Buck voiced her support for Re-Thinking Missions, a controversial study by a Presbyterian lay group that argued for scrapping traditional missions.

Instead of trying to convert all the peoples of the world to Christianity, the study stated, a Christian mission's main function should be to help those in need through humanitarian efforts.

The study also stated that Christian missionaries should ally themselves with all religions instead of trying to win converts. In her article, Buck mocked the fundamentalists' biblical literalism. She said that the study was "the only book I have ever read that seems to me literally true in its every observation and right in its every conclusion."

Later that year, Buck gave a speech before a large audience at the Astor Hotel, where she elaborated on the views expressed in her article, describing the typical Christian missionary as "narrow, uncharitable, unappreciative, [and] ignorant."

Pearl also rejected the concept of original sin and the need to believe in the divinity of Christ in order to live a Christian life. She wrote another article that was published in Cosmopolitan, and established herself as a leading liberal voice in the Presbyterian Church.

The Re-Thinking Missions study, along with the efforts of Buck and other liberals outraged the conservative, evangelical faction in the church, and a schism resulted that saw most conservatives bolt from the Presbyterian Church. The few that stayed were willing to compromise and accept modernist ideas.

At the time of her participation in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, Pearl Buck had also established herself as a bestselling writer. Her first novel, East Wind:West Wind was published in 1930.

A year later, she would publish her most famous novel, The Good Earth (1931), which was the first in a classic trilogy of novels called The House of Earth.

The Good Earth told the epic story of Wang Lung, a poor Chinese peasant farmer who marries a slave girl named O-Lan, lives a hard life, then unexpectedly rises to prominence, only to encounter more hardships.

The second book in the trilogy, Sons (1933), follows Wang Lung's sons; the third book, A House Divided (1935), follows the third generation of his family.

The Good Earth won Pearl Buck the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. It was adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1937, starring Paul Muni as Wang Lung and Luise Rainer as O-Lan.

I was thirteen years old when I first read this great novel as an eighth grade social studies assignment back in the early 1980s. It remains one of my all-time favorite novels.

Pearl Buck used her experiences in China as the basis for her novels, and in doing so, helped introduce Chinese culture to the West. No stranger to controversy, she would later write China Sky (1941), a tale of the horrors of the Japanese invasion of China during World War II.

She also wrote Peony (1948), the haunting, riveting story of a Chinese servant girl, Peony, who is sold to a wealthy Jewish family and embarks on a forbidden romance with the family's only son.

During her amazing literary career, Pearl Buck wrote over 40 novels (four of them under the pseudonym John Sedges) and many short stories, including children's stories. Her last novel, The Rainbow, was completed before she died in 1973 at the age of 80. It was published posthumously the following year.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."

- Pearl S. Buck

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Pearl S. Buck being interviewed on The Merv Griffin Show in 1966. Enjoy!

Notes For June 25th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On June 25th, 1903, the legendary English writer George Orwell was born. He was born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal, India, to an affluent family. His father, Richard Blair, was a civil servant. His mother, Ida, was a Frenchwoman.

When he was a year old, Orwell's mother moved him to England, settling in the town of Henley-on-Thames. As a young boy, Orwell met poet Jacintha Buddicorn. The two children became inseparable.

When they first met, Buddicorn found Orwell standing on his head in a field. When she asked him why he was doing that, Orwell replied "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up."

Orwell and Buddicorn spent a lot of time reading together, writing poetry, and dreaming of becoming famous writers. He also became close to the rest of the Buddicorn family and spent time hunting, fishing, and birdwatching with Jacintha's brother and sister.

While at prep school, Orwell wrote two poems that were published in the local newspaper. He won a scholarship, but during his college years, he proved to be an average student at best.

He co-created and co-edited a college magazine and spent more time writing for it than paying attention to his studies. He dropped out of school due to both his poor academic performance (which made future scholarships unlikely) and his desire to travel to the East.

In October of 1922, Orwell went to Burma, now known as Myanmar, where he joined the Indian Imperial Police. He was posted briefly to Maymyo, then to Myaungmya. By 1924, Orwell was promoted to Assistant District Superintendent and posted to Syriam. In 1925, he went to Insein, home of the second-largest prison in Burma.

A year later, he moved to Moulmein, where his grandmother lived. At the end of 1926, Orwell moved on to Kath, where he contracted Dengue fever. He was allowed to go home to England on leave.

While home and recovering, Orwell decided that he was tired of colonial life and police work. He resigned from the Indian Imperial Police and decided to become a writer. He used his experiences in Burma as the basis of his first novel, Burmese Days, which was published in 1934.

Orwell's first published work was a nonfiction book called Down And Out In London And Paris (1933), an account of his life as a struggling writer, as he worked at menial jobs to support himself while he wrote.

He had moved to Paris in 1928 because of its low cost of living and the bohemian lifestyle that attracted many aspiring writers. In 1929, Orwell fell ill and all of his money was stolen from his room at the boarding house where he lived. He later returned to London and took a job teaching at a boy's school.

Orwell's early books were published by Victor Gollancz, whose publishing house was an outlet for radical and socialist books. Orwell wrote two more novels, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936).

He later disowned these novels, claiming that they weren't his best works - he had just written them to earn money at a time when he was broke. Of the two, Keep The Aspidistra Flying is the better.

It's a grim black comedy about an aspiring poet, Gordon Comstock, who comes from an affluent, respectable family, but believes that in order to be a poet, one must denounce wealth. So, he quits his promising new job as an ad copywriter and takes a menial job while he writes.

Living in a grubby rented room, he both loves and loathes his new existence. Comstock finally feels like a real poet, but he resents having to work at boring menial jobs to support himself while he writes. His poverty is a frequent source of humiliation, and he soon becomes a deeply neurotic, absurd parody of himself.

Later, Gollancz encouraged Orwell to investigate and write about the depressed social conditions in Northern England, and he went to the poor coal mining town of Wigan, where he lived in a dirty room over a tripe shop.

He met many people and took extensive notes of the living conditions and wages, explored the mine, and spent days in the town's library researching public health records, working conditions in mines, and other data. The result was The Road To Wigan Pier (1937).

The book is divided into two parts. The first part is a straightforward documentary about life in Wigan. The second is Orwell's philosophical attempt to answer the question that if socialism can improve the appalling conditions in Wigan and such places around the world - which it can - then why aren't we all socialists?

Orwell places the blame on the ferocious prejudices of the white Christian middle class against the lower working class, the poor, and other people they associate with socialism, such as blacks, Jews, atheists, hippies, pacifists, and feminists, famously concluding that:

The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.

The second section of The Road To Wigan Pier shows the early development of Orwell's personal philosophy and his skill as a satirist, both of which have been misconstrued as endorsements of conservatism or even fascism. He was really a lifelong socialist.

Not long after writing The Road To Wigan Pier, Orwell volunteered to fight General Franco's fascists in the Spanish Civil War, using his comrades in the Labour Party to get a letter of introduction.

In Spain, Orwell joined the POUM - the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification - which was allied with the Labour Party. The POUM had joined a coalition of leftist factions that supported the Spanish Republican government against the fascists. Another member of the coalition was the Spanish Communist Party.

The Spanish Communist Party was controlled by the Soviet Union, which wanted a communist Spain under Soviet control. Seeing the POUM as a Trotskyist organization, they falsely claimed that the POUM was collaborating with the fascists. Then they outlawed the party and attacked its members.

Falsely accused of being a fascist collaborator, Orwell came to hate Soviet communism. He still fought the fascists and was shot in the throat by a sniper. After recovering in a POUM hospital, Orwell and his wife barely managed to escape Spain following the fall of Barcelona.

Orwell's exposure to Soviet communism and its methods of propaganda and oppression, which broke the coalition and caused it to lose the war, would have a lasting effect on him and lead him to write his two greatest novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Animal Farm was an anti-Stalinist fable set on a farm where the animals are ruthlessly oppressed and exploited by the humans for whom they toil. So, the pigs Old Major, (who symbolizes Lenin) Napoleon, (Stalin) Snowball, (Trotsky) and Squealer (Soviet propaganda minister Vyacheslav Molotov) orchestrate a violent revolution.

The humans are overthrown and the animals are free, but soon, Napoleon assumes dictatorial power. He establishes totalitarian rule, and the animals' new utopia becomes even more oppressive and miserable than their existence under human rule.

Declared unfit for military service during World War II, (though he supervised broadcasts to India for the BBC to help the war effort) Orwell had completed Animal Farm in 1944, but no publisher would touch it because the Soviet Union was a key member of the Allies.

The highly acclaimed novel was published after the war ended and adapted as an animated British feature film in 1954. It would be adapted again in 1999 as a live-action American TV movie.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, was Orwell's last and greatest novel. In the distant future, England is now part of Oceania, a dystopic, totalitarian state. The main character, Winston Smith, is a civil servant - a historical revisionist for the propaganda ministry.

Oceania is forever at war with Eurasia, the Soviet totalitarian state. Living in the postapocalyptic ruins of London, Winston's job is to rewrite the past and make it conform to regime ideology. Fascinated by the true past, Smith keeps a diary of his disillusionment with the regime. He soon embarks on a rebellion.

The regime's leader is an enigmatic dictator known as Big Brother, and he's always watching - literally. His face appears on posters and monitor screens. Citizens are under constant video surveillance, just like people in the UK are today, and encouraged to denounce each other to the Thought Police for expressing the wrong thoughts.

The phrase "big brother" was introduced into the English lexicon by Orwell's novel. Other clever touches include names such as the Ministry Of Peace, which deals with war, and the Ministry Of Love, a reeducation center where people are tortured until they submit.

Winston commits the ultimate crime against the sexually repressive regime - he falls in love with a woman named Julia, and they have a passionate affair. He and the girl try to escape detection but are arrested by the Thought Police, brought to the Ministry of Love, and tortured until they denounce each other.

Now reeducated - brainwashed - to be obedient, Winston is readmitted into the state as a citizen. He's calm, happy, and soulless, and as the novel's ominous final sentence observes, "He loved Big Brother."

A masterpiece of science fiction and political allegory, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June of 1949 to great acclaim. It remains a classic to this day and is often a subject of study for middle and high school English classes, resulting in bans and challenges.

Orwell managed to complete the novel despite being severely ill with tuberculosis. He also wrote frequently to friends, including his childhood sweetheart Jacintha Buddicorn, who was shocked to learn that the celebrated novelist George Orwell was her childhood sweetheart Eric Blair writing under a pseudonym.

He died of tuberculosis in January of 1950, at the age of 46. He'd had numerous lung problems over the years, including chronic bronchitis and pneumonia. He was also a heavy smoker - a habit he took to his grave.

His greatest literary legacy, the classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, would become the bible of anticommunism during the Cold War and still remains a favorite of the right today who appreciate it for all the wrong reasons.

George Orwell was a lifelong socialist who always hoped for a better world where the extremes of wealth and poverty didn't exist and everyone was truly equal. Nineteen Eighty-Four was a warning that even the noblest ideas can become corrupted and perverted if we allow them to be.

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Quote Of The Day

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"There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter."

- George Orwell

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features the full length BBC documentary, George Orwell - A Life In Pictures. Enjoy!

Notes For June 24th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On June 24th, 1842, the legendary American writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce was born in Meigs County, Ohio. He was the tenth of thirteen children, all bearing first names that began with the letter A.

He grew up in Kosciusko County, Indiana, where his poor but intellectual parents instilled in him a deep love for reading. When he was fifteen, Bierce left home to become a printer's devil (apprentice) at a small Ohio newspaper.

In 1861, when the Civil War broke out, Bierce enlisted in the Union Army's 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. The following year, he was made a First Lieutenant and served on the staff of General William Babcock Hazen as a topographical engineer, mapping areas that would likely become battlefields.

He fought in the Battle of Shiloh, which at the time was the bloodiest battle in U.S. history. Bierce used the terrifying experience as the source for several short stories and a memoir, What I Saw of Shiloh.

He continued fighting in the war and received recognition for his daring rescue of a seriously wounded comrade under fire in the Battle of Rich Mountain, West Virginia. In June of 1864, Bierce himself was seriously wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.

He spent the summer on furlough and returned to active duty in September. He was discharged in January 1865, but resumed his military career in the summer of 1866, when he rejoined General Hazen on an expedition to inspect military outposts in the Great Plains.

In San Francisco, after receiving the rank of Brevet Major, Bierce resigned from the Army. He remained in San Francisco, where he became famous as both a contributor and an editor for many local newspapers and periodicals. On Christmas Day, 1871, he married his girlfriend, Mary Ellen "Mollie" Day.

She bore him two sons and a daughter, but the couple would separate in 1888 when Bierce discovered letters from a lover that constituted proof of Mollie's infidelity. They finally divorced in 1904.

Mollie died a year later. Bierce's sons died before him; his son Day was shot in a dispute over a woman, and his other son Leigh died of pneumonia - a complication of his alcoholism.

Ambrose Bierce lived in England from 1872-75, where he wrote and contributed to magazines. He returned to San Francisco, then left again to manage a mining company in the Dakota Territory.

After the company folded, he went back to San Francisco and resumed his career as a journalist. In 1887, he published a column called Prattle, becoming one of the first columnists and editorial writers for William Randolph Hearst's newspaper, The San Francisco Examiner.

In January of 1896, Hearst sent Bierce to Washington, D.C. to foil the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies' plan to have a Congressional ally sneak in a bill that excused the companies from having to repay massive government loans to build the First Transcontinental Railroad.

Bierce's coverage of the story - and his scathing satirical diatribes - resulted in such public outrage that the bill was defeated. His sardonic nature and scathing satire earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce." Despite his reputation, he was known to encourage young writers to pursue and perfect their craft.

As a writer himself, Ambrose Bierce was known for both his horror stories, which were on a par with the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and his satircal works. His best known horror story was An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge.

Published in 1891, it told the tale of a Confederate saboteur, Peyton Farquhar, who is caught and sentenced to be hung from Owl Creek Bridge. At the hanging, the rope breaks and Farquhar falls into the water.

He escapes and makes it to dry land. From there, as he tries to get home to his family, Farquhar finds that his senses have been heightened to superhuman proportions. He also experiences visual and auditory hallucinations.

When he finally arrives home, he runs to his wife. Just as he reaches out to her, Farquhar feels a searing pain in his neck and all goes black. It is revealed that he never escaped at all. He dreamed the whole thing just as he was hung, right before the rope broke his neck.

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge was adapted numerous times, the most famous adaptation being a French short film made in 1963 called La Rivière du Hibou, directed by Robert Enrico.

It won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject and was later aired on American television as an episode of the brilliant and acclaimed 1959-64 TV series, The Twilight Zone.

Ambrose Bierce was most famous for his satirical masterpiece, The Devil's Dictionary. Published in 1911, The Devil's Dictionary was a scathing, book-length parody of Webster's Dictionary, filled with humorous definitions of various words, such as:

LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

PATRIOT, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.

CLERGYMAN, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.

The end of Ambrose Bierce's life turned out to be so strange that, had he lived, he might have written a short story about it. In October of 1913, at the age of 71, Bierce embarked on a tour of his old Civil War battlefields.

In December, after visiting locations in Louisiana and Texas, Bierce crossed the border into Mexico, where he became involved with the Mexican Revolution. He joined Pancho Villa's army as an observer, and later witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca.

Bierce followed Villa's army as far as Chihuahua. He wrote a letter to his close friend Blanche Partington, which was dated December 26, 1913. Then he mysteriously disappeared, vanishing without a trace - one of the most famous disappearances in literary history.

Some writers speculated that Bierce headed North to the Grand Canyon, where he committed suicide in a remote location. No evidence exists to prove this theory or the countless other theories about what happened to Bierce.

All investigations into his fate have thus far proved fruitless.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first."

- Ambrose Bierce

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Ambrose Bierce's classic horror story, An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge. Enjoy!

Notes For June 23rd, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On June 23rd, 1398 (c), the legendary German inventor Johannes Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany. As a young boy, he learned to read. This was a rare skill in the 15th century, as books were a luxury for the rich.

At that time, books had to be written by hand, (usually by monks, scholars, or scribes) a slow and expensive process. Fortunately for Gutenberg, he was born into a patrician (aristocratic) merchant family.

As public education didn't exist at the time, if you wanted to learn to read, you had to pay a tutor to teach you. (Or join the clergy.) This made literacy itself a luxury for the rich and the vast majority of people were illiterate.

After Gutenberg learned to read, he became an avid reader and spent hours in the library. The few libraries that existed then did not loan out books. They had to be read in the library and were chained to the wall.

Whenever his father ordered a book, it would take from several months to a year for the handwritten manuscript to be completed. Gutenberg hated to wait and dreamed of a more efficient means of producing books than writing them out by hand.

In 1411, there was an uprising against the patricians in Mainz, so the Gutenberg family moved to Eltville am Rhein, where Johannes took up the goldsmithing trade, as his father was a goldsmith who worked with the ecclesiastic mint.

Gutenberg became a skilled metalworker, and his skills would help him create his greatest invention - the mechanical printing press. By 1440, he began experimenting with the elements that would form his mechanical printing process.

Using his skills as a metalworker, Gutenberg designed a movable typeface, with separate metal type for each letter to be printed. He also developed oil-based inks of various colors that would hold up better on the page than the traditional water-based inks.

Last, but certainly not least, he built printing presses based on the designs of the olive, wine, and cheese presses of the time. By 1450, Gutenberg's print shop was in business. One of the first items to be printed there was a German poem.

The successful operation of the press and the quality of the printed material attracted attention, and Gutenberg was able to convince Johann Fust, a wealthy and powerful moneylender, to give him an 800-guilder loan to maintain and expand the business.

He took on Fust's son-in-law, Peter Schoffer, as an apprentice. In 1452, Gutenberg borrowed another 800 guilders from Fust. His print shop was a success and he printed thousands of indulgences for the Church.

Indulgences were certificates absolving the bearers of their sins and guaranteeing them entrance into Heaven after their deaths. Indulgences were sold to rich parishioners - the only ones who could afford them.

This made the Church a tremendous amount of money. The printing of indulgences earned Gutenberg a tidy profit as well, which he put back into the business and used to repay his loans. He then embarked on his greatest printing project.

Gutenberg was determined to print the most important book of the time - the Bible. He designed and tested beautiful layouts that combined color and black inks. Expenses for the Bible project started piling up, and he borrowed more money from Johann Fust.

Soon he was in debt for over 2,000 guilders. The Bible project took about three years to complete, and around 200 copies of the Bible were printed. During this time, a dispute arose between Gutenberg and Fust.

Fust accused Gutenberg of misusing the money he lent him and demanded all of it back. He filed suit at the archbishop's court. The court ruled in Fust's favor, giving him ownership of Gutenberg's print shop and half the bibles that had been printed.

Unfortunately, Fust also gained control of the Gutenberg name. Though effectively bankrupt, Gutenberg did run a small print shop in Bamberg and participated in another Bible printing project in 1459.

None of the materials he printed bore the Gutenberg name because Fust owned it, so it's uncertain exactly what Gutenberg printed in his little Bamberg shop. It's been speculated that he may have printed 300 copies of the 744-page Catholicon Dictionary there.

Johannes Gutenberg died in 1468 at approximately 70 years of age. By 1500, there were more than a thousand print shops in Europe. Gutenberg's dream of distributing information to the masses had come true.

In 1971, Project Gutenberg, launched by University of Illinois student Michael Hart, took the inventor's dream into the digital age. The idea of Project Gutenberg was to digitize public domain texts - to type them into a computer and transform them into searchable ASCII text files.

The files could then be stored on the university's Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer - one of fifteen nodes on a network that served as the precursor to the Internet. The first digitized text was the Declaration of Independence.

Project Gutenberg has since digitized over 50,000 public domain texts (novels, poetry, plays, nonfiction, etc.) in various languages. With the advent of telecommunication, Project Gutenberg e-texts were distributed on bulletin boards and the Internet.

E-books continue to evolve, and electronic reading devices like the Amazon Kindle have made them more popular than ever, but it was Johannes Gutenberg who gave the world its first means of mass-producing books.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The most important human being whoever lived, if you want to leave out religious figures, would be Johannes Gutenberg... that's when the liberation of human thought happened, because people could read the thoughts of people across the world, and have thoughts of their own, and publish them and spread information around."

- Tom Clancy

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a documentary on Johannes Gutenberg, hosted and narrated by Stephen Fry. Enjoy!

Notes For June 19th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On June 19th, 1947, the legendary Indian writer Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India. His father was a lawyer turned businessman, his mother a teacher.

Rushdie graduated King's College, Cambridge with a degree in history. He worked in advertising - for two different agencies - before trying his hand at writing.

In 1975, Rushdie published his first book, Grimus, a science fiction / fantasy novel that told the story of Flapping Eagle, a young Indian who receives the gift of immortality after drinking a magic potion.

He then wanders the Earth for 777 years, searching for his sister, who is also immortal. He ends up falling through a hole in the Mediterranean Sea, where he crosses over into a parallel dimension.

There, he arrives at a place called Calf Island, where fellow immortals, tired of the mortal world, live in their own community and sacrifice their freedom to maintain their immortality.

Grimus was pretty much ignored by critics and readers alike, but Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children, published in 1981, was a huge success and made him world famous.

The novel won him the Booker Prize that year, as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Midnight's Children introduced the magic realism style of writing that Rushdie's future works would become famous for.

The main character, Saleem Sinai, is born on August 15th, 1947, at the exact time that India becomes independent. He later discovers that all children born on that date, between 12 and 1AM, have telepathic powers.

Saleem embarks on a quest to gather together all his fellow telepaths and discover the meaning of their gifts. He then becomes swept up in the famous state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in June of 1975, which would last for almost two years.

During this time, Gandhi suspended elections and civil liberties and granted herself the power to rule by decree. It was one of the most controversial periods in Indian history, where many innocent people were arrested and held without charge.

These political prisoners were subjected to abuse and torture. The government used public and private media outlets for the purposes of propaganda. A notorious family planning initiative forced thousands of men to have vasectomies against their will.

During this period, Saleem Sinai becomes a political prisoner for a time, and Salman Rushdie uses Saleem's ordeal to level scathing criticisms of Indira Gandhi.

Rushdie's next novel, Shame (1983), dealt with political turmoil in Pakistan. It was followed by The Jaguar Smile (1987). The nonfiction book chronicled Rushdie's experiences with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the seventh anniversary of their rise to power.

The Sandinistas were supported by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, but his successor, Ronald Reagan, secretly and illegally financed right-wing Contra guerillas in their attempt to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government.

Nicaragua later won a historic case against the United States at the International Court of Justice, where the U.S. was ordered to pay twelve billion dollars in reparations for undermining Nicaragua's sovereignty.

In 1988, Rushdie published his most famous and most controversial novel, The Satanic Verses. In the dazzling, surreal narrative, two actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are trapped on a hijacked plane during a flight from India to Britain.

The plane explodes over the English Channel, but the two actors are magically saved. Farishta is transformed into the Archangel Gabriel and Chamcha is changed into a devil, both men possibly suffering from multiple personality disorder as the result of their ordeal.

The novel features numerous dream vision narratives. One of these tells the story of how the prophet Muhammad - the founder of Islam - had originally included in the Quran verses of prayer to three Persian pagan goddesses - Allat, Uzza, and Manat.

Muhammad later renounces these verses as the work of Satan and removes them, hence the title The Satanic Verses. Later, one of Muhammad's companions doubts the prophet's divinity and claims to have altered parts of the Quran as Muhammad dictated them to him.

Another narrative tells the story of a fanatical imam who returns from exile to incite the people of his country to revolt, without any regard to their safety.

These narratives provoked great outrage in the Muslim world. The Satanic Verses was banned in most Muslim countries. In the West, Muslim extremists firebombed bookshops selling the novel and held rallies where copies of the book were burned.

Some people associated with translating or publishing the book were attacked and seriously injured or killed; in February 1989, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - the spiritual leader of Iran - issued a fatwa condemning The Satanic Verses as "blasphemous against Islam."

The fatwa also called for Salman Rushdie's execution. A bounty was placed on the writer's head, and he was forced to live in hiding for years, under police protection. There were two failed attempts on Rushdie's life, one of them carried out by Hezbollah.

The UK government broke off diplomatic ties with Iran in protest of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In 1998, nearly ten years later, Iran, in an attempt to restore diplomatic relations, made a public statement claiming that it would neither support nor hinder assassination attempts on Rushdie.

In 2005, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reaffirmed the fatwa and the death sentence of Salman Rushdie. Two years later, the UK's Queen Elizabeth II knighted Rushdie for services in literature, angering Muslims around the world. In Pakistan and Malaysia, mass demonstrations took place in protest of Rushdie's knighthood.

A year later, in response to the outrage of Muslim extremists over editorial cartoons satirizing Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper, Rushdie signed the manifesto Together Facing The New Totalitarianism, which was published in the French liberal newspaper, Charlie Hebdo.

Sadly, in January of 2015, two Muslim extremist gunmen invaded the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, screamed "Allahu Akbar!" ("God is great!") and started shooting. Twelve people were killed, including five cartoonists and two editors.

Death threats continue to be made against Rushdie. In January of 2012, he was scheduled to appear at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India, but had to cancel that appearance and the rest of his Indian tour.

Jaipur police warned Rushdie that hired assassins were planning to kill him either there or at another one of his appearances in India. He later investigated the police reports and concluded that the Jaipur police had deliberately lied to him.

Never one to back down, Salman Rushdie often appears as a discussion panelist and activist advocating for freedom of expression and other liberal causes. He is without a doubt one of the world's greatest writers.

Unfortunately, he remains a target of radical Muslims. In August of 2022, as Rushdie was about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, a man stormed the stage and stabbed him repeatedly. He survived - barely - but was blinded in one eye and lost the use of one hand.

In May of 2025, the convicted assailant, Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old Muslim from New Jersey, was sentenced to two concurrent terms totalling 32 years in prison - 25 years for attempted murder plus 7 years for injuring someone else. He is still awaiting trial on federal terrorism charges.

Salman Rushdie's most recent novel, Victory City, was published in February of 2023. In 2024, he published Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, a memoir of his attempted assassination in Chautauqua.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes."

- Salman Rushdie

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Salman Rushdie discussing his recent memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, on an 86-minute UK livestream. Enjoy!

Notes For June 18th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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On June 18th, 1903, the legendary French writer Raymond Radiguet was born. He was born in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, just eight miles away from Paris. Not much is known of his early childhood.

Radiguet's father was a cartoonist, he grew up during World War I, and life on the French home front during the Great War influenced his writing. He started drawing and writing poetry at an early age.

At the age of 16, Raymond Radiguet abandoned his studies at a technical school to pursue his interest in literature. He went to Paris and became associated with the Dadaist and Cubist movements in literature and art.

He contributed to the magazine Sic, his works appearing alongside those of writers such as Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, and Philippe Soupalt.

The young Radiguet's talent attracted the attention and admiration of legendary French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who took him on as a protege. Radiguet wrote a book of poetry, Cheeks On Fire, and a play called Pelicans.

However, it was his classic debut novel - written at the age of seventeen - that made him a huge success and an object of controversy. It was called Le Diable au Corps - The Devil in the Flesh (1923).

The story is set on the French home front during World War I. The narrator is a fifteen-year-old boy who tells the story of his affair with a young married woman.

The novel opens with the boy striking up a friendship with Marthe Lancombe, a nineteen-year-old woman about to be married. They both share an admiration for the great poet Charles Baudelaire. Soon, the boy is skipping school to help Marthe shop for furniture.

Not long after her wedding, Marthe's soldier husband is sent to the front. The boy, smitten with her, sees his opportunity. Soon, the schoolboy and the lonely young married woman embark on a passionate, but doomed affair. Marthe becomes pregnant, causing a scandal.

The novel created quite a scandal itself. Critics expressed outrage at the novel's glorification of adultery and depiction of adolescent sexuality, but were soon won over by the author's skillfully crafted narrative, written in a sober and objective style.

Raymond Radiguet's prose effectively captures the teenage boy's conflicting emotions - his pride in becoming a man and the pain caused by his lack of maturity and being thrust into an affair he's really too young to handle.

With the success of The Devil in the Flesh, Raymond Radiguet became the talk of Paris. How could this novel have been penned by an author barely older than his teenage protagonist?

Radiguet was proclaimed a genius. Although he denied it, The Devil in the Flesh was later revealed to be a semi-autobiographical novel based on Radiguet's real-life affair with an older woman.

A feature film adaptation of Devil In The Flesh would prove to be even more controversial than the novel. Italian director Marco Bellocchio's 1986 film was neither the first nor the last adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's classic novel.

Definitely the most famous film adaptation, it was the first mainstream feature film where a well-known, mainstream actress (Maruschka Detmers) engaged in uncensored hardcore sexual acts on screen.

While reveling in the success of his debut novel, Raymond Radiguet began writing his next book. Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel - Count d'Orgel's Ball (1924) told the story of a handsome, charming, carefree aristocrat, his wife, and his protege, François de Séryeuse.

All three characters become ensnared in a web of adultery, deception, and self-deception, culminating in Count d'Orgel's masquerade ball, where the guests wear masks and later reveal their true selves - in more ways than one.

Count d'Orgel's Ball was also acclaimed by critics and readers alike, but Radiguet never lived to bask in it. Shortly after completing the novel, he contracted typhoid fever. He died in December of 1923 at the age of twenty.

Radiguet's mentor, the great Jean Cocteau, was devastated. While trying to work on his own writing, he plunged into a quagmire of depression and drug addiction. From this despair would come Cocteau's classic novel, Les Enfants Terribles - The Terrible Children (1929).

Meanwhile, Count d'Orgel's Ball and other writings by Radiguet, including a second poetry collection, were published posthumously.

One can only imagine what the young genius Raymond Radiguet may have written, had his life not been tragically cut short.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Listen to me. I have something terrible to tell you. In three days, I am going to be shot by the soldiers of God."

- Raymond Radiguet, spoken to Jean Cocteau shortly before his death.

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a clip from the 1947 French feature film adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's classic novel, The Devil in the Flesh, in French with no subtitles.

Notes For June 17th, 2026

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This Day In Literary History

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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.

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Quote Of The Day

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"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

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on an episode of The Kalb Report marking the 40th anniversary of Watergate. Enjoy!