This Day In Literary History On July 31st, 1965, the legendary Scottish writer J.K. Rowling was born. She was born Joanne Kathleen Rowling in Yate, Gloucestershire, England.
Although her first name is Joanne, she has always been known as Jo. "No one ever called me 'Joanne' when I was young, unless they were angry," she once said.
Around the age of five or six, Rowling began writing fantasy stories, which she read to her younger sister. She enjoyed playing "wizards and witches" with her childhood best friend Ian Potter, who would be the inspiration for her most famous character.
She attended St. Michael's Primary School, whose headmaster was a kind, elderly man named Alfred Dunn. She adored him and would model Harry's mentor and school headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, after him.
When she was a young teenager, Rowling's great aunt, who "taught classics and approved of a thirst for knowledge, even of a questionable kind" gave her a copy of Hons and Rebels, the autobiography of British political activist Jessica Mitford.
Mitford was born into a wealthy, aristocratic family. In the 1930s, her sisters and father were ardent Nazi sympathizers, but Jessica became a devout communist, eloped, and ran away to Spain to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. J.K. Rowling loved her autobiography. Mitford became her heroine and she read all of her books.
Rowling received her college education at the University of Exeter, where she studied French and the classics. University was a "bit of a shock" to her, as she "was expecting to be amongst lots of similar people– thinking radical thoughts."
Once she made some like-minded friends, however, she began to enjoy college. After a year of study in Paris, Rowling returned to London, where she worked as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.
Around this time, in 1990, while on a four-hour delayed train trip from Manchester to London, an idea formed in Rowling's mind for a story about a young boy attending a school of wizardry.
She wouldn't act on the idea until a few years later. In 1991, she moved to Porto, Portugal, to teach English as a second language. While there, she met Portuguese TV journalist Jorge Arantes.
She married him the following year and bore him a daughter, Jessica, named after her heroine, Jessica Mitford. Six months after the baby was born, Rowling and her husband separated.
Just over a year after the separation, Rowling moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, to be near her sister. She was diagnosed with clinical depression and contemplated suicide.
Broke and surviving on welfare, Rowling decided to try her hand at writing. She completed her first novel, writing in longhand in cafes and at other locations while out with her daughter, whom she took for walks to get her to sleep.
Later, she typed up her writings on an old manual typewriter. She decided to go back to teaching, but in order to teach in Scotland, she would need a postgraduate certificate of education, which required a year long, full-time course of study.
While studying for her teaching certificate, Rowling tried to get her novel published. After an enthusiastic response from one of their readers, the Christopher Little literary agency agreed to represent J.K. Rowling.
They submitted her novel to twelve different publishing houses, and all of them rejected it, some stating that the novel was unpublishable and would never sell. Finally, a small publishing house in London called Bloomsbury - which was teetering on bankruptcy - decided to take a chance on the book.
This was because Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury's chairman, was thrilled with Rowling's novel. Given the first chapter to review, she quickly the demanded the next. And the next.
J.K. Rowling was paid a 1,500 pound advance by editor Barry Cunningham, but he warned her not to quit her day job, because she had little chance of making money in children's books.
Her novel was published in June of 1997. It was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. It told the story of Harry Potter, an 11-year-old orphan boy being raised by his ignorant, hateful, and abusive aunt and uncle, Petunia and Vernon Dursley.
Forced to live in a staircase closet and tormented by his odious cousin Dudley, Harry's bleak life changes forever when a giant called Hagrid arrives to take him away from his nasty relatives.
Hagrid reveals to Harry the truth about himself, which his aunt and uncle had concealed from him: Harry is a wizard, like his father, James Potter, and his mother Lily - his aunt Petunia's sister - was a witch.
When Harry was a baby, his parents were murdered by the evil dark wizard Lord Voldemort, who tried to kill Harry as well. But Harry miraculously survived, and the lightning-shaped scar on his forehead is the result of his attempted murder.
Harry discovers that there exists a secret world of wizards and witches hidden from the eyes of muggles - people born without magical powers. Hagrid takes him to Diagon Alley, a shopping district in the magical world, where he learns that he has inherited his parents' fortune.
There, Harry buys the books and supplies he'll need for boarding school - the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry - where he will learn to master his magic and become a great wizard.
On the train ride to Hogwarts, Harry meets fellow students Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. The three will soon become inseparable best friends.
At school, Harry meets his teachers, including kindly old headmaster Albus Dumbledore, teacher and Gryffindor house director Minerva McGonagall, and professor Severus Snape, director of the sinister Slytherin house, who may or may not be a "death eater" - a follower of the evil Lord Voldemort.
At the Hogwarts school, the students play a sport called Quidditch - kind of a cross between soccer and polo, the playing field high up in the air, the players riding on broomsticks. Harry takes a liking to the sport and becomes a talented Quidditch player.
As the forces of good and evil in the magical world prepare for war, Harry learns that his ultimate destiny is to face (and hopefully destroy) his parents' murderer, Lord Voldemort, to whom he is psychically linked via his lightning-shaped scar.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is the first is a series of seven Harry Potter novels that follow the boy wizard through his years at Hogwarts, as he prepares for his final showdown with Lord Voldemort.
Meticulously plotted and detail-rich, the novel became a huge bestseller after it was published in the United States as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
J.K. Rowling has said that if she had been in a better position to do so, she would have fought her American publisher, Scholastic, Inc., to retain the novel's original title for its U.S. publication.
The Harry Potter novels created a literary phenomenon. They not only encouraged millions of children to discover the joy of reading, they also earned millions of adult fans as well, including me. They disproved the long held notion that children's novels must be brief and fast-paced.
Rowling's amazing fantasy novels are full-length and epic in scope. The fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, (2003) clocked in at a whopping 750+ pages. She has earned the respect of many of her fellow writers, including horror master Stephen King, who is a huge fan of the series.
There were however, some people who were less than thrilled by the adventures of Harry Potter. Christian fundamentalists around the world attacked Rowling's novels, accusing her of encouraging children to dabble in the occult, including practicing witchcraft and engaging in devil worship.
Rowling dismissed these ridiculous accusations, explaining that magic in her novels is depicted as a talent - a gift one is born with - and not part of a religion. She also noted that she belongs to the Church of Scotland.
Christian fundamentalists still attack her novels. The Catholic Church was mostly divided on the issue, however, Pope Benedictus XVI attacked the Harry Potter novels for their "subtle seductions," for which he was ridiculed and scorned, given the child sexual abuse scandals plaguing the Church.
The former Pope was neither the first nor is he the last clergyperson to attack the Harry Potter novels, which reached the top of the American Library Association's list of most banned and challenged books for the years 1999-2001.
The Harry Potter novels made the jump to the big screen in November of 2001, when a feature film version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was released.
Like the novel it was based on, the movie became a huge hit. The film version of the final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released in two parts in 2010 and 2011.
The movie studio, Warner Brothers, claimed there was too much detail in Rowling's last novel for one feature film. That didn't stop them from condensing the 750+ page Order of the Phoenix into one 138-minute movie.
The film's poorly written, threadbare screenplay removed a tremendous amount of important details, including the critical ending scene between Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore. Needless to say, that film was a huge disappointment.
J.K. Rowling said from the beginning that the Harry Potter chronicles were planned to be a seven-novel series. At the end of the last book, there is an epilogue set 19 years in the future.
While some new characters are established, there is no indication that Rowling will continue the series further - though she hasn't ruled it totally out of the question, either.
She has written some companion books, including Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, (2001) Quidditch Through The Ages, The Tales Of Beedle The Bard (2007), and most recently, two Short Stories from Hogwarts books.
When her Harry Potter books first became an international sensation, Rowling expressed interest in writing other novels and she has. Her first non-fantasy novel, The Casual Vacancy, was published in September of 2012.
Geared toward adult readers, it's a scathingly funny black comedy centered around the people and politics of a quaint little English village whose appearance is deceiving, as a Parish Council election results in the spilling of several villagers' dark secrets.
In April of 2013, a detective novel titled The Cuckoo's Calling, written by a new author named Robert Galbraith, was published. According to the book jacket, Galbraith was an ex-RMP (Royal Military Police) investigator - the perfect person to write detective fiction.
He introduced private detective Cormoran Strike, a down-on-his-luck gumshoe. When famous supermodel Lula Landry dies in a fall from her balcony, her death is ruled a suicide. Her brother John doesn't buy it and hires Strike, a childhood friend of their late brother Charlie, to investigate.
The Cuckoo's Calling received rave reviews, but sold poorly. When writer and Sunday Times columnist India Knight sent out a tweet praising the novel, someone named Jude Callegari sent a reply tweet claiming that J.K. Rowling was the real author of the book.
Rowling didn't respond. Her circle of literary friends denied she had written The Cuckoo's Calling. So, Richard Brooks, arts editor for the Sunday Times, began an investigation. He sent a copy of the novel to linguistics experts who confirmed that Rowling had written it.
Confronted with the evidence, Rowling's agent was forced to admit that she had written The Cuckoo's Calling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Many thought that the mysterious Jude Callegari who had outed the pseudonym was Rowling herself as part of a publicity stunt.
They were wrong. Judith "Jude" Callegari was the best friend of the wife of one of the founding partners of Russells Solicitors, the UK law firm that represented J.K Rowling, who was furious that her pseudonym had been outed. She issued a press release stating the following:
"To say that I am disappointed is an understatement. I had assumed that I could expect total confidentiality from Russells, a reputable professional firm, and I feel very angry that my trust turned out to be misplaced."
Rowling explained the reason for her pseudonym by saying, "It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name."
After Rowling was revealed as the real author of The Cuckoo's Calling, sales of the novel on Amazon jumped 4000%. She decided to continue the Cormoran Strike series, and the second novel was published in June of 2014.
The Silkworm finds Strike hired by Leonora Quine, the wife of notorious novelist Owen Quine, who vanished without a trace shortly after the manuscript for his long-awaited second novel, Bombyx Mori, was leaked. Quine's novel, filled with rape, sadomasochism, and cannibalism, was considered unpublishable.
The Harry Potter novels have sold over four hundred million copies combined. The book, movie, and merchandising royalties have made J.K. Rowling, once a broke single mother on welfare, one of the richest women in the UK.
Her new found wealth enabled her do a lot of philanthropic work, including raising money to combat poverty, helping single mothers, raising money to benefit multiple sclerosis research, (her mother died of the disease) and helping other causes.
On the day after Christmas, 2001, Rowling married her second husband, Neil Michael Murray, an anesthetist. She bore him two children, a son and a daughter. They live on an estate in Perth and Kinross, Scotland.
They also own homes in Edinburgh and Kensington, West London. J.K. Rowling's most recent novel, Lethal White, the fourth entry in her Cormoran Strike series, is scheduled for release on September 18th.
Quote Of The Day "We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better." - J.K. Rowling
Vanguard Video Today's video features J.K. Rowling being interviewed by Val McDermid at the 2014 Harrowgate International Festival. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 27th, 1916, the famous American writer and literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick was born in Lexington, Kentucky. She was eighth in a family of eleven children. Her father ran a plumbing and heating business.
Although he and his wife brought up their children in a strict Protestant household, they also held liberal political views, and Elizabeth inherited their deep compassion for the poor.
In 1939, Elizabeth moved to New York City to do graduate work at Columbia university. Two years later, she dropped out to become a freelance writer. As a literary critic, she reviewed books for highbrow publications such as the Partisan Review.
The editor for the Partisan Review, Philip Rahv, became her lover for a time. She would later describe her life in Manhattan as being comprised of "love and alcohol and clothes on the floor." She embraced the bohemian lifestyle of writing, free love, and jazz nightclubs.
Elizabeth Hardwick's first novel, The Ghostly Lover, was published in 1945. A year later, she attended a party given by poet Robert Lowell and his wife at their Greenwich Village apartment.
Elizabeth and Robert would meet again at Yaddo, a famous retreat for writers in upstate New York. By this time, Robert had finalized his messy divorce from his wife Jean Stafford, a hardened alcoholic who had given up writing to devote her time to the bottle.
Elizabeth and Robert dated for a couple of years, then married in 1949. The marriage would prove to be both long and tempestuous. Robert was mentally ill; during their honeymoon, he had to be committed following a severe manic-depressive episode.
At the mental hospital, he received shock treatment. After he recovered and was released, he and Elizabeth traveled to Europe, where Robert took a job as a teacher in Salzburg.
Robert Lowell's struggle with mental illness continued. In addition to manic depression, he suffered from psychotic episodes. While teaching in Salzburg, he engaged in an affair with one of his students - an affair that existed only in his mind.
He had another breakdown, received treatment, and was released. It would be a recurring pattern for him. Elizabeth Hardwick struggled to keep her marriage together. When her husband engaged in real life affairs with other women, she forgave the casual flings.
Meanwhile, in 1956, at the age of 40, Elizabeth gave birth to their only child, a daughter named Harriet. She continued with her writing career. In 1955, her second novel, The Simple Truth, was published.
Four years later, in 1959, she published her famous essay, The Decline of Book Reviewing, in Harper's Magazine. It was a scathing critique of the book reviews currently being published in American periodicals - including The New York Times Book Review. Though she and her husband had parted and reunited several times, by 1961, the marriage finally seemed solid and stable.
In 1963, Elizabeth Hardwick, along with her friends Jason Epstein, Barbara Epstein, and Robert B. Silvers, founded the legendary literary magazine, The New York Review of Books. For many years, she served as editorial adviser and creative consultant, and also published numerous essays in the magazine.
Her last, published in 2003, was about Nathanael West, the legendary author of the classic novels Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939) whose brilliant writing career and young life were both cut short by a car accident.
Elizabeth Hartwick's 21-year marriage finally came to an end in 1970, when instead of a casual fling, her husband fell in love with another woman - novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood. By 1972, Elizabeth and Robert Lowell divorced, and he married Caroline.
Elizabeth returned to her writing career. When she wasn't working or writing for The New York Review of Books, she worked on her third novel, Sleepless Nights, which would be published in 1979.
In addition to her novels and short fiction, Elizabeth published several nonfiction books, including a biography of Herman Melville and a true crime book about the Caryl Chessman case, one of several famous capital murder cases.
These cases led the Supreme Court to ban capital punishment as unconstitutional in 1972. Chessman, a career criminal, had been convicted of being the "Red Light Bandit," a serial robber who sometimes raped his female victims after robbing them.
Chessman was sentenced to death because a law on California's books (passed as a result of the Lindbergh baby case) made kidnapping with bodily harm a capital offense. Acting as his own attorney, Chessman appealed his conviction vigorously, claiming that it was due to mistaken identity.
Chessman won eight stays of execution. On his ninth execution date, the governor's office called the prison with another order to stay it, but the call came in too late - Chessman was already in the gas chamber, choking to death.
Elizabeth Hardwick's account of the Chessman case was included in the Library of America's 200-year retrospective of American true crime writing. She died in 2007 at the age of 91.
Quote Of The Day
"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination." - Elizabeth Hardwick
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a panel discussion of how three great writers - Elizabeth Hardwick, Henry James, and Edith Wharton - chronicled life in New York City in their short fiction. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 26th, 1894, the legendary English writer Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England. His father, Leonard Huxley, was a writer, a scientist, and a schoolmaster.
His grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a brilliant scientist famous for his vigorous defense of Charles Darwin's theories of evolution, which earned him the nickname "Darwin's Bulldog."
He also became famous for coining the term agnostic to describe his spiritual beliefs. An agnostic neither believes nor disbelieves in the existence of a god, because there is no scientific evidence to either prove or disprove that a higher power exists.
Aldous Huxley began his education at home, assisted by both his mother and his father's well-equipped laboratory. His mother died of illness when he was 14. At 17, he wrote his first novel, which would go unpublished.
That same year, Huxley suffered from keratitis, an inflammation of the corneas that left him practically blind for nearly three years. When he regained some of his eyesight, he enrolled at Balliol College, Oxford, to study English literature.
After he graduated with honors, Huxley taught French at Eton College. One of his students was a young man named Eric Blair, who would become famous for the classic novels he wrote under his legendary pseudonym, George Orwell.
Although Blair and his other students were impressed with his intellect, Huxley found that he had no aptitude for teaching and trouble maintaining discipline in the classroom.
Disqualified from military service during World War I due to his eyesight, Huxley would work briefly for the Air Ministry in 1918, near the end of the war. During the war, he spent most of his time working as a farm laborer at Garsington Manor.
Garsington Manor was the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a society hostess and patron of the arts. She would host the gatherings of a group of writers, artists, intellectuals, and philosophers that came to be known as the Bloomsbury Set.
Through Lady Ottoline, Aldous Huxley was introduced to this influential group and became friends with many of its members, including D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and Clive Bell. He determined to become a serious writer.
His first published novel, Crome Yellow, was published in 1921. Huxley began his literary career satirizing England's class system, specifically, the manners and mores of the upper class. Then, in 1932, he published the novel that made him world famous.
Brave New World, (the title comes from a line in Shakespeare's classic play, The Tempest) a masterpiece of dystopic science fiction, was far removed from anything Huxley had written before, though it did showcase the talent for satire that marked his previous novels.
It was inspired by H.G. Wells' novel Men Like Gods (1923), a work of utopic science fiction. Huxley had intended to write a scathing parody of the utopic visions of the future depicted in Wells' novel and in the works of other writers of the time.
Unlike his former student George Orwell's satire of Stalinism in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), Huxley's anti-capitalist dystopic vision depicted a twisted, surreal society of the future dedicated to mindless, materialistic pleasure.
It's "the Year of our Ford" 632, (car magnate Henry Ford has become a messianic figure to this capitalist, materialist dystopia) aka 2540 A.D., and the vast majority of the world's people live in a single, unified state called The World State, where the form of government is an eerily benevolent fascist dictatorship.
A strict caste system is in effect, and children are conceived in hatcheries and conditioned to fit into a predetermined class. The caste system of highest (Alpha) to lowest (Epsilon) is designed to assure universal employment in all areas - the backbone of the World State's capitalist economy and materialistic society.
Mass consumption is the government's philosophy, with catch phrases like "spending is better than mending" its mantras. There are no such things as parents or family; children are raised by everyone.
To keep the people happy, (and happy to work and spend money) the state uses recreational sex, which it encourages people to have often, with no emotional connections. Birth control is mandatory. To condition children to become sexually active adults, they are encouraged at a very young age to engage in erotic play with each other.
The World State also keeps its people happy by encouraging them to drug themselves with Soma, a mood enhancing narcotic. Instead of practicing a religion, people attend Solidarity Services.
At a Solidarity Service, people drug themselves into oblivion with large amounts of Soma, sing hymns, and then partake in "communion" by having an orgy.
Almost all the people of the World State engage in these and other state-approved customs and activities, as those who don't face ostracism and potential exile.
Bernard Marx works as a psychologist for the World State, but he has become discontented with this so-called utopia. Although an Alpha, his petite frame has made him a misfit among those of his caste.
He takes issue with the State's use of sleep programming to shape the people's most deeply held beliefs. He hates taking Soma and would "rather be himself." Worst of all, he finds himself drawn to a woman named Lenina Crowne.
Bernard doesn't want to engage in emotionless sex with Lenina, he - gasp - has fallen in love with her. Lenina is torn between her loyalty to the World State and the passions that are growing within her.
Eighteen-year-old John the Savage lives outside the World State on an Indian reservation. He is the illegitimate son of Thomas, a World State official, and a woman called Linda. Thomas is the Director of the London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.
Thomas lives in fear of this dark secret; conceiving a child naturally - and in an act of love - are considered scandalous and obscene acts in the World State. Thus, Linda was considered a disgrace.
She had been a Beta in the World State; now she lives on an Indian reservation because she's too ashamed to return to the World State. The Indian women hate her - she had sex with all their men, which she was conditioned to do by the World State.
Linda taught her son John how to read, an ability he considers a gift. The only books he had access to were his mother's manual from her old job in the World State and a collection of Shakespeare's plays.
John hated the job manual, but loved Shakespeare's plays and memorized them verbatim. Shakespeare's works are banned by the World State, but John still wants to see the "brave new world" his mother spoke of.
Bernard Marx takes John into the World State, where he becomes the toast of London. To Bernard's delight, when John meets Thomas and calls him father, Thomas is humiliated and resigns. Unfortunately, John's presence in the World State leads to tragedy.
After his mother dies of a Soma overdose, he incites a riot by throwing workers' Soma rations out a window. Caught by police, he is exiled and becomes a hermit. His solitude ends when he is caught on film whipping himself in a ritual of atonement, setting the stage for a tragic ending.
When Brave New World was first published in 1932, it was met with both acclaim and outrage. During the 1960s, it became a classic of the American counterculture. It remains remarkably relevant to this day.
Often appearing on high school English teachers' required reading lists, the novel continues to face bans and challenges from disgruntled parents. The American Library Association ranked the novel #52 on its list of the most banned and challenged books of all time.
Brave New World would be adapted for the radio, stage, screen, and television. In 1937, a few years after it was published, Aldous Huxley and his family moved to Hollywood, California.
There, his friend, American writer and philosopher Gerald Heard, introduced him to Vedanta (Veda-Centric Hinduism), meditation, vegetarianism, and enlightenment through ahimsa, the Hindu principle of nonviolence.
Huxley soon became part of Swami Prabhavananda's (the founder of the Ramakrishna Order) circle of followers. He would introduce his friend and fellow writer Christopher Isherwood to the group.
When he wasn't involved with his Vedantic studies, Huxley continued to write. His 1939 novel After Many A Summer, a satire of American culture, (specifically, its narcissism, superficiality, and obsession with youth) won him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
In 1938, Huxley's friend, the legendary novelist and screenwriter Anita Loos, introduced him to the MGM film studio, which hired him to write the screenplay for the movie Madame Curie, which starred Greer Garson as the famous scientist.
MGM rejected Huxley's original screenplay as "too literary." His original script synopsis for Walt Disney's animated adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic novel Alice In Wonderland was also rejected.
He did achieve some success as a screenwriter; he co-wrote the screenplays for the 1940 feature film adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and the 1944 adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
Huxley was known for his experiments with hallucinogenic drugs. Legend has it that the legendary English occultist Aleister Crowley introduced him to peyote after they dined together in Berlin one night in 1930.
Another friend, the famous British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, (who first coined the term psychedelic) introduced him to mescaline in 1953. Through Osmond, Huxley met Alfred Matthew Hubbard, "the Johnny Appleseed of LSD," who introduced him to that famous drug in 1955.
Intrigued by the potential of psychedelic drugs to assist humans in achieving enlightenment, he wrote of his experiments in his classic nonfiction works, The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956).
The legendary American rock band The Doors took their name from The Doors of Perception, their music a psychedelic blend of rock and poetry, the poetry written by their iconic lead vocalist - the late, great Jim Morrison.
In 1960, Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. Over the next couple of years, his health began to deteriorate. On the morning of November 22nd, 1963, as he lay on his deathbed unable to speak, he gave his wife a written request to inject him with 100 micrograms of LSD.
She granted the request, and he spent the last few hours of his life under the influence of LSD, then died at the age of 60 - not long after President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
Aldous Huxley's last novel, Island, published in 1962, was conceived as a utopic counterpoint to his classic novel, Brave New World. It told the story of Will Farnaby, a cynical journalist who finds himself shipwrecked on the fictional island of Pala.
Will discovers that the Palanese people, who are Mahayana Buddhists, live in a utopic society that combines modern science with the use of psychedelic substances to gain mystical insight.
Quote Of The Day
"It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels." - Aldous Huxley
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Aldous Huxley's classic novel, Brave New World. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 25th, 1897, the legendary American writer Jack London set sail from San Francisco to the Canadian Yukon. He was only 21 at the time and accompanied by his much older brother-in-law, James Shepard.
Following the Panic of '93, a precursor to the Great Depression, London found himself among the millions of other young men working grueling, low-paying, dead end jobs. For a time, he became a hobo and drifted from place to place.
When the economy improved a little, he was able to save money for college, but later, new financial difficulties would force him to drop out. He never graduated.
Intrigued by stories of prospectors striking it rich in the Gold Rush, London and James Shepard decided to go to the Canadian Yukon and try their luck.
What they didn't know was that only 30% of the hundred thousand prospectors who made the trip actually reached the Yukon and only four thousand of them managed to find gold.
Shepard mortgaged his home so that he and London could pay their boat fare and buy the supplies they'd need for their prospecting trip. Then they set sail from San Francisco to Juneau, Alaska.
The eight day boat trip was literally smooth sailing all the way. After arriving in Juneau, London and Shepard made an arduous 500-mile trek to Dawson City, the heart of the Gold Rush.
The brutal Arctic winter had just begun in the Canadian Yukon, and like so many other prospectors, London was unprepared for the harsh climate. His food supply inadequate, he suffered from malnutrition, then developed a severe case of scurvy.
With no gold found and little money left, London spent most of his Yukon adventure living in a shelter and medical facility for the poor. His scurvy caused him lose four front teeth and suffer facial scars.
Although he failed to find gold in the Yukon, his experience there enabled him to strike gold with his writings, setting many of them in bleak, harsh, unforgiving landscape of the Yukon.
His classic short story To Build a Fire, published in 1908, told the story of a young prospector in the Yukon. Unprepared for the brutal Arctic winter and with only a stray wolf-dog for companionship, he struggles to build a fire to keep them both warm.
I first read this great story in my advanced reading class in elementary school. I was awestruck by the power of London's words and felt like I was slowly freezing to death along with his protagonist. It made me want to be a writer.
London's most famous novels, also classic adventures set in the Yukon, were The Call of the Wild (1903), and White Fang (1906).
The Call of the Wild told the story of a dog called Buck, a St. Bernard - Scotch shepherd mix who is stolen from a ranch in California, sold, and shipped to Seattle.
There, he's resold to a couple of French Canadians who take him to the Yukon to serve as a sled dog. Buck survives the brutal cruelty of humans, other dogs, and the Arctic winter, and becomes the leader of the sled team.
In White Fang, a wolf-dog hybrid called White Fang is brutalized by humans and raised to be a savage fighting dog. He goes undefeated until a vicious bulldog nearly tears him apart. Left for dead, he is rescued by a kind young prospector who nurses him back to health. But can he be tamed again?
Jack London would publish nearly two dozen novels and nearly two short story collections during his remarkable career. He died of kidney failure at the age of 40, though some believe it may have been from an accidental or intentional overdose of morphine he used to treat the excruciating pain of his kidney stones.
Quote Of The Day
“I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.” - Jack London
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Jack London's classic short story, To Build a Fire. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 24th, 1802, the legendary French writer Alexandre Dumas was born in the village of Villers-Cotterets, Aisne, France. He was half-black like his father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a top general in Napoleon's army.
When he publicly criticized Napoleon's military leadership, the emperor accused him of sedition. Thomas-Alexandre resigned from the army in disgust, and the ensuing scandal ruined the Dumas family.
Alexandre Dumas' father died of stomach cancer when he was three years old. His mother, Marie-Louise, couldn't provide him with much of an education, but Dumas loved books and read every one he could get his hands on.
That and his mother's stories of his brave father's adventures as a soldier planted the seeds of his future writing career. He dreamed of heroes and high adventure.
When Dumas was 20 years old, he moved to Paris, where he was employed at the Palais Royal in the office of Louis-Phillipe, the Duc D'Orleans and the future and last king of France.
While working in Paris, Dumas began his literary career, writing articles for magazines and co-writing plays for the theater. In 1829, King Henry III and His Court - his first solo play - was produced and became a great success, as did his second play, Christine.
After writing more successful plays, Dumas turned his attention to novels, as the newspapers and literary magazines of the day offered a lucrative market for serialized novels.
In 1838, Dumas' first novel La Capitaine Paul - a novelization of one of his plays - was published. The success of the book led Dumas to create a studio of sorts dedicated to producing short stories and serial novels, where he worked with assistants and other collaborators.
Dumas continued writing nonfiction, and from 1839 to 1841, he compiled an eight-volume collection of essays about famous crimes and criminals in European history called Celebrated Crimes.
During this time, Dumas married actress Marguerite-Josephine Ferrand, known by her stage name, Ida Ferrier. Though he loved Ida, Dumas was a notorious womanizer.
He would father at least four illegitimate children, one of whom, Alexandre Dumas Jr., would become a fine novelist and playwright himself.
In 1844, Dumas published The Three Musketeers - the first in a three-book trilogy, The D'Artagnan Romances. A fourth book, The Son Of Porthos, aka The Death Of Aramis, was published 13 years after Dumas' death; though it bore his name, it was written by Paul Mahalin.
In Dumas' classic swashbuckler, a young man named D'Artagnan sets out to join the King's Musketeers. He meets three of them - Athos, Porthos, and Aramis - and ends up being challenged to a duel by each man.
Just as D'Artagnan's duel with Athos is about to begin, the guards of the evil Cardinal Richelieu arrive and threaten to arrest all the men for dueling. Using his skill as a swordsman, D'Artagnan helps the three Musketeers defeat the guards.
The impressed Musketeers befriend D'Artagnan and offer to take him under their wing. Soon, D'Artagnan runs afoul of the vengeful Cardinal and his beautiful but deadly spy, Milady de Winter.
The Three Musketeers was followed by two more novels - Twenty Years After (1845) and The Vicomte de Bragelonne, aka Ten Years Later (1847). It be adapted numerous times for the stage, screen, radio, and television.
From 1845-46, Alexandre Dumas published, in serial format, what is considered to be his greatest novel, The Count Of Monte Cristo, an epic novel of adventure, betrayal, hope, vengeance, and forgiveness.
It told the story of Edmond Dantes, an honest and loyal man framed for treason by group of conspirators including a romantic rival and a corrupt prosecutor.
Sentenced to life imprisonment, Dantes is befriended by fellow prisoner Abbe Feria - a priest and sage. He becomes Edmond's friend, father figure, and teacher. They work on a plan to tunnel out of prison.
Fourteen years later, Dantes finally escapes from prison. Before he died, the ailing Abbe gave Dantes a map to a treasure he buried on Monte Cristo, an island off the coast of Milan. Dantes finds the treasure.
Now a wealthy man, Dantes buys the island and re-invents himself as a mysterious aristocrat known as the Count of Monte Cristo. He returns to France, where he finds that his former fiancee Mercedes married one of the men who framed him.
Dantes conceives and executes an elaborate plan of vengeance against the conspirators responsible for his imprisonment, then questions the value of his revenge when it threatens to destroy the son of the woman he still loves.
Even though the success of Alexandre Dumas' plays and novels brought him wealth, he spent money lavishly, and his mansion, the Chateau de Monte Cristo, was always filled with friends and hangers-on looking to take advantage of his generosity.
Often broke and in debt, he continued to write more great novels, including another classic swashbuckler, Robin Hood (1863), Dumas' retelling of the story of the legendary outlaw Earl of Huntingdon, his Merry Men, and his love, Maid Marian.
Alexandre Dumas died in 1870 at the age of 68.
Quote Of The Day "How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it." - Alexandre Dumas
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Alexandre Dumas' classic novel, The Three Musketeers. Enjoy!
My review of Blood Orbit, a Gattis File Novel by K.R. Richardson, has been published by the Internet Review of Books.
Joanna M. Weston
I have two poems up at 7Beats Here and Now. Just scroll down and towards the end, and you'll find mine, with a shot of the cover of my book 'Bedroom of Searchlights'.
This Day In Literary History
On July 20th, 1304, the legendary Italian poet, philosopher, and scholar Petrarch was born. He was born Francesco Petrarca in Arezzo, Italy. Petrarch's father was in the legal profession, so he demanded that his sons study law as well.
Petrarch spent seven years in law school, but he considered it a waste of time - his main interests were writing and Latin literature and he hated the practice of law, which he considered to be the art of selling justice.
After the death of their parents, Petrarch and his brother Gherardo went back to Avignon, where they spent most of their early years. To support himself, Petrarch worked in clerical offices. This gave him time to write.
He became friends with the legendary writer Boccaccio and corresponded with him frequently. Petrarch also completed his first major work, Africa - an epic poem written in Latin that told the story of the great Roman general, Scipio Africanus.
Petrarch's epic poem made him a celebrity throughout Europe. He became a priest and continued his work as a scholar and writer. He wrote mostly in Latin, but his most famous collection of poems, Il Canzoniere, (The Songbook) was written in Italian.
This work contained over 300 sonnets, a form his name would always be associated with. Though he is sometimes mistakenly credited as being the inventor of the sonnet, he was not. He did, however, invent the particular rhyme scheme for the form that came to be known as the Petrarchan sonnet.
The sonnets in Petrarch's book were inspired by a mysterious young woman known only as Laura. When Petrarch was 24 years old, after he had left the priesthood, he first saw Laura in church on Good Friday.
It was love at first sight for Petrarch, but alas, Laura was a married noblewoman who could not return his affection. Although an aristocrat, Laura was also a sweet-natured and humble girl, which endeared her to Petrarch.
Unable to realize his love for Laura, Petrarch wrote over 300 sonnets secretly professing his unrequited love for her. They are among the greatest love poems ever written. Not much is known to history about Laura.
Some scholars believe that she may have been Laura de Noves, wife of Count Hugues de Sade - an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade. When she died in 1348, Petrarch was wracked with grief.
The legendary composer Franz Liszt would set three of Petrarch's sonnets to music for voice in his work Tre Sonnetti Di Petrarca, and later transcribe them for solo piano in his suite Annees De Pelerinage.
In 1341, Petrarch was crowned the first poet laureate of Rome since antiquity. He traveled all over Europe as an ambassador. During his travels, he collected old, crumbling Latin manuscripts and became a leader in the movement to recover and restore the manuscripts of ancient Roman and Greek writers.
He advised Leontius Pilatus in his translation of a Homer manuscript acquired from Boccaccio, but was greatly displeased with the result. In 1345, Petrarch himself discovered a previously unknown collection of Cicero's letters, the Ad Atticum.
During the Italian Renaissance, Petrarch became a respected and influential philosopher. He is credited with founding the Humanist movement and describing the ignorant times that preceded the Renaissance as the "Dark Ages." But he will always be known as one of the greatest writers and poets of all time.
Throughout his remarkable life, he wrote poetry collections, essays, numerous scholarly works, and a large volume of correspondence. He brought the sonnet to prominence long before the birth of Shakespeare, and his love poems were magnificent. One of his most beloved sonnets is Sonnet #140:
She ruled in beauty o'er this heart of mine,
A noble lady in a humble home,
And now her time for heavenly bliss has come,
'Tis I am mortal proved, and she divine.
The soul that all its blessings must resign,
And love whose light no more on earth finds room,
Might rend the rocks with pity for their doom,
Yet none their sorrows can in words enshrine;
They weep within my heart; and ears are deaf
Save mine alone, and I am crushed with care,
And naught remains to me save mournful breath.
Assuredly but dust and shade we are,
Assuredly desire is blind and brief,
Assuredly its hope but ends in death.
Petrarch died in July of 1374, just before his 70th birthday.
Quote Of The Day "There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. Other pleasures fail us or wound, us while they charm, but the pen we take up rejoicing and lay down with satisfaction, for it has the power to advantage not only its lord and master, but many others as well, even though they be far away- sometimes, indeed, though they be not born for thousands of years to come. I believe I speak but the strict truth when I claim that as there is none among earthly delights more noble than literature, so there is none so lasting, none gentler, or more faithful; there is none which accompanies its possessor through the vicissitudes of life at so small a cost of effort or anxiety." - Petrarch
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a documentary on Petrarch and his contribution to the sonnet. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 19th, 1898, the legendary French writer Emile Zola was forced to flee France to escape imprisonment after being falsely convicted of libel.
Zola's conviction resulted from the publication of his most famous nonfiction work, J'Accuse, an open letter to France's president, Felix Faure. The letter would expose one of history's most famous and shameful political scandals - the Dreyfus Affair.
Emile Zola was born in Paris in 1840. He rose from humble working class roots to become one of France's greatest writers. Though he became wealthy, he never forgot his roots. A lifelong socialist, he was also a leading figure in the intellectual movement of his time.
As a young man, before he made his name as a writer, he openly denounced Napoleon III, the nephew of ex-emperor Napoleon I. In 1848, three years after he was elected President of the French Second Republic, Napoleon III staged a coup and overthrew the republic, establishing himself as the new emperor.
After Napoleon III was deposed in 1870 following France's disastrous defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the French Third Republic was established. It would remain in power for 70 years, until the Nazis invaded in 1940.
In its early days, the French Third Republic was a right wing fascist republic, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church and the French Army. It gave new meaning to Oscar Wilde's definition of patriotism as a virtue of the vicious.
Of course, not everyone in France agreed with their government. A great split was brewing. Intellectuals such as Emile Zola were concerned by not only the political atmosphere, but also by the plague of anti-Semitism that was spreading like wildfire throughout the country.
The plague was being spread by the Church, the army, and the right wing press. It was this climate of right wing nationalism and anti-Semitism that led to the Dreyfus Affair.
Captain Alfred Dreyfus was an artillery officer in the French Army who had been accused of turning military secrets over to a contact at the German Embassy. Although there was no evidence to prove his guilt, he was nonetheless convicted of treason and sent to Devil's Island, the notorious prison in French Guiana.
Some people believed that Dreyfus had been railroaded because he was Jewish. Later, one Lt. Colonel Georges Picquart discovered evidence proving that another officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, had committed the crime for which Dreyfus had been convicted and imprisoned.
Rather than release Dreyfus, Picquart's superior, Hubert-Joseph Henry, forged documents to make it look like Dreyfus was guilty. Then he reassigned Picquart to a remote post in Africa.
Before he left for his new post, Picquart told Dreyfus' supporters what he knew about the case. For this, he would be court-martialed and sentenced to 60 days in jail. The right wing government refused to allow new evidence to be introduced.
Emile Zola could stand it no more. He wrote an open letter to President Felix Faure, which would be published in the January 13th, 1898 issue of L'Aurore, then France's most prominent and respected liberal newspaper.
J'Accuse (I Accuse) described the plot to frame Alfred Dreyfus for espionage, accusing by name the Army officers responsible. This cabal of officers was led by one Lt. Colonel Du Paty de Clam.
All of the conspirators were devout Catholics and ferocious anti-Semites. They framed Dreyfus for two reasons: to protect the real culprit and to rid the French Army of one more "dirty Jew."
Why would soldiers protect a comrade whom they knew had committed treason? Because they also knew that he was a double agent. Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy had been working for the French Secret Service, pretending to spy for Germany.
The "secrets" he was passing to the Germans were actually carefully crafted pieces of disinformation. To prevent Esterhazy's cover from being blown, the conspiring officers were more than happy to sacrifice the life of an innocent Jew. They got away with it in the name of national security.
Since Emile Zola was one of the most prominent intellectuals in France, the publication of J'Accuse resulted in a huge uproar - an outrage that sharply divided the French people and shocked other countries.
The Catholic Church backed the government and the Army. La Croix, France's most prominent Catholic newspaper, ran daily anti-Semitic editorials and blasted Zola.
As Zola expected, he was stripped of the Legion of Honor and quickly arrested. Charged with libel, he was convicted just over two weeks later and sentenced to a year in jail. He fled to England, where he stayed for over ten years.
Zola returned to France in June of 1899, just in time to see the right wing government fall. The new liberal government added to the republic's constitution a separation of Church and state.
The case of Alfred Dreyfus was taken up again. The government would not exonerate him, because that would have involved introducing classified Secret Service documents into the public record. So, they offered him a pardon instead, which he accepted.
But the truth was on the march, as Zola once said, and in 1906, the French Supreme Court finally exonerated Alfred Dreyfus. He was readmitted to the Army and given a promotion.
He would later serve his country in the first world war and retire from the military with the rank of Lt. Colonel and the Legion of Honor award.
Emile Zola died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1902 at the age of 62. Many years later, a Parisian roofer confessed on his deathbed to killing Zola by closing his chimney. He claimed it was a political assassination.
In 1998, on the 100th anniversary of the publication of J'Accuse, the still prominent Catholic newspaper La Croix finally issued a public apology for its long history of anti-Semitism and the role it played in the Dreyfus Affair.
Quote Of The Day
"I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul." - Emile Zola
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a documentary on the Dreyfus Affair, the notorious political scandal exposed by Emile Zola in his classic nonfiction work, J'Accuse. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 18th, 1937, the legendary American writer and journalist Hunter S. Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky. The eldest of three sons, Thompson's father was an insurance adjuster, his mother a librarian.
When Hunter was fourteen, his father died of a degenerative disease called myasthenia gravis. His mother was left to raise her sons alone, a burden that would drive her to drink heavily.
From a young age, Hunter displayed a natural talent for athletics. While he attended middle school, he joined an athletic club that served to prepare boys his age to play sports on high school teams.
Although he excelled at baseball, Hunter didn't play any sports in high school, as he was considered a troublemaker and not a team player. So, he joined the school's literary club instead.
There, he became enamored with classic, controversial novels such as J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man (1955) and Jack Kerouac's On The Road (1957), attracted to their subversive nature.
When he was seventeen, Thompson happened to be riding in a car with a robber when the police pulled them over. Although he had no connection to the crime, Thompson was arrested and charged with being an accessory. He was sentenced to 60 days in jail, but only served half that time.
While Hunter was in jail, the school superintendent refused to allow him to take his final exams, so he never graduated. After his release, he joined the Air Force.
Stationed at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida, Hunter took night classes at Florida State University. He also landed his first professional writing job for the local Command Courier newspaper. He got the job by lying about his work experience.
Nevertheless, Hunter excelled as a sports writer and editor, covering the local football team, the Elgin Eagles, whom future pro football stars Bart Starr, Max McGee, and Zeke Bratkowski would play for.
After being honorably discharged by the Air Force, Hunter continued his journalism career, which took him East to New York City. There, while working as a copy boy for Time magazine, he typed out copies of novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway as a means of studying fiction.
Fired by Time for insubordination, Hunter moved upstate to Middletown, where he worked as a reporter for the Middletown Record. He was fired from that job for telling off a local restaurant owner who was one of the paper's advertisers.
In 1961, Hunter, following in the footsteps of his literary idol Jack Kerouac, hitchhiked across the country. While living in Big Sur, California, he published his first magazine article, a piece on the Beat literary and artistic scene in Big Sur.
At this time, Thompson began writing fiction. He wrote two novels, Prince Jellyfish and The Rum Diary, which wouldn't be published until the late 1990s. He also wrote many short stories, but found little success as a fiction writer.
In November of 1963, Hunter first coined his famous phrase "fear and loathing" in a letter to his old friend, legendary novelist William Kennedy, expressing his feelings about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. (No relation.)
Two years later, Hunter S. Thompson took an assignment that would make his name as both a maverick journalist and as a writer. The editor of The Nation, a prominent liberal news magazine, asked him to write about the notorious Hell's Angels motorcycle gang.
So, Hunter spent a year riding with the gang, which was the most feared motorcycle club in the country, accused of crimes such as drug trafficking and gunrunning. The Hell's Angels hated reporters, but they came to like Hunter S. Thompson.
The relationship ended at a party held to celebrate the publication of Hunter's book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. The Hell's Angels demanded a cut of the royalties, but Hunter refused.
When Thompson learned that one gang member called Junkie George was a wife-beater, he told the biker off in front of the rest of the gang, saying that "Only a punk beats his wife." The gang beat Thompson severely.
His Hell's Angels book received rave reviews. The New York Times said that it was an "angry, knowledgeable, fascinating and excitedly written book," and that its author was a "spirited, witty, observant and original writer; his prose crackles like motorcycle exhaust."
In the late 1960s, Hunter wrote many articles for national magazines. One of them, titled The Hashbury is the Capital of the Hippies criticized the hippie generation for lacking the political convictions of the New Left and the artistic fire of the Beat generation and for only being interested in drugs and free love.
Possessing strong political convictions, Hunter became an activist for the New Left. He signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, a pledge to refuse to pay taxes to support the Vietnam War.
One of his heroes was the legendary Cuban revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Though he would rarely label his political beliefs, he would retain his strong anti-capitalist convictions throughout his life.
In the 1970s, Hunter developed his trademark style of "gonzo journalism," which began with his article The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. He accepted an assignment from Sports Illustrated to cover a motorcycle race in Las Vegas, and ended up writing his most famous book in the process.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) was an autobiographical novel based on Hunter's coverage of both the race and a narcotics officers' convention in Sin City. His alter ego, journalist Raoul Duke, covers the convention along with his "300-pound Samoan attorney" Oscar "Dr. Gonzo" Zeta Acosta.
The two men traveled together in a car loaded with an ample supply of drugs of all sorts, and were frequently stoned. A major theme of the novel was the ultimate failure of the late 1960s American counterculture, which would vanish by the mid 1970s.
In 1972, Thompson covered the presidential election in a series of articles for Rolling Stone that would be published in book form as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. He loathed then President Richard Nixon.
He described Nixon as a man who "could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time... an evil man — evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it."
Thompson later accepted an assignment from Rolling Stone to cover the last days of the Vietnam War. He traveled to Saigon and found the country in chaos. When publisher Jann Wenner canceled the assignment without notice, Thompson found himself trapped in Vietnam without an expense account or health insurance.
In the 1980s, Hunter covered such famous events as the U.S. invasion of Grenada and the scandalous Roxanne Pulitzer divorce. In the 1990s, he wrote two noted fictional pieces. One was based on his interview with Bill Clinton, the other a protest against Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court.
By then, he had become a something of a recluse. His popularity soared again with the release of the acclaimed 1998 feature film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke and Benicio Del Toro as Dr. Gonzo.
Hunter's long lost novel The Rum Diary was published, along with two collections of letters. In 2003, a new book, Kingdom of Fear, was published, which contained new writings and classic pieces, serving primarily as an angry attack on post 9/11 America.
After suffering from numerous medical problems, including illnesses and a hip replacement, Hunter S. Thompson was left in poor health and chronic, often severe pain. Unable to stand it any longer, he committed suicide in February of 2005 at the age of 67.
At the private funeral ceremony attended by nearly 300 people and paid for by Johnny Depp, Thompson's ashes were shot out of a cannon to the tune of Norman Greenbaum's Spirit in the Sky and Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man.
Quote Of The Day
"Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the good life, whatever it is and wherever it happens to be." - Hunter S. Thompson
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 1978 BBC documentary on Hunter S. Thompson. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 17th, 1889, the legendary American mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner was born in Malden, Massachusetts. After graduating high school in 1909, he entered the Valparaiso University School of Law in Indiana.
Gardner later dropped out and moved to California, where he became a self-taught attorney and passed the California state bar exam. He opened his own law practice, but later gave it up and went to work for a sales agency for five years before returning once again to practice law in 1921.
Creative and restless by nature. Gardner was bored by routine legal practice. He enjoyed trial work, especially planning his strategy for defending his clients.
He took up writing as a hobby and sold short stories to pulp magazines, cutting his teeth just as his fellow mystery writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler had done.
In his short stories, Gardner created many popular series characters, including gentleman thief Lester Leith and crusading lawyer Ken Corning. But they weren't his most famous characters.
In 1933, Gardner's first novel was published. The Case Of The Velvet Claws was also his first novel to feature a character who would become one of the greatest literary icons of all time - Perry Mason.
A brilliant and cunning defense attorney and sleuth, in his first adventure, Mason crosses paths with the spoiled, philandering wife of a rich and powerful man.
The amoral woman is determined to keep her affairs a secret and retain her life of luxury - even if she has to frame Perry Mason for murder to do it!
The Case Of The Velvet Claws became a huge success. By 1937 - four years after it was published - Erle Stanley Gardner quit his law practice to write full time.
Many of his Perry Mason novels were published in serialized form in The Saturday Evening Post, then in book form. Sixteen of them appeared in condensed form in the Toronto Star Weekly.
Gardner wrote over 80 Perry Mason novels during his career, which would sell over 300,000,000 copies combined. He also published mystery novels featuring other characters such as Terry Clane and Gramps Wiggins, short story collections, and a series of nonfiction books.
Perry Mason remains Gardner's most popular character to this day. Always determined to see justice done, while defending his clients, Mason worked tirelessly to solve the crimes of which they were accused.
Mason made his feature film debut in the 1930s. In 1943, a Perry Mason radio mystery series premiered and ran for twelve years. Fourteen years later, Perry Mason made the jump to television
The acclaimed TV series starred Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, defending his clients and solving crimes with the help of his private investigator Paul Drake (William Hopper) and his secretary, Della Street (Barbara Hale).
The Perry Mason TV series ran for nine years. Erle Stanley Gardner made an uncredited appearance in the final episode, playing a judge. Raymond Burr would return for a whopping 30 Perry Mason made-for-tv movies that aired between 1985 and 1995.
When he wasn't writing about him, Erle Stanley Gardner became a real life Perry Mason in his spare time, donating thousands of hours to a project called The Court of Last Resort.
The project was dedicated to helping those suspected of being wrongly convicted of crimes as the result of poor legal representation or careless or malicious police work or prosecutorial misconduct.
The Court of Last Resort focused mostly on forensics, specifically the mishandling and misinterpretation of forensic evidence due to ineptitude or malice on the part of investigators or prosecutors.
Gardner was assisted in his project by his many friends in the forensic, investigative, and legal communities. In 1952, Gardner published a nonfiction account of his work for The Court of Last Resort, which won him an Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category.
Five years later, in 1957, Gardner produced a TV series based on his work with The Court of Last Resort. Unfortunately, it would only run for one season.
Erle Stanley Gardner died in 1970 at the age of 80. His famous character Perry Mason remains a major iconic figure in popular culture.
In his 1995 album Ozzmosis, the legendary English rock singer Ozzy Osbourne paid tribute to Gardner's attorney and sleuth in the song Perry Mason, which became a hit single:
On his way to dinner
when it took him by surprise
and with one pull of the trigger
he would vanish overnight
Dancing by the roadside
holding on for dear life
then a gun from out of nowhere
made a widow of his wife
I don't mind
single file down the runway
Feelin' fine
and I'll see you my friend
over and over again
Who can we get on the case?
We need Perry Mason
Someone to put you in place -
calling Perry Mason again...
Quote Of The Day
"It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check." - Erle Stanley Gardner on his first Perry Mason novel, The Case Of The Velvet Claws.
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Erle Stanley Gardner's classic first Perry Mason novel, The Case Of The Velvet Claws. Enjoy!
My two latest reviews for the Internet Review of Books have been posted. FBI Girl is a memoir, and Prairie Fires is the Pulitzer-winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Thanks to the NFiction folks who critted them for me. And my apologies for sending this first to the wrong list.
My story, "Turn Around," is up at Sunlight Press. I began this story in Practice and it was critiqued in Fiction as well, so I have a lot of people to thank.
Joanna M. Weston
My poem, 'Being friends', is up at Stanzaic Stylings. It's good to have writing friends all over the place!
Dave Gregory
My eighth published story this year has landed at The Literary Nest: An Online Magazine of Literary Art. Hagar, Cezarija, Wayne, Edita, Paul, Siewleng, John, Pauline and Tony all provided great suggestions to turn a sloppy, implausible SUB into a publishable story.
This Day In Literary History
On July 13th, 1798, the legendary English poet William Wordsworth wrote his classic poem Tintern Abbey. He had just returned from a visit to Wales, accompanied by his sister Dorothy.
While on a four-day walking tour of the Welsh countryside, they visited Tintern Abbey, a ruined church that was the first Cistercian monastery in Wales, and only the second in the United Kingdom.
Wordsworth composed the poem in his head while on the four-day walking tour, using a singsong method he had developed called "booing and hawing."
That was quite a feat, considering the length and quality of the poem. As soon as he got back home to Bristol, he wrote the poem down. The day after that, he brought it to the printers.
The poem Tintern Abbey first appeared in the book Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, which Wordsworth co-wrote with his friend, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Published later in 1798, it included Coleridge's classic poem, Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. The first edition sold out within two years. The second edition of the book included a preface article on Romantic poetry.
Tintern Abbey, (its full title is Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey) a long blank verse poem that read more like prose, was steeped in the fundamental themes of Romantic poetry
These themes included communion with nature, which has a restorative power. The poem also deals with memory, specifically childhood memory and how it affects us as adults. These themes were hugely important in Wordsworth's work.
William Wordsworth would go on to become the Poet Laureate of England. He died of lung disease in April of 1850 at the age of 80. He is still considered one of the greatest English Romantic poets of all time.
Quote Of The Day "What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them." - William Wordsworth
Vanguard Video Today's video features a complete reading of William Wordsworth's classic poem, Tintern Abbey. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 12th, 1817, the legendary American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts. The Thoreau family had their own business - a pencil factory founded by Henry's grandfather.
Henry David Thoreau graduated from Harvard University in 1837. According to legend, his first act of rebellion was refusing to buy one of the honorary Master's degrees that Harvard would bestow on its graduates.
To receive one of these degrees, one would give a $5 (the equivalent of $95 in today's money) donation to the university. It was a long held tradition that graduates bought these worthless degrees.
At the time of Thoreau's graduation, the employment opportunities for college graduates were typically limited to business, medicine, and the church. None of these interested Thoreau.
He became a schoolteacher, but his first teaching job only lasted three weeks. He resigned in disgust rather than carry out his superiors' order to administer corporal punishment to his students.
Thoreau and his brother John then founded their own school. It was a progressive elementary school where they introduced a new, then revolutionary activity to their educational curriculum - the field trip.
Students would partake in everything from nature hikes to visits to local shops and businesses and see the real world in action. Sadly, the school would close in four years, following the sudden death of John Thoreau from tetanus.
When he wasn't running the school with his brother, Henry David Thoreau spent time with legendary poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had become not only his close friend, but also his literary mentor and father figure.
Like Emerson, Thoreau was a ferocious abolitionist and had no use for organized religion. He followed Emerson's Transcendentalist philosophy. When he became fascinated with his idol's practice of keeping a journal, Emerson encouraged him to keep a journal of his own.
After Thoreau lost his brother and closed their school, he tried to begin a literary career. With Emerson's encouragement and assistance, he began publishing essays, poems, and journal excerpts.
For a time, he lived with Emerson, tutored his children, and served as his assistant, editor, gardener, and handyman. Later, he worked at his family's pencil factory, where he perfected a graphite recycling process.
Thoreau would make good pencils from inferior, reject graphite by using clay as a binder. He would later produce plumbago at the factory - a type of graphite used for typesetting machine ink.
By the spring of 1845, after a period of restlessness, Thoreau decided to write full time. To do this, he required solitude, a quiet place away from the rest of the world.
He began an experiment in simple living, building a cabin on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson near Walden Pond, a beautiful wilderness that would inspire him to write his most famous book.
The following year, Thoreau ran afoul of the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who demanded that he pay six years of back poll taxes. The poll tax was a tax one paid for the privilege of voting in federal elections.
Some state and local governments imposed additional poll taxes for their elections. The poll tax was hugely controversial; it took away the voting rights of poor people who couldn't afford to pay the tax.
It was another way for the wealthy elite to maintain their power and oppress the working class. After the Civil War, the Southern states imposed steep poll taxes to prevent freed blacks from voting. The poll tax wouldn't be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court until 1937.
Thoreau refused to pay his poll taxes for a different reason: he refused to pay any taxes to support a federal government that allowed slavery to remain legal. He also refused to pay taxes to support the Mexican-American War.
That unpopular conflict, which took place from 1846-1848, was instigated by President James K. Polk and fought to allow Americans to expand into the West. We wanted land that belonged to Mexico, so we decided to take it by force.
War was declared on Mexico, bolstered by a recent, successful armed insurrection by American settlers living in a Mexican territory that would become the state of Texas. The insurrection was waged so the settlers could keep both their stolen land and slaves to work it. The Mexican government had banned slavery.
During the Mexican-American War, heavy American casualties and the skyrocketing cost of the conflict drove the government to sign an armistice with Mexico which called for certain territories to be sold to the United States.
These territories, which would become the states of New Mexico and California, were turned over to the United States in exchange for $18 million (the equivalent of $450 million in today's money) and the forgiveness of all Mexico's debts.
For Henry David Thoreau and other abolitionists, achieving the goals of the Mexican-American War meant that the new territories would be built on the backs of slaves. This is why Thoreau refused to pay his taxes.
He was taken to jail, but released a day later when his aunt paid his taxes, which infuriated him. The entire ordeal would change Thoreau forever. He would develop an anarchist philosophy of which he would become a noted and popular lecturer.
In January of 1848, Thoreau gave a lecture at the Concord Lyceum that was attended by writer and philosopher Bronson Alcott, the father of legendary writer Louisa May Alcott.
Bronson wrote that he "took great pleasure" in Thoreau's lecture. Thoreau would become a close friend of the Alcott family. He would also rework his lecture material into a classic essay, Civil Disobedience.
Civil Disobedience (1849) was inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley's classic political poem The Masque of Anarchy (1819) and by Thoreau's anger at legislation like the Fugitive Slave Act.
The Fugitive Slave Act was a Congressional compromise to appease the South. It prohibited all people - even those living in free states - from helping runaway slaves. Thoreau opined:
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.… where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,– the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.… Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.
If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
When he wasn't lecturing or doing odd jobs to pay his bills, Henry David Thoreau lived in his beloved wilderness, kept up his journal, and worked on the book that he would become most famous for.
Walden, or Living in the Wilderness (1854) was a memoir of the two years that Thoreau spent living in his cabin in a wilderness located about two miles away from his family home.
The purpose of his experiment was to see if he could live a simple life under minimal conditions and away from what he called "over-civilization." He did not, however, intend to become a hermit. He received many visitors and would leave his cabin to make visits of his own. He summed up his objectives this way:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Steeped deep in philosophy, spirituality, and satire, and featuring some of the finest writings about nature, Walden became an all-time classic nonfiction book. The legendary poet Robert Frost said of it, "In one book... [Thoreau] surpasses everything we have had in America."
The experience would kindle within Thoreau lifelong interests in natural history and botany. He came to admire the work of naturalists William Bartram and Charles Darwin.
Henry David Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835. Amazingly, the disease would come and go, and he suffered from it only sporadically. This enabled him to conduct his Walden experiment.
Unfortunately, in 1859, after getting caught in a rainstorm one night, Thoreau contracted a bad case of bronchitis which brought his tuberculosis back with a vengeance. His health began to decline until he was bedridden.
Realizing that he was dying, Thoreau spent his last years revising unpublished manuscripts, writing letters, and keeping up his journal until he was too weak to do so.
Henry David Thoreau died in May of 1862 at the age of 44. His old friend Bronson Alcott planned the funeral service. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the eulogy.
Quote Of The Day
"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience." - Henry David Thoreau
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Henry David Thoreau's most famous book, Walden. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 11th, 1960, To Kill A Mockingbird, the classic novel by the famous American writer Harper Lee, was published.
The classic semi autobiographical Southern Gothic Bildungsroman novel was inspired by actual events from the author's childhood. Harper Lee, born Nelle Harper Lee in Monroeville, Alabama, in 1926, was the daughter of a prominent lawyer.
Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, once defended two black men accused of murder. After the men were convicted, hanged, and mutilated, Amasa never practiced criminal law again. This took place in 1919, before Harper was born.
In 1936, when Harper was ten, a black man named Walter Nett was accused of rape by a white woman, convicted, and sentenced to death. A series of letters then appeared which contained proof that Nett's accuser had lied.
Instead of being released from prison, Nett's death sentence was commuted to life. He died a year later of tuberculosis. After Harper Lee's father quit practicing law, he founded a newspaper. The paper would cover the Nett trial and its shocking aftermath.
Some scholars believe that it wasn't the Nett case but the case of Emmett Till that inspired Harper Lee to write her famous novel. In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy visiting relatives in Mississippi, made the mistake of flirting with a white woman.
The woman's name was Carolyn Bryant. When her husband Roy found out that a black kid had flirted with his wife, he, his half-brother John Milam, and an unknown accomplice abducted Emmett Till, beat him savagely, shot him in the head, then dumped his nude body in the Tallahatchie River.
Roy Bryant and John Milam were arrested and charged with murder. At their trial, it took an all-white jury just over an hour to acquit them both. One of the jurors later said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long."
The murder of Emmett Till would serve as a catalyst for the then fledgling Civil Rights Movement, helping to bring it to prominence and setting the stage for the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders.
To Kill A Mockingbird tells the story of a black man's tragic fate in Depression era Alabama, as seen through the eyes of the white little girl whose father defended him.
In the small town of Maycomb, Alabama, circa 1936, spunky little tomboy Jean Louise "Scout" Finch lives with her big brother Jem and their widower father, Atticus Finch, a prominent, respected attorney.
School is out for the summer, and Scout and Jem make a new friend - Dill, a boy who is visiting his aunt, who lives nearby. The three children spend their days outside playing and fantasizing about another neighbor, Arthur "Boo" Radley.
As his nickname implies, Boo is a strange and spooky character, a mysterious recluse whom everyone knows of but no one ever sees. As they try to think of ways to get him to come out of his house, the kids wonder if he really is a monster.
Soon, little trinkets begin to appear in the tree outside Boo Radley's house - apparently gifts to Scout and Jem from Radley, though the man never seems to come out of his house.
Scout's obsession with Boo Radley is put aside when a black man named Tom Robinson is accused of raping a white woman, and her father, Atticus, agrees to defend him. For this, Atticus pays a dear price.
Once one of the most respected and admired men in Maycomb, Atticus quickly becomes the most hated man in town. Scout and Jem are taunted by the other children, who call their father a "nigger lover."
After shaming a lynch mob into backing off, Scout, Jem, and Dill secretly watch the trial from the colored section of the courtroom.
Atticus believes that Tom Robinson's accuser, Mayella Ewell, and her father, Bob - a violent, alcoholic racist - are lying. During the trial, Atticus exposes the truth. The lonely, abused Mayella flirted with Tom and got caught by her father.
After beating his daughter, Bob Ewell forced her to accuse Tom Robinson of rape in order to save face. He couldn't allow his friends and neighbors to think that his daughter would flirt with a black man.
Despite the truths revealed in court, the all-white jury still convicts Tom Robinson of rape. The conviction causes Atticus and Jem to lose faith in the American justice system. Later, Tom is shot and killed when he tries to escape from prison.
Even though he won in court, Bob Ewell, furious with Atticus Finch for exposing his daughter, spits in the lawyer's face. In the novel's memorable climax, a drunken, enraged Bob Ewell attacks Scout while she and Jem are walking home from a school Halloween pageant.
Jem tries to save his little sister and gets his arm broken. Suddenly, a man appears out of the shadows and attacks Bob Ewell, stabbing him to death with his own knife. Scout realizes that their savior is none other than Boo Radley.
The strange, silent man scoops Jem up in his arms and carries him home. The sheriff is called, and he and Atticus argue about how to handle Bob Ewell's death. He convinces Atticus that justice would be best served by declaring Ewell's death an accident.
Though it would receive rave reviews and sell over 30,000,000 copies, Harper Lee never expected her novel to be a success. She said:
I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.
Lee was stunned when her novel won her a Pulitzer Prize. Two years after it was published, To Kill A Mockingbird was adapted as a highly acclaimed feature film.
Featuring an Academy Award winning screenplay by playwright Horton Foote, and starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch (he won an Oscar for Best Actor) and in an amazing performance, eight-year-old Mary Badham as Scout Finch, it's considered one of the all time great movies.
A staple of study for eighth grade English classes, (where I first read it) To Kill A Mockingbird has faced censorship battles due to its depictions of rape and use of racial epithets.
Scholars - and the author herself - argue that the novel's depiction of a black man suffering at the hands of ignorant, racist white Southerners is the real reason why some people want the book banned from the classroom.
In 2003, a rumor began spreading that To Kill A Mockingbird was written not by Harper Lee, but by her childhood (and lifelong) best friend, legendary writer Truman Capote, whom the character of Dill was based on.
An Alabama newspaper had quoted Capote's biological father, Archulus Persons, as stating that Capote had written "almost all" of Lee's novel.
Three years later, the rumor was discredited by a letter written by Capote himself that was donated to Monroeville's literary museum.
In this letter to a neighbor, Capote mentioned that his old and dear friend Harper Lee was writing a book that would soon be published. Capote's letter was corroborated by extensive notes between Lee and her editor at the Lippincott publishing house.
In 2006, she received an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame. A year later, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It seemed like To Kill A Mockingbird would be her only novel.
Then, on February 3rd, 2015, Harper Lee announced that she would be publishing another novel. The book, titled Go Set A Watchman and published a few months later in July, was a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird that follows Scout as a grown woman.
Watchman was actually written before Mockingbird, which was intended to be its prequel. Lee thought the manuscript had been lost forever, but it was found by her lawyer in a safe deposit box in 2011. The manuscript was published exactly as written, with no revisions.
It's 20 years later, and the Civil Rights movement is just starting to become a major force for change. With racial tensions escalating across the country, especially in Scout Finch's home state of Alabama, she can't help but recall the lessons she learned in childhood.
Scout, now going by her proper name Jean Louise, joins the Civil Rights movement and is stunned to discover that her now elderly father Atticus, whom she idolized and who risked everything to defend an innocent black man from racist injustice, is opposed to civil rights.
What's more, he's determined to fight school integration and has been consorting with the Ku Klux Klan. For the first time, Jean Louise begins to see her father through the eyes of an intelligent grown woman instead of the rose colored glasses of a naive, adoring little girl.
She finds that Atticus is flawed like any other person and, like other white Southerners, fears the sudden end of the only way of life he's ever known. Can it really be true? Will Jean Louise's relationship with her father be shattered forever?
The announcement of a second Harper Lee novel came as quite a shock to the literary community. The 89-year-old author had been residing in a nursing home, having suffered a stroke a while back. Her vision and hearing were deteriorating.
The timing of Watchman's publication made some wonder if Lee, perhaps senile, was being exploited by her publisher. Suspicion of elder abuse led the state of Alabama to conduct an investigation. They interviewed Lee and determined that no abuse had taken place.
Her longtime friend, historian Wayne Flynt, said that the "narrative of senility, exploitation of this helpless little old lady is just hogwash. It's just complete bunk."
Needless to say, the publication of Go Set A Watchman caused quite a stir. Many readers believed that Lee had betrayed them and soiled the legacy of one of America's most beloved literary characters.
Others, like this writer, found Watchman to be a powerful read and a worthy successor to To Kill A Mockingbird that truthfully explores the insidious nature of intolerance.
Harper Lee died in February 2016 at the age of 89.
Quote Of The Day
"Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself. It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent." - Harper Lee
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Harper Lee's classic novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. Enjoy!
