This Day In Literary History
On September 30th, 1868, Little Women, the classic novel by the famous American writer Louisa May Alcott, was published. The novel was published in two parts.
The second part, Good Wives, was published in 1869. In 1880, both parts would be combined and republished as a single volume, which is how the novel appears to this day.
Little Women, which tells the story of the four March sisters, (Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy) growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, was based on Alcott's experiences growing up with her own three sisters in Concord and Boston. Louisa modeled the character of Jo after herself.
Fifteen-year-old Jo March is the second oldest of the sisters. Intelligent, outspoken, and tomboyish, Jo longs to be a writer. An early feminist, Jo finds herself at odds with society's restrictions on women in the late 19th century.
At that time, most women were unable to pursue a higher education. They were pressured to marry young and have lots of children. Employment opportunities for respectable young women were few. Worst of all, women were denied the right to vote to change the status quo.
Through the course of the novel, the March sisters become friends with Theodore "Laurie" Laurence, the handsome, charming, affluent boy next door. An orphan, Laurie lives with his grandfather. He becomes especially close to Jo.
As Laurie joins in the March sisters' adventures, they get into various scrapes. The sisters also struggle to overcome their particular character flaws (Jo has a temper, Meg is vain, Beth is shy, and Amy selfish) in order to live up to their parents' expectations and become, well, little women.
The first part of Little Women became a huge hit with both critics and readers, and an overnight success, selling over 2,000 copies in 1868. Louisa May Alcott received many letters from fans (and visits from them at her home) clamoring for a sequel.
So, in 1869, Alcott published the second part, Good Wives. Although her fans were begging for Jo to get married - especially to Laurie - she resisted the idea at first, believing that Jo should remain a "literary spinster."
Alcott changed her mind, and in Good Wives, married off not only Jo, but Meg and Amy as well. However, in a surprising twist, Jo marries Friedrich "Fritz" Bhaer, the poor German immigrant and professor who encouraged her to be a serious writer, while Amy marries Laurie.
Alcott would later write :
Jo should have remained a literary spinster, but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn't dare refuse and out of perversity went and made a funny match for her.
In reviews that proved to be prescient, the critics of the day proclaimed Little Women to be a classic. And to this day, it remains one of the most popular works of 19th century American literature. It would be followed by two sequels: Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).
Little Women would later be adapted many times for the radio, stage, screen, and television.
Quote Of The Day "Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable."
- Louisa May Alcott
Vanguard Video Today's video features a complete reading of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel, Little Women. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 29th, 1547, the legendary Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet Miguel de Cervantes was born in Madrid, Spain. His father, Rodrigo de Cervantes, was a surgeon. Not much is known about his mother, Leonor de Cortinas.
Born into a noble family, Miguel de Cervantes was well-educated. In 1569, at the age of 22, he moved to Rome, where he immersed himself in the city's literature, art, and architecture. He found work as valet to a wealthy Catholic priest, Father Giulio Acquaviva, who would be ordained Cardinal the following year.
By then, Cervantes had enlisted in the Spanish naval elite corps, the Infanteria de Marina, stationed in Naples, which at the time was Spanish territory. In October of 1571, he served on a ship in the Holy League fleet.
The Holy League was a coalition of allies that included the Vatican, Spain, the Republics of Venice and Genoa, and others under the command of John of Austria, King Philip II's illegitimate half brother. Cervantes saw action in the Battle of Lepanto.
The Battle of Lepanto was a brutal five-hour battle between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire. When his ship came under fire, Cervantes was below deck, stricken with fever.
He couldn't bear to stay hidden with other sick men while his comrades were fighting and dying, so he begged his commanding officer for permission to fight. Permission was granted.
Cervantes fought bravely against the Ottomans and was shot three times. One of the bullets rendered his left arm useless. The other two struck him in the chest. Ultimately, the Holy League won the battle.
After the battle was over, he would spend six months in hospital recovering from his injuries. He left before his wounds completely healed and returned to active duty as a solider. He would serve for a few more years.
In September of 1575, he set sail from Naples to Barcelona, carrying letters of commendation to the King from the Duke de Sessa. As his ship approached the Catalan coast, it was attacked by Algerian pirates.
Although the captain and crew mounted a fierce resistance, most of the men were killed. The rest, including Cervantes, were taken prisoner and brought to Algiers. He spent five years as a slave.
Cervantes' parents and the Trinitarians (a Catholic religious order) were ultimately able to buy his freedom. During his captivity, he began to write, and he already had a lifetime of experiences to inspire him.
In December of 1584, Cervantes married his much younger girlfriend Catalina de Salazar y Palacios. Her uncle, Alonso de Quesada y Salazar, would serve as the inspiration for Cervantes' most famous literary character, Don Quixote.
The following year, Miguel de Cervantes' first major work was published. It was a novel called La Galatea. On the surface, La Galatea seems like a typical pastoral romance, as it tells the story of two shepherds, best friends, who are in love with the same woman.
However, Cervantes' dazzling debut novel is much more than that. Combining prose with poetry in a variety of forms and styles, La Galatea is a deep and poetic examination of the nature of love.
Although literary critics of the time and even Cervantes himself would claim that he couldn't write poetry, he proved his poetic talent in his first novel.
Now recognized as a major work, La Galatea was only modestly successful when it was first published. His early plays also enjoyed just modest success. So, Cervantes spent the next twenty years living a nomadic existence.
He traveled and worked at various jobs, including that of a tax collector and a purchasing agent for the Spanish Armada. Financial and legal troubles would plague him, as he went bankrupt and was imprisoned twice on suspicion of embezzlement.
By 1606, Cervantes returned to Madrid, where he would live for the rest of his life. A year earlier, he published the first part of his greatest work, which established him as a brilliant, modern novelist far, far ahead of his time.
It's also rightfully considered to be one of the greatest novels in the history of Western literature. El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha, (The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha), later shortened to just Don Quixote, was a masterpiece of satirical comic adventure.
Alonso Quixano is a recently retired gentleman nearing his 50th birthday. He now lives a quiet life in the Spanish countryside, in the town of La Mancha, along with his niece and their housekeeper.
Quixano spends practically all of his time reading books about knights and chivalry. He becomes so obsessed with these stories - which he believes are real and not works of fiction - that he rarely sleeps or eats. All he does is read, and people begin to believe that he's lost his mind.
One day, Quixano decides to become a knight himself. He dons a suit of armor, renames himself Don Quixote de La Mancha, and sets off in search of adventure - and to defend the honor of his mistress, the beautiful noblewoman Lady Dulcinea del Toboso.
She is really Aldonza Lorenzo, a neighboring farm girl. Quixote performs his first act of chivalry when he saves a boy who'd been tied to a tree by his master for daring to ask for the wages he'd earned but was never paid. Unfortunately, after Quixote leaves, the boy is beaten by his master.
Later, Quixote has a run-in with some traders whom he believes have insulted his imaginary mistress, Lady Dulcinea. Quixote demands satisfaction. Severely beaten by one of the traders, he's left on the side of the road.
He is later found by one of his neighbors, Pablo Crespo, who brings him home. Quixote plans another quest. His niece, the housekeeper, the parish curate, and the local barber try to dissuade him from his quest for adventure.
They burn his books about knights and chivalry, then seal up the rest of his library and pretend that it was taken by a traveling magician. Undeterred, Quixote turns to another neighbor, Sancho Panza, and persuades him to become his squire.
Panza is a short, fat, vulgar man who is proud of his illiteracy. Though he seems dimwitted at first, Sancho proves to be far wiser and far more sensible than his master, Don Quixote.
Together, they set off for adventure and during their travels, they meet prostitutes, priests, soldiers, goatherds, escaped convicts, scorned lovers, and other characters. Don Quixote's overactive imagination leads him to embark on chivalrous quests.
His tendency to violently intervene in matters that are none of his business - and his habit of never paying his debts - often results in humiliation and injury, with poor Sancho Panza getting the worst of it.
In his most famous adventure, Quixote attacks a group of ferocious giants, which Sancho knows are just windmills. Eventually, Don Quixote is at last persuaded to go home, but the first part hints at yet another quest, stating that the records of it were lost.
Don Quixote didn't make a rich man of Miguel de Cervantes, but it did rescue him from poverty and bring him international fame. He continued to write. Mostly he wrote plays, but he also published a classic short story collection, Novelas Ejemplares (1613) and a dazzling epic poem, Viaje del Parnaso (1614).
In 1614, an unknown writer using the pseudonym Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda published his own sequel to Don Quixote. Avellaneda's work was held in low regard by critics and readers - then and now.
The book was infamous for its poor quality and numerous errors, including misnamed characters. Cervantes would pepper his own sequel with in-jokes and other potshots at Avellaneda's work.
Angered by Avellaneda's phony sequel to his novel, Cervantes was prodded to deliver what he had promised but never completed - a sequel to Don Quixote. He immediately began work on Don Quixote, Part Two which would be published in late 1615.
Both novels would later be published in one epic volume, which first appeared in 1617. From then on, Don Quixote would be published as one long volume.
Where the first part of Don Quixote was pure farce, the second part is more serious - a philosophical treatise on deception. Quixote's imaginary quests are the result of incredibly cruel practical jokes.
These jokes, played on Quixote by wealthy patrons, take a great emotional toll on him. He eventually regains his sanity and renounces chivalry. He dies a sane but sad and broken man.
Don Quixote would be adapted numerous times for the stage, screen, radio, and television. Its most famous stage adaptation, a play called Man of La Mancha, would itself be adapted as an award winning Broadway musical.
The musical's original lyrics, written by British poet W.H. Auden, were replaced due to their scathingly anti-establishment themes. Miguel de Cervantes died in April of 1616 at the age of 68.
His last great novel, Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, would be published posthumously in 1617.
Quote Of The Day
"The pen is the tongue of the mind."
- Miguel de Cervantes
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of the first volume of Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel, Don Quixote. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 25th, 1897, the legendary American writer William Faulkner was born. He was born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi, named after his great-grandfather, a former Confederate Army colonel and an important figure in Northern Mississippi.
A town in nearby Tippah County had also been named after him. When Faulkner was four years old, the family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he would live on and off for the rest of his life.
Oxford became the model for the town of Jefferson in Faulkner's writings. It was located in Lafayette County, which served as the model for Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
As a teenager, Faulkner planned to marry his girlfriend Estelle Oldham, but another suitor, Cornell Franklin, proposed first, and Estelle's parents demanded that she marry him because he came from a respectable family.
Ten years later, her marriage fell apart and she divorced Cornell in April of 1929. Two months after Estelle's divorce was finalized, William Faulkner married her.
During the last year of World War I, Faulkner tried to enlist in the Army but was deemed unfit for service due to his height, or rather, his lack of it: he stood about 5'5" tall.
Undaunted, Faulkner joined first the Canadian then the British Royal Air Force, but saw no action. When he joined the Royal Air Force, he changed the spelling of his last name from Falkner to Faulkner.
Legend has it that the change had been made by a careless typesetter during the printing of his first novel. When asked about the misspelling of his name, Faulkner allegedly replied, "Either way suits me."
Although he would always be associated with Mississippi, Faulkner wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1925), while living in New Orleans. He had been encouraged to write by his friend, writer Sherwood Anderson.
The small house in New Orleans where Faulkner lived and wrote, located at 645 Pirate's Alley, just around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral, now serves as the premises of Faulkner House Books and the headquarters of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society.
Soldiers' Pay told the story of a World War I pilot who returns to his home town in Georgia after suffering a severe head injury in combat, from which he is dying.
Throughout the late 1920s, Faulkner honed his craft and published more novels. His fourth novel, The Sound And The Fury, (1929) while not a commercial success at the time of its publication, has since been regarded as his first masterpiece.
Making bold and brilliant use of experimental techniques in narration and non-linear plotting, the novel told the story of the once great Compson family, formerly respected Old Southern aristocrats. Now the family teeters on dissolution and its reputation is tarnished.
The novel is divided into four sections. The first three sections feature first person narration, each section narrated by one of the grown Compson sons. The fourth section is told in third-person narration.
This section follows Dilsey Gibson, the matriarch of the servant family that works for the Compsons, as she observes the slow destruction of the Compson family.
The four sections are not in chronological order. The first section is narrated by 33-year-old Benjy Compson, the youngest son, who is an embarrassment to the family because he is retarded.
The only ones who care for him are his beloved older sister, Candace "Caddy" Compson and the matriarchal servant woman, Dilsey Gibson. In Benjy's narration, Faulkner makes use of dazzling impressionistic language to convey his retardation.
As the novel progresses, the reader is drawn into the self-destructive web that has ensnared the Compsons, which includes nihilism, racism, sexual frustration, sexual promiscuity, suicide, mental illness, and financial crisis.
The Sound And The Fury is rightfully considered one of the greatest American novels ever written. Today, it still appears frequently on required reading lists for high school and college English classes.
Faulkner's next novel, As I Lay Dying, (1930) is also considered a classic and expands on the techniques Faulkner used in The Sound And The Fury.
The narration is still in the stream-of-consciouness style, but this time, the story is narrated by 15 different people - including the late family matriarch who provides narration while she lies dead in her coffin.
Her name is Addie Bundren, and the novel deals with her family's quest to honor her last wish, which is to be buried in Jefferson, Mississippi. As the story unfolds, we learn all about the Bundren family, including how one of Addie's children is illegitimate, conceived as the result of her affair with a preacher.
In 1931, William Faulkner would publish the novel that first made him famous - or some would say, infamous. Sanctuary not only proved to be a shocker for 1930s readers, it also made Faulkner's name as a writer and awakened interest in his brilliant earlier works.
Ironically, Sanctuary, a Southern Gothic potboiler, was deliberately written to be shocking; Faulkner was in serious financial straits and needed to write something that would make him some fast money. There were no artistic intentions behind it.
Set in 1929 Mississippi, Sanctuary told the story of Temple Drake, an attractive young woman from a wealthy, respected Southern family - her father is a well-known and powerful judge.
Though a college student at the University of Mississippi, Temple Drake is shallow and vapid. A wild, promiscuous party girl, she loves to go drinking and carousing with boys, and they love to drink and carouse with her.
During one night of partying, Temple gets involved in a drunk driving accident. She and her bootlegger boyfriend Gowan Stevens are hidden from the police by his bootlegging crew members, Tommy and Popeye.
Tommy is good-natured, but Popeye is an impotent, degenerate psychopathic criminal. After Popeye catches Temple and Tommy making love, he kills Tommy and rapes Temple with a corncob. He eventually kidnaps her and forces her to live and work at a brothel he owns.
The story climaxes with a sensational murder trial where Temple, who enjoyed her degradation at Popeye's hands, falsely accuses Lee Godwin, another bootlegger, of raping her and killing Tommy - crimes for which Godwin is wrongly convicted and lynched.
Believe it or not, Sanctuary was adapted as a feature film in 1933. The novel was heavily sanitized for the screen, with no references to corncobs. The character of Popeye was renamed Trigger to avoid confusion with the popular comic strip character.
Retitled The Story Of Temple Drake, the resulting film still caused a furor and helped bring about the Production Code crackdown the following year, resulting in fiercely strict censorship of American films for over thirty years.
Twenty years after the publication of Sanctuary, Faulkner would publish a sequel called Requiem For A Nun, which follows Temple Drake, now a wife and mother, as she struggles to deal with her violent, troubled past.
The sequel is no simple potboiler - it's written in Faulkner's experimental literary style. In fact, the book is part novel and part play. The entire book would be adapted for the stage by the legendary French novelist and playwright Albert Camus in 1956.
William Faulkner would continue to write more great novels, including Light In August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), and Intruder In The Dust (1948).
He was also a prolific short story writer; A Rose For Emily, Red Leaves, That Evening Sun, and Dry September were among his most acclaimed and popular stories, and often published in anthologies.
In 1949, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He donated a portion of his prize money "to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers."
This donation resulted in the establishment of the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction. He donated another portion of his prize money to set up a scholarship fund for black students at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
In the early 1940s, legendary film director Howard Hawks invited Faulkner to come to Hollywood and work on screenplays for his movies. Faulkner gladly accepted the offer, as he needed the money and the pay was good.
He would contribute to the scripts of Hawks' classic films such as his adaptations of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Ernest Hemingway's To Have And Have Not. Faulkner's work as a screenwriter led him to become friends with Hawks, actors Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and other Hollywood illuminati.
Faulkner suffered from a lifelong drinking problem, though he would often tell friends, family, and the press that he drank while he wrote because he believed that alcohol helped fuel the creative process.
Many believe that he drank to escape the pressures of his life, including his frequent financial problems. In 1959, Faulkner was seriously injured in a horse-riding accident. His injuries and the ravages of alcoholism led to the deterioration of his health.
William Faulkner died of a heart attack in 1962 at the age of 64. Before his death, he completed his last novel, The Reivers, which was supposedly the book he intended to end his writing career with.
The brilliant coming-of-age story, set in early 20th century Memphis, won Faulkner the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which was awarded to him posthumously in 1963. The novel would be adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1969, directed by Mark Rydell and starring Steve McQueen, Mitch Vogel, and Burgess Meredith.
Quote Of The Day "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."
- William Faulkner
Vanguard Video Today's video features a rare recording of William Faulkner giving his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Faulkner claimed that he was so drunk, he didn't remember giving the speech. Is that a humorous exaggeration or the truth? Listen and decide for yourself!
This Day In Literary History
On September 24th, 1896, the legendary American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald was born. He was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald in St. Paul, Minnesota, named after his famous distant relative, poet Francis Scott Key, who had written the poem that would become the national anthem.
Scott, as he was called by family and friends, spent most of his childhood in upstate New York, but returned to Minnesota in 1908 after his father was fired from his job at Procter & Gamble. His first short story, a detective story, was published in a school newspaper when he was 12.
After returning to Minnesota, Fitzgerald spent three years at St. Paul Academy, but was expelled at the age of 16 for neglecting his studies. However, not long afterward, when he attended Newman School in Hackensack, he buckled down and excelled at academics.
In 1913, at the age of 17, Fitzgerald entered Princeton University, where he met and became friends with future writers and literary critics Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. He became involved with and wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club.
The Triangle Club is a student theater troupe that puts on an original, student-written musical comedy every year, then takes the show on tour over the winter holiday season. Fitzgerald's experience writing for the Club inspired him to write his first novel.
His first novel was called The Great Egoist. He submitted it for publication to Charles Scribner's Sons. The editor praised Fitzgerald's writing talent, but rejected his novel. It would not discourage him from writing.
During World War I, Fitzgerald left Princeton to join the Navy, but the war ended shortly after he enlisted. He was stationed at Camp Sheridan, where he met a girl named Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama State Supreme Court judge.
They fell in love and became engaged. In 1919, Fitzgerald moved into an apartment in New York City, where he took a job at an advertising firm and wrote short stories on the side. He was unable to convince Zelda that he could support her, so the engagement was called off.
Fitzgerald moved back in with his parents in St. Paul and began revising his previously rejected novel. Practically re-written and retitled This Side Of Paradise, the novel was accepted by Scribner's for publication and published on March 26th, 1920.
It became one of the most popular novels of the year. A classic of the flapper generation, the novel told the story of Amory Blaine, a handsome young Princeton University student and aspiring writer who learns a bitter lesson about status seeking and greed via two doomed romances with wealthy debutantes.
The success of Fitzgerald's novel, which also helped raise the prices of his short stories, enabled him to make a decent living, so he and Zelda got back together and were married at St. Patrick's Cathedral. They had only one child, a daughter, Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald.
The 1920s proved to be an influential decade in F. Scott Fitzgerald's development as a writer. His second novel, The Beautiful And Damned (1922) was the semi-autobiographical story of a wealthy heir, Anthony Patch, his relationship with his wife Gloria, and his struggle with alcoholism.
The Beautiful And Damned was a brilliantly written character study, but Fitzgerald's third novel would prove to be his masterpiece. The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, was an unforgettable chronicle of the Jazz Age - a term Fitzgerald coined.
Taking place from 1919 to 1929, the Jazz Age was the post World War I era of unbridled prosperity, Prohibition, organized crime, uncontrolled drinking, sexual experimentation, jazz music, flappers, and other rowdy, disaffected youth.
Set during the summer of 1922, the novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner and World War I veteran who moves to New York City to seek his fortune. At a lavish party, he meets the host - a mysterious wealthy man named Jay Gatsby, who claims to know Nick from his Army days during the Great War.
Nick and Gatsby strike up an odd, yet close friendship. Nick is bemused when Gatsby introduces him to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish underworld figure. Gatsby is also a former suitor of Nick's cousin, Daisy Buchanan, now the selfish, spoiled wife of millionaire Tom Buchanan.
Nick arranges a meeting between Gatsby and Daisy. The two begin an affair which angers Tom, even though he has a mistress on the side. Nick stands by his friend Gatsby and soon finds himself caught in a web of adultery, decadence, and ultimately, murder.
Within a year of its initial publication, The Great Gatsby was adapted as a Broadway play and a feature film, but the novel was not popular and sold less than 25,000 copies during Fitzgerald's lifetime. Upon its republication in 1945 and 1953, the novel became a classic.
It quickly gained a huge readership and a deserved reputation as one of the greatest American novels of all time. It would be adapted again as a feature film, the most acclaimed version released in 1974 and starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby.
During the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald made several visits to Europe, most notably Paris, where he became friends with many of the American expatriate writers living there, including Ernest Hemingway, who became his best friend.
They would spend lots of time drinking, talking, and exchanging manuscripts. Fitzgerald helped boost Hemingway's career. Unfortunately, Hemingway and Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, couldn't stand each other.
Hemingway accused Zelda of being insane (which she was) and encouraging Fitzgerald to drink heavily in order to distract him from writing novels. That way, he could devote his attention to cranking out short stories strictly for money to keep Zelda in the life of luxury to which she was accustomed.
Zelda accused Hemingway of using Fitzgerald to further his own career. She called him a fairy and accused him of having a homosexual affair with her husband. There is no evidence to support this accusation, most likely a product of Zelda's paranoia, but some scholars claim that Hemingway's aggressive hypermasculinity was the result of him being a repressed, self-loathing homosexual.
To punish his wife for questioning his masculinity, Fitzgerald slept with a female prostitute and flaunted it. The conflict between Hemingway and Zelda resulted in the ending of Fitzgerald's friendship with him and a lifelong animosity between the two men.
At first, the Fitzgeralds' marriage had been productive. Zelda's diaries and large collection of correspondence would inspire Scott's writings; sometimes he even quoted passages from her writings. But their alcoholism and Zelda's worsening schizophrenia took a toll on him.
In 1934, Fitzgerald finally published his long awaited fourth novel, Tender Is The Night. He started writing the novel in 1932, while Zelda was hospitalized. It received glowing reviews and briefly made the bestseller list.
But its reception was nowhere near as big as that of The Great Gatsby. In deep financial trouble, Fitzgerald spent the remainder of his life writing commercial short stories for money and working for Hollywood movie studio MGM.
He became a screenwriter for hire, which he found degrading. He worked on many scripts and even wrote some unfilmed scenes for Gone With The Wind. There was no artistic intent behind his work as a screenwriter - he did it for the money.
Fitzgerald would mock himself in a series of 17 short stories known as the Pat Hobby Stories, which would later be republished as a collection.
Pat Hobby, a once great screenwriter of the silent film era, is now a broken down, drunken hack. He haunts studio lots looking to write for a few dollars, or better yet, an on-screen credit. His schemes usually backfire and result in more humiliation.
By the late 1930s, years of heavy drinking had taken a toll on F. Scott Fitzgerald's health. In late 1940, he suffered two heart attacks. On December 21st, 1940, the day after he suffered his second heart attack, he suffered a third, massive heart attack and died at the age of 44.
Among the mourners at his wake was legendary writer Dorothy Parker, who reportedly wept and murmured, "The poor son of a bitch." - a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in The Great Gatsby.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's last novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously in 1942.
Quote Of The Day
"Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel, The Great Gatsby. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 23rd, 480 BCE, the legendary ancient Greek playwright and poet Euripides was born on the Greek island of Salamis. Evidence suggests that he was born into a wealthy family.
He served as a cup-bearer (a royal court officer whose duty was to serve drinks at the royal table) for Apollo's dancers, but soon came to question his religion after being influenced by the great thinkers of the day, including Sophocles, Protagoras, and Anaxagoras.
Euripides was married twice; his wives were Choerile and Melito, though it's not clear which was his first wife. He had three sons. Supposedly, he also had a daughter who was killed by a rabid dog.
This may have been a joke attributed to the comic playwright Aristophanes, who often poked fun at Euripides. In addition to his literary talents, Euripides was also an accomplished painter and athlete.
He once traveled to Syracuse, Sicily, and was involved in various public and political activities. At the invitation of King Archelaus I of Macedon, Euripides left Athens and moved to Macedonia, taking up permanent residence.
It has been said that Euripides wrote his plays in a cave on the Island of Salamis; the ten-chambered cave, now known as the Cave of Euripides, was the subject of an archaeological dig in the 1990s.
While the complete manuscripts of many of his plays (including his very best ones) survived, many more plays were lost, with only fragments or a handful of lines left to prove their existence.
In 455 BCE, Euripides competed for the first time in the City Dionysia, the famous Athenian dramatic festival. He entered his classic second play, Medea, a take on the Medea myth, which was written in 431 BCE.
After completing his quest for the Golden Fleece, Jason leaves his wife Medea so that he can marry Glauce, the daughter of King Creon. Driven to great anger and despair by this betrayal, Medea poisons Glauce and King Creon, then takes an even crueler revenge on Jason by murdering his children - her own sons.
Euripides' Medea is a sympathetic character who suffers from the disadvantage of being a woman in a stifling patriarchal society that regards her as property to be acquired and discarded at will. This and her identity as a barbarian woman infuriated ancient Greek audiences.
Euripides' proto-feminist treatment of women, his sympathetic depiction of intelligent slaves, and his meditations on the irrationality of religion would establish him as a progressive thinker and a modernist playwright way ahead of his time.
His fellow playwright Sophocles said that while he portrayed men as they ought to be, Euripides portrayed them as they were. Medea placed third in the City Dionysia, reportedly because Euripides refused to brown nose the judges.
Another of his classic plays, The Trojan Women (415 BCE), would win second prize. The play, produced during the Peloponnesian War, was a biting commentary on the capture of the Island of Melos by the Athenians earlier that year, and their subsequent slaughter and enslavement of their fellow Greeks.
Euripides' last and greatest play, The Bacchae, completed before his death in 406 BCE, would finally win him first prize at the City Dionysia competition when it was performed a year later. The prize would be awarded posthumously.
The Bacchae is a gruesome tragedy based on the myth of King Pentheus of Thebes and his mother Agave, who were punished by the god Dionysus (King Pentheus's cousin) for refusing to worship him.
Euripides would also write Cyclops, the only complete satyr play (the ancient Greek equivalent of bawdy burlesque comedy) to survive. He died of illness at the age of 74, most likely the result of his exposure to the harsh Macedon winter.
His works would influence the New Comedy, Roman drama, and the French classicists. His influence as a dramatist continues to this day.
Quote Of The Day
"The wisest men follow their own direction and listen to no prophet guiding them. None but the fools believe in oracles, forsaking their own judgment."
- Euripides
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete performance of Euripides's classic play, Medea. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History On September 22nd, 1598, the legendary English playwright, poet, and actor Ben Jonson was arrested and charged with manslaughter. It would not be Jonson's first brush with the law.
He and fellow playwright Thomas Nashe had been previously jailed for obscenity following a performance of their play The Isle of Dogs, which, sadly, has been lost, as all existing copies of the script were destroyed by the authorities. Jonson's arrest for manslaughter came about as the result of his duel with Gabriel Spenser, an actor who belonged to the same company, that of Philip Henslowe, who managed the Rose Theatre.
Jonson was known for his foul temper and frequent quarrels with other actors - especially those performing in his plays. However, the exact reason for his duel with Spenser is not known.
Swords were the chosen weapons for this particular duel. Although the blade of his sword was ten inches shorter than that of his opponent, Jonson killed Spenser (who, ironically, had previously killed another man in an earlier duel.) to win the duel.
He was immediately arrested, charged with manslaughter, and incarcerated at Newgate Prison. Jonson pled guilty, but avoided the hangman's rope by converting to Catholicism.
He then invoked the Benefit of Clergy, which allowed a defendant to request that he be tried under canon law by a bishop instead of under secular law by a judge.
At his trial, Jonson was able to avoid the death penalty and receive a light sentence by reciting a bible verse (Psalm 51) in Latin and reading a passage from the Bible to prove his literacy.
He was sentenced to be branded on his left thumb (to mark him as a convicted criminal) and to forfeit his property to the Church, after which, he was released from prison and returned to writing plays and acting.
Earlier that year, Jonson had enjoyed his first big success as a playwright when he staged a production of his classic play, Every Man in His Humour. The play was performed by an acting company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men at the Curtain Theatre.
The Lord Chamberlain's Men were England's most famous acting company. One of the first actors to be cast in the play was the legendary actor, playwright, and poet William Shakespeare.
Although Jonson would also become famous for his criticisms of Shakespeare's plays - he once quipped that Shakespeare never revised his plays when they should have been revised heavily - he actually admired Shakespeare.
He said of the Bard, "there was ever more in him to be praised than pardoned." When Jonson learned of Shakespeare's death, he said, "he was not of an age, but for all time."
Quote Of The Day
"Art hath an enemy called Ignorance."
- Ben Jonson
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a full cast reading of Ben Jonson's classic play, Every Man in His Humour. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On September 18th, 1987, Hellraiser, a feature film adaptation of the classic horror novella The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker, was released to theaters.
The movie was written and directed by Clive Barker himself - the first time that the popular English horror novelist ventured into filmmaking. It was not the first time that Barker's writings were adapted for the screen.
His short stories Transmutations and Rawhead Rex were adapted as feature films in 1985 and 1986, respectively. Barker hated both movies, which is why he decided to write and direct the next film adaptation himself.
Hellraiser opens with Frank (Sean Chapman), a hedonistic adventurer always in search of new sexual thrills, buying a mysterious antique Chinese puzzle box in an unnamed third world country. It's not really Chinese; it's a diabolical object called the Lament Configuration that opens a door to another dimension.
Back home in England, Frank solves the puzzle. Chains with small hooks on them fly out of the box and tear into Frank's flesh, then tear him apart as three demonic beings called Cenobites cross over from their hellish dimension and into ours.
The Cenobites examine Frank's remains, after which, the leader, Pinhead, (Doug Bradley) picks up the puzzle box and closes it. The room returns to normal. Later, Frank's brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) moves into Frank's house, along with his wife, Julia (Clare Higgins).
They don't know what happened to Frank - they think he's off on another one of his adventures. When Larry enters the upstairs room where Frank was killed, he cuts his hand and some of his blood drips onto the floor - and mysteriously disappears into the floorboards.
This allows Frank's tortured soul to partially regenerate his body. He appears to Julia, with whom he once had an affair, and convinces her to help him complete the regeneration of his body so he can escape from the Cenobites, breaking the deal he made with them.
Soon, Julia is luring men up to the attic on the pretense of sex, where Frank drains them of their blood, which he uses to regenerate his body. He tells Julia about the Lament Configuration and how it allows the Cenobites to cross over from their world into ours.
Soon, Frank, Julia, and Frank's teenage niece Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) all run afoul of the demonic Cenobites, who believe that the extremes of pleasure and pain are inseparable - and are more than happy to introduce the trio to the pleasures of pain.
When Hellraiser was completed, in order to avoid an X rating, the MPAA ratings panel required Clive Barker to trim some of the gore and tone down the overall sadomasochistic theme of the movie.
Some of the cuts would later be restored without resulting in the loss of the film's R rating. The movie's first working title was Sadomasochists From Beyond The Grave.
Hellraiser became a huge box office hit, grossing twenty times its budget. Rightfully considered one of the great cult classic horror films, it inspired numerous sequels and made English actor Doug Bradley, who plays Pinhead, a cult film icon.
The Cenobite leader was not called Pinhead in the novella or in the screenplay. In the book, he's referred to as "the Hell Priest." In the screenplay, he has no name. He was nicknamed Pinhead by the crew and fans because his head and face were pierced by metal pins. The nickname stuck and was used in the sequels.
Clive Barker would write and direct more film adaptations of his works, including Nightbreed (1990) and Lord of Illusions (1995).
In 2011, Barker was supposed to write and direct a remake of Hellraiser for Dimension Films, which owned the film rights to the Hellraiser franchise. Unfortunately, the project fell through.
When Dimension Films realized that their contract with Clive Barker stipulated that they would lose the rights to the Hellraiser franchise if they didn't produce the movie, they rushed a film into production on a tiny budget of $300,000.
Barker wanted nothing to do with the film, Hellraiser: Revelations, a sequel to Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005). After the advertising claimed it was "from the mind of Clive Barker," the angry writer referred to it as "no child of mine" in a profanity laced tweet.
Hellraiser: Revelations was the first film to not star Doug Bradley as the iconic Pinhead. Bradley tweeted that he backed out because the script read like an unrevised first draft (it was, and there would be no revisions) and his salary would be about, in his words, "the price of a fridge."
Stephan Smith Collins was cast as Pinhead in Hellraiser: Revelations, which is considered by many to be the worst film in the popular series. Despite backlash from fans and critics, another installment of the series was released seven years later so Dimension could keep the film rights.
The role of Pinhead in Hellraiser: Judgement (2018) was again offered to Doug Bradley, but he turned it down when he learned that he would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement just to read the script, to prevent him from publicly expressing any displeasure he might have with it.
This time, Bradley was replaced by a newcomer, Paul T. Taylor, who had impressed writer-director Gary J. Tunnicliffe. Together, they decided to give Pinhead a new look and a new interpretation. Here, he works for Hell as a harvester of condemned souls.
The movie opens with Pinhead and the Auditor of the Stygian Inquisition discussing updating their methods in the age of advanced human technology. Meanwhile on Earth, three police detectives - Sean Carter, his brother David, and Christine Egerton - are investigating a brutal serial killer.
The killer is called The Preceptor because he murders his victims based on the Ten Commandments. As the body count continues, David Carter follows the clues and is stunned to discover that Sean, his brother and fellow detective, is the Preceptor.
Sean is caught by Pinhead first, and finds himself in Hell. He escapes, stealing the Lament Configuration, which he plans to use to sic the Cenobites on his wife and his brother in retribution for their affair...
Despite the studio toning down some of the gore and sexual content, Hellraiser: Judgement was surprisingly well received by fans and critics, with Dread Central horror film critic Steve Barton saying:
Hellraiser: Judgment's biggest accomplishment is that it's actually good. All of the acting is solid, as is the story. Pinhead is omnipresent, and Taylor delivers a worthy performance and is every bit as majestic as you'd hope he'd be... while not perfect nor as good as the classic Hellraiser films, [it] delivers a rather striking vision that feels as new as it does familiar.
In April of 2020, preproduction was finally set to begin on a Hellraiser reboot. By December, Clive Barker had regained the U.S. rights to the franchise. The film, produced by the Hulu streaming service and delayed by the pandemic, began shooting in Serbia the following year and was released on Hulu in October of 2022.
More faithful to Barker's novella than its predecessors, here Pinhead is referred to as The Priest and played by a woman, Jamie Clayton - a nod to the Cenobite leader's androgyny in the book. The main character, Riley McKendry, is a recovering drug addict struggling to stay clean. She's living with her estranged brother David, his boyfriend Colin, and their roommate, Nora.
Riley and her boyfriend Trevor find the Lament Configuration in an abandoned warehouse. After a fight with David, who accuses her of relapsing, Riley runs off and solves the puzzle box. David tracks her down, cuts himself on the box, and is abducted by the Cenobites.
After discovering that the Lament Configuration was previously owned by hedonistic millionaire Roland Voight, Riley and Trevor visit Voight's abandoned mansion and find his journals. Riley learns the horrifying truth about the puzzle box and the Cenobites - and what she'll have to do to save her brother from eternal torment in Hell...
Stylish and gruesome, the Hellraiser reboot received mostly good reviews from critics and fans and was the most watched movie on all streaming platforms during its first week of release.
Quote Of The Day
"My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that."
- Clive Barker
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 68-minute documentary on Hellraiser and the film franchise it spawned. Enjoy!
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