This Day In Literary History
On March 31st, 1836, The Pickwick Papers - the classic first novel by legendary English writer Charles Dickens, was published. Like most novels of the time, it first appeared in a serialized format, published in twenty monthly installments.
When the first installment was published on this date, only 400 copies were printed. By the time the 15th installment came out, it was being published in press runs of 40,000 copies.
Originally titled The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, the novel had originally been commissioned by publishers Chapman and Hall as captions to accompany humorous drawings by illustrator Robert Seymour.
The members of the Pickwick Club, founded by a wealthy old gentleman named Samuel Pickwick, travel through remote areas of the English countryside by coach, then report back on their adventures when they return. Alfred Jingle, an English mangling actor, charlatan, and practical joker, joins them and plays tricks on them.
Charles Dickens wasn't the publishers' first choice to write the book, but their senior editor had been impressed by his earlier collection of serialized writings, Sketches by Boz, which had also been written to accompany illustrations.
Sketches combined nonfiction articles with short stories. Dickens was just 21 years old when he wrote them. His Pickwick writings were also originally published under the pseudonym Boz, which was the childhood nickname Dickens had given his brother Augustus.
Robert Seymour had conceived the original idea for Pickwick, but creative control of the series went to Charles Dickens, who took the idea and improved on it vastly. Seymour had previously suffered a nervous breakdown after a nasty row with Gilbert A'Beckett, editor of Figaro in London magazine.
The conflict, over money owed Seymour and the illustrator's parody of another writer's work, resulted in Seymour resigning and A'Beckett mounting a cruel public smear campaign against him. The illustrator returned to work after A'Beckett was replaced as editor.
Now, Seymour found himself in another bad situation. His original idea for Pickwick had been given to someone else, who made it his own and improved it. Seymour was never given credit for his creative input.
To add insult to injury, he wasn't even credited as illustrator. The publisher listed the byline as "Edited by Boz with Illustrations." Before the second installment of Pickwick was completed, a distraught Seymour committed suicide with his shotgun.
Seymour's widow publicly blasted Charles Dickens and the publishers, claiming that the first two installments of Pickwick were her husband's idea, i.e., that he told Dickens what to write. Actually, the opposite was true; Dickens had creative control.
Robert Seymour had struggled to come up with illustrations to compliment Dickens' writing, frustrating the author to the point that he advertised for a new illustrator. After Seymour's death, Dickens took over as editor of the publication and saved it from bankruptcy.
Scholars have agreed that although Robert Seymour came up with the original idea for The Pickwick Papers, if he'd had creative control over the series, the final product would have been completely different and nowhere near as successful.
It was Charles Dickens' distinctive style of writing that made the novel what it was. When The Pickwick Papers was issued in book form, the publishers defended themselves and Dickens with the following disclaimer:
Mr. Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word to be found in this book. Mr. Seymour died when only twenty-four pages of this book were published, and when assuredly not forty-eight were written... all of the input from the artist was in response to the words that had already been written.
Taking a final pot shot at the troubled illustrator, the disclaimer goes on to say “that he took his own life through jealousy, as it was well known that Seymour’s sanity had been questioned."
Suicide was considered a scandalous act by Victorian society and a felo de se (felony to self) by the law, so Seymour was denied a Christian burial. His estate went to the government, and his widow couldn't receive any royalties for his work on The Pickwick Papers.
Despite the controversy surrounding its conception, The Pickwick Papers made Charles Dickens' name as a novelist. His second novel would make him a legend. It was named after its main character - a poor orphan boy called Oliver Twist.
Quote Of The Day
"'I am ruminating,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'on the strange mutability of human affairs.' 'Ah! I see — in at the palace door one day, out at the window the next. Philosopher, Sir?' 'An observer of human nature, Sir,' said Mr. Pickwick. 'Ah, so am I. Most people are when they've little to do and less to get.'" - Charles Dickens, from The Pickwick Papers
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Charles Dickens' classic first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 30th, 1820, the famous English children's book writer Anna Sewell was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England. She was born into a devoutly religious Quaker family. She had one sibling, a younger brother named Philip.
As a young girl, Anna Sewell was mostly educated at home by her mother, who established a strict regime of schooling heavily influenced by her religious beliefs.
When Anna was twelve, her family moved to Stoke Newington, where she began her formal education. For the first time, she was able to study subjects new to her, such as mathematics and foreign languages.
Two years later, at the age of fourteen, Anna took a nasty fall while walking home from school. She severely injured both her ankles, and medicine in 1834 was primitive. She never received proper treatment.
As a result, Anna would remain practically lame for the rest of her life, unable to stand without a crutch or walk more than a few steps.
In 1836, Anna's father took a job in Brighton, partly because he hoped the climate there would improve his daughter's health. Meanwhile, Anna used horse-drawn carriages to get around, which led her to develop a love of horses and a strong belief in the humane treatment of all animals.
Anna Sewell's first introduction to professional writing was through her mother, who was a children's book writer. Mary Wright Sewell had written a series of evangelical children's books that was quite popular during its time.
Another of her books, a poetry collection called Mother's Last Words, sold millions of copies. Anna would often help edit her mother's manuscripts.
Later, when she was a grown woman, Anna met many writers, artists, and philosophers as she traveled throughout Europe, visiting spas in an attempt to restore her health. Unfortunately, her health would continue to deteriorate.
Anna would return to England and settle in Old Catton, a village outside of Norwich in Norfolk. She contracted tuberculosis, and her health would decline to the point that she was often bedridden. In 1871, at the age of 51, she began work on a novel.
She wrote it partly to pass the time, partly to inspire those who worked with horses to be kind to the animals. At the time, horses were often beaten by their owners and forced to pull wagons and carriages that were overloaded. Many horses died on their feet from exhaustion - while still wearing their harnesses.
To make carriage horses look attractive, some cruel fashions were employed, such as docking, where a horse's tail would be cut short, causing the animal great pain and leaving it vulnerable to insect bites and stings. Another cruel fashion was the bearing rein.
The bearing rein held the horse's head toward its chest. This gave the horse's neck a graceful arc, but it also left the animal unable to breathe properly, which resulted in respiratory problems. It also caused horses to suffer from very poor vision and loss of balance.
Anna Sewell completed her novel six years later, in 1877. She struggled to write it, but was determined to finish it. When she was too weak to write, she dictated to her mother. When the novel was completed, Anna sold it to a publisher, Jarrolds, for £40.
Although she never intended it to be a children's book, Black Beauty would rightfully be considered one of the greatest works of children's literature ever written.
Black Beauty is a novel in the form of a memoir - the autobiography of a black stallion named Black Beauty. Beginning with his carefree childhood as a colt on an English farm, he tells the story of his life.
Most poignant are his recollections of his hard life in London, where he pulled taxicabs for a living. Black Beauty tells many tales of cruelty and kindness as he chronicles his life, ending his story on a bright note as he retires to a happy life in the country.
Anna Sewell's eye for detail - specifically, her extensive and accurate descriptions of the behavior of horses - gives the novel a great sense of realism, despite the fact that it's a story narrated by a horse.
Her descriptions of the hard life of working horses led to reforms benefiting horse-drawn taxi drivers so they wouldn't have to work the animals so hard to make a decent living.
The initial sales of Black Beauty would break all the current publishing records. The novel would go on to sell over 30,000,000 copies.
Sadly, Anna Sewell wouldn't live to see the runaway success of her novel. She died of tuberculosis five months after it was published, in 1878, at the age of 58. Black Beauty would be adapted several times for the screen and television.
Quote Of The Day "There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham." - Anna Sewell
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Anna Sewell's classic children's novel, Black Beauty. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 29th, 1936, the famous American writer Judith Guest was born in Detroit, Michigan. The famous poet Edgar Guest was her great-uncle. Judith Guest studied English and psychology at the University of Michigan, where she belonged to the Sigma Kappa sorority.
In 1975, while working as a schoolteacher, Guest wrote her first novel. Having no agent, she decided to sell it herself. Her first two submissions were rejected. The first publisher rejected the novel without comment.
The second publisher enclosed a note with her rejection slip, telling her that "While the book has some satiric bite, overall the level of writing does not sustain interest and we will have to decline it."
The third submission proved to be the charm. An editor at Viking Press immediately bought Guest's novel. It was the first time in over 25 years that Viking had bought and published an unsolicited manuscript.
The release of the novel was far from immediate; the editor held it back for eight months, so that it would hit bookstores in July of 1976 - the time of the bicentennial celebration in the United States.
To release this particular novel around the time of the country's 200th birthday was clever, as it told the story of an all-American family that falls apart after its mask of perfection is suddenly ripped off. Ordinary People would become a classic novel and make Judith Guest's name as a writer.
Ordinary People opens with the Jarretts, a wealthy upper class family who live in a big house in an exclusive neighborhood in Lake Forest, Illinois, appearing to have come to terms with the sudden death of oldest son Buck in a sailing accident six months earlier.
Then, younger son Conrad, 17, attempts suicide by slashing his wrists. He had been suffering from severe depression, as he was on the boat with Buck when a sudden storm hit, and his brother was killed.
Conrad's parents, Cal and Beth, commit him to a psychiatric hospital. After eight months of treatment, he returns home and goes back to school, but his unresolved issues threaten his sanity.
His father, Cal, encourages him to see a therapist. Resistant at first, Conrad agrees to therapy and begins seeing Dr. Tyrone Berger, an eccentric psychiatrist. He starts to open up and Dr. Berger helps him work through his issues.
Conrad's issues include survivor's guilt and an apathetic mother. Beth Jarrett has an anal-retentive "type A" personality and is maniacally devoted to perfection. Determined to be the perfect wife and mother, she keeps a perfect house and had built a perfect family.
But that perfection was shattered when Buck died, and now she is incapable of grieving for him, feeling for her troubled surviving son, or dealing with the fact that her perfect life has fallen to pieces.
Beth's husband, Cal, a tax attorney, grew up in an orphanage after losing his mother at the age of 11. He never knew his father. Becoming successful and wealthy after enduring a poor and unhappy childhood is a source of great pride to Cal.
He always believed himself lucky, but now that his family is falling apart, he begins to wonder who and what he really is and where his life is headed. To add to his mid life crisis, his wife Beth has become cold, distant, and frigid. His marriage is crumbling.
The experimental narrative switches between Cal and Conrad's points of view and includes interior monologues and stream-of-consciousness narration. Ordinary People won Judith Guest the Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize for best first novel.
Before the novel hit the bookstores, legendary actor-filmmaker Robert Redford got hold of a preview edition. He loved the book, bought the movie rights, and directed the feature film adaptation, which was released in 1980.
The highly acclaimed film, which starred Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, and Timothy Hutton, won several Academy Awards. Redford took home the Best Director Oscar for his directorial debut.
With the success of the film, the novel became a subject of study for middle and high school English classes. This led to challenges from some disgruntled parents due to the dark subject matter and a brief sex scene between the troubled, teenage Conrad and his new girlfriend, Jeannine.
Ordinary People would be the first of several novels by Judith Guest that dealt with adolescents in crisis. Her most recent novel, A Tarnished Eye (2004), was loosely based on a real life crime that took place in her native Michigan.
In this novel, the rural community of Blessed, Michigan, is shattered when an entire family - a couple and their four children - are found savagely murdered in their summer home. The Sheriff, Hugh DeWitt, still reeling from the death of his infant son, must deal with his grief as he tries to solve the murders.
There had been a history of conflict between the locals and the rich city folk who come to Blessed to buy up the land for their vacation estates. Could that have been the motivation for such a monstrous crime?
Quote Of The Day
"I wanted to explore the anatomy of depression — how it works and why it happens to people; how you can go from being down but able to handle it, to being so down that you don’t even want to handle it, and then taking a radical step with your life — trying to commit suicide — and failing at that, coming back to the world and having to 'act normal' when, in fact, you have been forever changed." - Judith Guest on her novel Ordinary People.
Vanguard Video
Today's video features the original theatrical trailer for the highly acclaimed 1980 feature film adaptation of Judith Guest's classic debut novel, Ordinary People. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 28th, 1909, the famous American writer Nelson Algren was born. He was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, to a German Jewish mother and a Swedish father. When Nelson was three, his family moved to Chicago.
The Abrahams first settled in the South Side. When Nelson was eight, they moved to an apartment in the North Side. Nelson was a lifelong White Sox fan.
As a child growing up in Cubs country, the other kids teased him frequently for being a White Sox fan. The teasing would increase exponentially during the Black Sox Scandal of 1920, when it was revealed that eight White Sox players had been bribed to throw the World Series.
In 1931, Neslon Algren graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelor's degree in journalism. Unfortunately, with the Great Depression in full effect, all he could do to make ends meet was drift around the country looking for work like so many other people did.
Two years later, Algren wrote his first short story, So Help Me. At the time, he was working at a gas station in Texas. Before his planned return home to Chicago, he found a typewriter in an abandoned classroom and decided to take it, as very few publications accepted handwritten manuscripts.
Algren was caught, arrested, convicted of theft, and sentenced to prison. He was released after serving five months of a possible three and a half year term. While in prison, he was moved by the scores of men who were also incarcerated for taking desperate measures in desperate times.
He found kindred spirits among the outsiders, misfits, failures, and other tragic characters spawned by the Depression. They would strongly influence his writing. In 1935, his short story The Brother's House, was published by Story magazine. It won him his first of three O. Henry Awards.
That same year, Algren published his first novel, Somebody in Boots. It sold only 750 copies before going out of print, which didn't bother the author because he considered it primitive - his worst work.
His second novel, Never Come Morning (1942), courted many good reviews. Ernest Hemingway wrote of it, "I think it very, very good. It is as fine and good stuff to come out of Chicago..." The novel also courted controversy.
Never Come Morning told the haunting, tragic, and lyrical story of Bruno "Lefty" Bicek, a small time hoodlum and aspiring prizefighter from the "Polish Triangle" - the Polish section of Chicago's North Side. Algren tells the story without pronouncing any moral judgement on his characters.
Growing up desperately poor, Bruno dreams of escaping the slums by becoming a boxing champion, but ultimately realizes that he was born a thug and will be a thug until the day he dies - a revelation that comes when he fails to save his girlfriend Steffi Rostenkowski from being gang raped by his thug buddies.
Algren's grim and frank depictions of the Polish Triangle as a cesspool of crime, corruption, misery, and hopelessness outraged Polish-American groups in Chicago, who accused him of being a Nordic Nazi sympathizer.
They didn't realize hat he was actually Jewish and a leftist. Nevertheless, the pressure groups succeeded in getting Never Come Morning banned by the Chicago Public Library.
In 1949, Nelson Algren published his most famous novel, The Man With the Golden Arm. It would win him the National Book Award. The Polish-American protagonist, Francis Majcinek, known as Frankie Machine, is a professional card sharp.
Also an aspiring jazz drummer, Frankie longs to escape the seedy world of professional gambling by becoming a professional musician, but his personal problems threaten both his dream and his life.
When he served in World War II, Frankie took shrapnel in his liver and was treated with morphine. Now he's a morphine addict - a habit he refers to as the "thirty-five-pound monkey on his back." He keeps his friends and wife in the dark about his habit, which is a source of shame for him.
Speaking of his wife, Frankie is trapped in a miserable marriage to wheelchair-bound Sophie, whom he thinks he crippled in a drunk driving accident. Her paralysis is actually psychological, and she takes her frustration out on Frankie, using guilt to keep him from leaving her. The stress adds to his drug habit.
After Frankie ends up accidentally killing his drug supplier "Nifty Louie" Fomorowski, he and his friend, petty crook Sparrow Saltskin, cover up Frankie's involvement in the crime. Then, Frankie's life takes a turn for the better when he has an affair with his childhood sweetheart, Molly "Molly-O" Novotny.
Molly was also trapped in a rotten marriage until her abusive husband got arrested. Reunited with Frankie, she uses her love to help him beat his drug addiction. Unfortunately, Frankie screws up again, but in a different way - he gets busted for shoplifting.
While Frankie serves his time, Molly moves away and they lose contact. After his release, without Molly to lean on, Frankie goes back on the needle. When his friend Sparrow breaks down during an intense police interrogation over the death of Nifty Louie, Frankie must go on the lam.
While on the run, Frankie finds Molly working at a strip joint. He hides out at her apartment and, with her help, kicks his drug addiction once and for all. The cops learn where he's hiding and he's forced to flee again. He barely escapes from them.
Hiding out in a sleazy flophouse, Frankie realizes that he'll never be free or have his Molly again, so he commits suicide, hanging himself in his room. The novel ends with a poem for Frankie called Epitaph.
Several years after The Man With the Golden Arm was published, the legendary director Otto Preminger decided to adapt it as a feature film. Unfortunately, the stifling Production Code was still in effect, and the Code forbade any stories dealing with drugs.
In 1953, Preminger successfully defied the Production Code to adapt the risque romantic comedy The Moon is Blue, which had been a hit Broadway play. When the PCA (Production Code Administration) once again denied him a Code Seal for The Man With the Golden Arm, Preminger released it without one, like he'd done for The Moon is Blue.
He had several key factors working in his favor. The Legion of Decency didn't condemn the film. Theater owners, granted independence from the studios in a landmark Supreme Court antitrust decision in 1948, didn't care about the Code Seal anymore. Last, but certainly not least, Preminger had cast legendary singer Frank Sinatra in the lead role.
The film adaptation of The Man With the Golden Arm was a cinematic milestone in that it finally cajoled Hollywood to amend the Production Code, which hadn't changed in over 25 years. It was also the first Hollywood feature film in over two decades to deal with drug addiction as its main theme.
Even anti-drug propaganda films like Reefer Madness (1936), Marihuana (1936), and The Cocaine Fiends (1935) could only be made by low budget exploitation filmmakers and booked into small, local theaters. The Code forbade studios from making drug movies.
Despite Frank Sinatra's excellent performance as Frankie Machine, Nelson Algren hated Otto Preminger's adaptation of his novel. He had been brought in as a screenwriter, then quickly replaced by Walter Newman.
Although an acclaimed film and a big hit at the box office, the screenplay took extensive liberties with the novel and featured a completely different ending. To make matters worse, Algren, believing he had been duped into selling the adaptation rights for far less than they were worth, sued producer-director Otto Preminger for his fair share. He lost.
During the 1950s, Nelson Algren ran afoul of McCarthyism - the government's relentless and mostly illegal persecutions of suspected communists and communist sympathizers.
Algren never joined the Communist Party because of negative experiences he and his friend, legendary African-American novelist Richard Wright, had at the hands of party members. However, he had belonged to the John Reed Club, a social club for left-leaning artists, writers, and intellectuals.
He had also belonged to a committee that protested the persecution of alleged spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were both executed. So, the FBI began surveillance of Algren, deeming him a subversive.
The FBI's dossier on Nelson Algren would clock in at over 500 pages long, but never contain any concrete evidence against him. Still, the government denied him a passport until 1960.
He had wanted to visit his girlfriend, legendary French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in Paris. By the time he finally got his passport, their relationship had begun to wane.
In 1956, Algren finally followed up The Man With the Golden Arm with another classic novel. A Walk on the Wild Side opens in South Texas during the early years of the Great Depression, telling the story of Dove Linkhorn, another casualty of the Depression and of his own upbringing.
At sixteen, Dove is illiterate. His father refused to allow him to go to school because the principal was Catholic. So, he learned about life from the movies and from the hobos, pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, and bootleggers who lived and worked nearby.
Another denizen of the town is Terasina Vidavarri, the owner of a bleak little cafe who teaches Dove how to read. Terasina was once raped by a soldier. She and Dove become lovers, though he rapes her as well.
Dove begins hopping trains to look for work. His surreal, poetic, tragicomic adventures find him working everywhere from a steamship to a brothel to a condom factory. He also gets caught up in petty crime and has many affairs but ultimately returns to Terasina's cafe.
This novel was most famous for containing Nelson Algren's "three rules of life," which were "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."
A Walk on the Wild Side was adapted as a feature film in 1962, but because the Production Code was still in effect, the novel was bowdlerized and changed considerably for the screen.
Despite the efforts of the great director Edward Dmytryk behind the camera and Laurence Harvey in the lead role, the film was a bomb at the box office. Bosley Crowther, the celebrated film critic for The New York Times, panned the movie, describing it in his review as a "lurid, tawdry, and sleazy melodrama."
In 1975, Nelson Algren was commissioned to write a magazine article on the trial of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, who had been convicted again for a double murder he didn't commit.
Carter wouldn't be acquitted until 1985, when his convictions were overturned after a Federal Appeals Court determined that he'd been the victim of racism and malicious prosecution.
While researching his article, Algren visited Carter's hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, and liked it so much that he decided to live there. He spent five years in Paterson before moving to Long Island, where he died at home of a heart attack. He was 72 years old.
Quote Of The Day
"A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery." - Nelson Algren
Vanguard Video
Today's video features rare footage of Nelson Algren chatting with Studs Terkel at a party in Chicago, circa 1975. Enjoy!
I got great news yesterday that my flash memoir, Dog With No Name, won a place in the Writer Advice Flash Memoir contest. I don't know what place my story won in the contest and won't know that until April. But I do know they'll be publishing my piece (they said so). That news puts a smile on this coffee-deficient face.
This Day In Literary History
On March 24th, 1955, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the classic play by the legendary American playwright Tennessee Williams, opened on Broadway. The play focused on a Southern family in crisis - the affluent Pollitt family.
The Pollitts hide their dark secrets under a cloak of respectability. The extended family has gathered to celebrate the 65th birthday of patriarch Big Daddy Pollitt, the richest cotton grower in the Mississippi Delta.
The family knows that Big Daddy is dying of cancer and won't live to see another birthday, but have conspired to keep him (and his wife, Big Mama) from finding out about his terminal condition.
All of Big Daddy's kin ingratiate themselves to him, hoping to receive the lion's share of his huge estate when he dies - all of them except indifferent son Brick Pollitt, who, along with his wife Maggie, (the Cat) are having serious marital problems.
Brick is an aging, injured, detached alcoholic ex-football hero who neglects his wife and spends most of his time drinking and railing against mendacity. A desperate Maggie reveals to Brick that she had an affair with his best friend Skipper, even though she knew that Skipper was secretly gay.
Suspecting that her husband might also be gay, Maggie seduced Skipper to prevent anything from happening between the two men. The affair drove Skipper to drink, despair, and suicide.
A disgusted Big Daddy has similar suspicions. He accuses Brick of drinking to escape his guilt over not saving Skipper from suicide - because he and Skipper were more than just best friends.
Furious, Brick reveals that Big Daddy is dying. Maggie, knowing that the old man never made out a will, panics and fears that he'll disinherit Brick. She escaped a miserable childhood of grinding poverty and despair when she married into the rich Pollitt family.
The prospect of being poor again terrifies her, so she falsely claims to be pregnant to win her father in-law's sympathy. Later, Maggie throws away Brick's liquor, telling him:
We can make that lie come true. And then I'll bring you liquor, and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into!
The original Broadway production was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Ben Gazzara as Brick, Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie, and legendary folksinger-actor Burl Ives as Big Daddy.
Gazzara's understudy was a young actor named Cliff Robertson, who would go on to become a star of stage, screen, and television. But when Gazzara left the play, Jack Lord replaced him.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won Tennessee Williams a Pulitzer Prize - his second. He won his first Pulitzer for his famous play, A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1958, three years after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway, a feature film adaptation was released.
Directed by Richard Brooks, it starred Paul Newman as Brick and Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie, with Burl Ives and Madeleine Sherwood reprising their Broadway roles as Big Daddy and Big Mama.
Unfortunately, due to the stifling Hollywood Production Code in effect at the time, the screenplay toned down Tennessee Williams' play considerably, removing all the sexual elements of the story.
Richard Brooks was not the studio's first choice to direct the film; it had been offered to George Cukor, but he turned it down in disgust after reading the bowdlerized screenplay.
As for Tennessee Williams' reaction, he hated the movie so much that he told people on line for the premiere not to see it, yelling "This movie will set the industry back 50 years! Go home!" Quote Of The Day
"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory." - Tennessee Williams
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete live performance of Tennessee Williams' classic play,Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 23rd, 1999, the famous American writer Thomas Harris delivered the completed manuscript for his classic fourth novel, Hannibal, to his publishers.
It was the third in a series of four novels featuring his most famous character - Dr. Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist, classical music enthusiast, wine connoisseur, and gourmet turned cannibalistic serial killer - who had been terrifying readers for nearly 20 years.
(Harris's classic debut novel, Black Sunday (1975), told the story of a psychotic Vietnam veteran who conspires with terrorists to bomb the Super Bowl. It was adapted as a film in 1977, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Robert Shaw and Bruce Dern.)
Hannibal Lecter made his debut in Red Dragon (1981), where he was called upon by Will Graham - the FBI agent who captured him - to help profile a new serial killer, Francis Dolarhyde, aka the Red Dragon.
The sequel, The Silence of the Lambs (1988), found Lecter called on again, this time by trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling, to help her gain insight into the mind of Buffalo Bill, aka Jame Gumb, a depraved serial killer who has abducted a Senator's daughter.
Although Red Dragon was filmed first in 1986 as Manhunter, (featuring British actor Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecter) it would be the film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 that made Hannibal Lecter a pop culture icon.
Stylishly directed by Jonathan Demme and featuring stellar performances by Anthony Hopkins as Lecter, Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, and Ted Levine as Jame Gumb, the film swept the Academy Awards.
It became only the third movie in history to win all five major Oscars - Best Actor (Hopkins), Best Actress (Foster), Best Director (Demme), Best Picture, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
After the huge success of The Silence of the Lambs, fans were clamoring for a sequel. It took over ten years for Thomas Harris to deliver. Hannibal was the result.
In this novel, Lecter himself is Agent Starling's quarry, as he escaped from custody in The Silence of the Lambs. What Starling doesn't know is that someone else is hunting Lecter - Mason Verger, a victim of Lecter's who survived.
Verger, the wealthy heir to a meat packing empire, was an evil, sadistic pedophile whose long list of victims included his own little sister, Margot. When his father established a Christian summer camp for children, Verger used it to prey on more young victims.
When he was finally caught and arrested, Verger avoided jail time because of his family's wealth and position. He was ordered to perform community service and receive therapy. His court appointed psychiatrist? Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
The good doctor's idea of therapy was to have Verger take hallucinogenic drugs, manipulate him into demonstrating his technique of autoerotic asphyxiation via hanging, then make him slash his own face to ribbons with a shard of broken glass and feed his mutilated flesh to his dogs.
Lecter then hanged Verger with his own noose, breaking his neck. Verger survived, but was left a quadriplegic with a mangled face. He wants to catch Lecter before Agent Starling does and take revenge.
The revenge Verger has planned is a fate worse than death, and he has government agents in high places on his payroll - including Starling's Justice Department superior, Paul Krendler.
Meanwhile, Hannibal Lecter has been living in Rome under an assumed name. His true identity is discovered by Rinaldo Pazzi, a corrupt, disgraced Italian police detective. Instead of contacting Interpol, Pazzi makes the fatal mistake of trying to capture Lecter alive himself and collect Mason Verger's bounty.
After killing one of Verger's men, Dr. Lecter escapes again, back to the United States - to pursue Clarice Starling. Hannibal received mixed reviews because of its controversial ending, which I won't give away.
I will say that it does make sense after all that happens to Clarice Starling throughout the novel, and fits in well with the dark surrealism (and dark humor) of the story for a chilling and memorable coda.
I for one enjoyed Hannibal immensely. I believe it's the best book Harris has written so far, second only to The Silence of the Lambs. Stephen King, a big fan of the Hannibal Lecter series, proclaimed Hannibal, along with William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971), to be the two greatest modern horror novels of all time.
Hannibal would be adapted as a feature film in 2001, with Anthony Hopkins returning as Lecter and Julianne Moore taking over the role of Clarice Starling.
Directed by Ridley Scott, it received mixed reviews from fans because the screenplay (written by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian) omitted a major character (Margot Verger) and changed the ending of the novel.
To placate fans, the screenwriters did include part of the novel's ending - the famous Grand Guignol scene where Dr. Lecter lobotomizes corrupt Justice Department agent Paul Krendler and... well... serves him a most unusual gourmet dinner...
Unfortunately, the most shocking part of the novel's ending - the fate of Clarice Starling - was also omitted from the screenplay, which featured a completely different outcome.
Thomas Harris followed Hannibal with another Lecter novel, a prequel called Hannibal Rising (2006), which was published seven years later and adapted as a feature film in 2007.
Expanding on flashbacks that appeared in Hannibal, it told the dark and chilling story of how a frighteningly intelligent little Lithuanian boy named Hannibal Lecter grew up to be the gentleman ghoul we know and love.
In 2013, a Hannibal TV series premiered. Featuring the great Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen in the title role, the series was a prequel to Red Dragon, with Lecter helping FBI special agent Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) hunt bizarre and sadistic serial killers.
An unusual friendship develops between the two men, but soon it becomes apparent that Graham's pursuit of serial killers - using his uncanny ability to enter their depraved minds - poses a serious threat to his sanity.
What Will doesn't realize is that the elusive main serial killer he's been pursuing, the Chesapeake Ripper, is really the brilliant psychiatrist who's been assisting him as a consultant - Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
Stylishly gruesome and surreal, (and surprisingly graphic for network TV) the series, which ran for three seasons, was a hit with critics and viewers alike.
In February of 2021, a new TV series called Clarice premiered on CBS. Taking place between the events of The Slience of the Lambs and Hannibal, it follows Clarice Starling, now a full fledged FBI agent, as she hunts serial killers and sexual predators.
Despite a solid cast including Rebecca Breeds as Clarice Starling, and a grim atmosphere, the series was widely panned by critics and viewers who found it bland and boring. Clarice scored 37% on the Tomatometer and only ran for one season.
The worst part was the total absence of Hannibal Lecter, who is never seen, referenced, or even mentioned once in the series. That's because the rights to the Lecter character are owned by the Dino De Laurentis Company.
Similarly, NBC's Hannibal series couldn't mention Clarice Starling, because she was owned by MGM - but it didn't matter, as that series took place long before Starling's debut in the Lecter lexicon.
Thomas Harris's most recent novel, Cari Mora (2019), unrelated to his Hannibal Lecter series, is also a dark suspense thriller. The title character, Caridad "Cari" Mora, is a Colombian refugee. As a teenage guerilla, she fought for the FARC against the cartels and her country's corrupt right wing government.
Now living in Miami, Cari works as the caretaker of a mansion once owned by legendary Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. What she doesn't know is that there's $25 million in cartel gold hidden beneath the house.
Two criminal gangs - one Colombian and the other led by a sadistic German psychopath who specializes in human trafficking - know about the gold and want to get their hands on it. What they don't know is that messing with Cari Mora is not a good idea...
Quote Of The Day
"Problem solving is hunting. It is savage pleasure and we are born to it." - Thomas Harris
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Thomas Harris discussing his most recent novel, Cari Mora. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 22nd, 1947, the legendary American writer James Patterson was born in Newburgh, New York. He earned his Master's Degree from Vanderbilt University. In 1985, at the age of 38, Patterson retired from his successful advertising career to write full time.
Before he retired from advertising, Patterson had written three novels. His first, a mystery novel called The Thomas Berryman Number (1976), won him an Edgar Award for Best First Novel.
His fifth novel, the first in a classic series of suspense thrillers, was a huge bestseller and established him as one of the greatest suspense novelists of all time.
Along Came a Spider (1993) introduced Patterson's most famous character, Alex Cross, an African-American homicide detective for the Washington, D.C. police. He's also a brilliant forensic psychologist.
The novel opens with Cross suddenly pulled off the case he's been working on - the bizarre and savage murder of two black prostitutes - and reassigned to investigate the kidnapping of two students from an exclusive private school.
Cross is angered at being pulled off his double murder case, and feels that the department cares more about rich white children that poor black women. What he doesn't know is that both cases are linked.
They are the work of Gary Soneji, a math teacher at the private school the children attended. After a standoff at a McDonald's restaurant, Soneji is captured, and Cross must figure out what he did with the children.
Using his skills as a psychologist, Cross hypnotizes Soneji several times and pieces together the horrifying truth. Soneji is a split personality. He is both Gary Murphy, a gentle teacher and loving family man, and Gary Soneji, a bloodthirsty psychopathic serial killer.
The kidnapping of the children was part of a ransom plot. In order to save the children, Cross must track down Soneji's partners in crime - a task that is complicated when Soneji escapes from prison. He wants to get to his partners - and the ransom money - before Cross does.
Along Came a Spider was adapted as a feature film in 2001, starring Morgan Freeman as Alex Cross. Widely panned by critics, (and fans) it scored only 32% on the Tomatometer. Another film, Alex Cross (2012), was even more reviled by critics and fans, scoring just 12% on the Tomatometer.
There are thirty novels in the Alex Cross series so far; the 30th, Triple Cross, was released last year. Another of James Patterson's popular suspense novel series is the Women's Murder Club series.
The first Women's Murder Club novel, 1st To Die, was published in 2001. In it, San Francisco police detective Lindsay Boxer is called to the scene of a horrific crime - a young newlywed couple has been viciously murdered in their hotel room on their wedding night, the bride still wearing her wedding gown.
Lindsay's investigation is complicated by her personal problems - she suffers from severe depression and a life threatening blood disease. She could use a little help, and she's about to get some.
Covering the story of the crime is Cindy Thomas, a rookie investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Lindsay and Cindy form an unlikely friendship as Lindsay begins tracking down a brutal, twisted serial killer.
Soon, two new friends join in - city medical examiner Claire Washburn and Assistant District Attorney Jill Bernhardt. The four ladies decide to pool their talents and resources to catch the serial killer, and The Women's Murder Club is born. There are twenty-two Women's Murder Club novels. The 22nd, 22 Seconds, was published last year.
In 2005, James Patterson began a new series of novels in a new genre - young adult fantasy. The series was called Maximum Ride and the first book, The Angel Experiment, introduced the heroine, Maximum "Max" Ride.
14-year-old Max is the leader of The Flock, a group of children ages 6-14 who are winged human-bird hybrids (98% human, 2% bird) created by genetic engineering. In addition to being able to fly, they possesses other powers as well.
The Flock, which also includes Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gazzy, and Angel, are on the run from the scientists who created them. The scientists have dispatched superhuman assassins called Erasers to kill off The Flock in order to keep their creations a secret.
A feature film adaptation of The Angel Experiment, titled Maximum Ride, was released in 2016. The film is available on DVD and Blu-Ray, and streaming services.
In addition to his series novels, James Patterson has written many stand-alone novels. In recent years, he has outsold Stephen King, John Grisham, and Dan Brown - combined. Most of his novels are huge bestsellers. One in 17 hardcover novels sold in the United States is by James Patterson.
Many of his numerous novels are co-authored with other writers. He's often been criticized as being a brand rather than a novelist, more interested in cranking out a product and making money than in his craft. Horror master Stephen King, who's taken many pot shots at Patterson, said that he's "a terrible writer, but he's very successful."
Patterson's philanthropic endeavors are geared toward promoting literacy. In 2005, he established the James Patterson Page Turner Awards, which awarded nearly $1,000,000 a year to schools, institutions, companies, and individuals who encourage people to read.
In 2008, Patterson put the Page Turner Awards on hold and began a new initiative, ReadKiddoRead.com, which is for parents, teachers, librarians, and others who want to encourage children to read. The site helps them find the best books for kids and provides information such as lesson plans for teachers and social networking.
Quote Of The Day
"When I write I pretend I'm telling a story to someone in the room and I don't want them to get up until I'm finished." - James Patterson
Vanguard Video
Today's video features an interview of James Patterson at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, Australia. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 21st, 1556, the famous English writer and cleric Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake. Cranmer, a leader of the English Reformation and the Archbishop of Canterbury, was part of the Oxford Martyrs - three men who were executed by order of Queen Mary I.
The other two Oxford Martyrs were Hugh Latimer, the Bishop of Worcester, and Nicholas Ridley, the Bishop of Rochester. They had all run afoul of the queen's heresy laws.
Mary I, England's notorious Catholic monarch, would be known as "Bloody Mary" for executing over 300 Protestant clerics and reformers during her five-year reign as Queen.
Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was Queen Mary's most prized target, for he had championed William Tyndale's English language Bible, deemed heretical by the Vatican, which had declared the Latin Bible to be the true Bible. The Old Testament was originally written in Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, and the New Testament in Ancient Greek.
Cranmer had also been partly responsible for the Church of England's break with the Holy See by building a case for the divorce of Mary's father, King Henry VIII, from her mother, Catherine of Aragon.
Worst of all, Cranmer had written and compiled the first two editions of The Book of Common Prayer which contained not just prayers but also the complete liturgy of the Anglican Church. This was the ultimate violation of Queen Mary's heresy laws.
The Queen had not originally intended to execute Cranmer; she had a different plan for him which she hoped would result in a huge propaganda coup against the Anglican Church.
First, Cranmer was forced to watch his friends Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley be tried, convicted, and executed by burning right after the verdicts were delivered.
Then, Cranmer himself was tried for heresy and treason. He appealed to Rome to be tried by a papal court instead of the Queen's secular court. His appeal was denied.
After his conviction, he was sent to prison to await execution. He was offered a commutation of his death sentence if he would recant his Protestant faith in writing.
Thomas Cranmer would write not one, not two, but four recantations during the two years he spent in prison. The authorities believed that his fourth recantation was most likely genuine.
He was released to the custody of the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. While living at the Dean's house, Cranmer was counselled by a Dominican friar, Juan de Villagarcia.
Although Cranmer had in writing pledged his loyalty to the English monarchy and recognized the Pope's authority as head of the Church, he had conceded little in the matter of Protestant versus Catholic doctrine, so he was returned to prison.
Two days after a writ for Cranmer's execution was issued, he wrote a fifth recantation which was deemed genuine. He was a broken old man so desperate to save his life that he wrote a sweeping confession.
In his detailed catalog of his sins against the Catholic Church, Cranmer begged for mercy, but Queen Mary would have none. She ordered his execution to take place, though he was told that he could make one final, public recantation to plead for his life. So he wrote one.
Then, the day before his execution, while on the pulpit at University Church to make his final recantation, Thomas Cranmer changed his mind and decided to go out in a blaze of glory - literally.
Instead of delivering a final, ultimate recantation of his Protestant faith, he renounced all of his previous recantations, blasted the Catholic Church, and denounced the Pope.
Cranmer was seized, removed from the pulpit, taken to the place where Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were burned at the stake before him, and executed. He put his right hand, which had written his recantations, into the fire before it consumed the rest of his body.
Two years later, Queen Mary I died of influenza at the age of 42. Her successor and half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I, restored the Anglican Church to power, repealed the heresy laws, and brokered a settlement between the Anglican and Catholic Churches.
An adapted version of Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer would be designated the new Anglican Church's official liturgy.
The burning of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley would inspire the legendary American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury to write his classic novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
The hero, Guy Montag, resists the government's attempts to force him to recant his belief that books shouldn't be burned. Bradbury quotes Latimer's last words to Ridley before their execution:
Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.
Quote Of The Day
"I have sinned, in that I signed with my hand what I did not believe with my heart. When the flames are lit, this hand shall be the first to burn." - Thomas Cranmer, his last words
Vanguard Video
Today's video features the final speech given by Thomas Cranmer before his execution. Note: you'll want to expand this video to full screen. Enjoy!
I'm pleased to tell you that the International Sports Press Association (AIPS) writing contest longlisted two of my essays, "Roger Federer: Tennis God and man of the People" and "Serena, An Enigma."
Rest assured, I could not have done it without the many excellent critiques from members of our Nonfiction group and others in the Workshop. These critiques improved the clarity, grammar, punctuation, word choice, transitions, you name it.
This Day In Literary History
On March 17th, 1948, the legendary American science fiction writer William Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina. Though he spent most of his childhood in Wytheville, Virginia - his parents' hometown - his family moved frequently due to his father's position as a manager for a large construction company.
While his family lived in Norfolk, Virginia, Gibson attended Pines Elementary School, where his teachers never encouraged him to read, much to the chagrin of his parents. Around this time, his father died, choking to death in a restaurant while on a business trip.
The family returned to Wytheville, which was a small Appalachian town, a place that Gibson described as "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent, but was deeply distrusted." He hated it.
Living in such a disturbing and surreal atmosphere led William Gibson to become a shy, withdrawn adolescent who kept to himself. When he was twelve, he "wanted nothing more than to become a science fiction writer."
A year later, without his mother's knowledge or permission, he bought an anthology featuring works by the Beat generation's greatest writers - William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs would become Gibson's favorite writer and a major influence on his work.
As a teenager, Gibson rejected his religion and read voraciously, with the works of Burroughs and Henry Miller being his favorites. However, at school, his grades were poor. His mother threatened to send him to a boarding school.
To her surprise, he was enthusiastic about going to boarding school, so she sent him to the Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson. Gibson hated the structure of the school, but he was glad to escape from Wytheville and his "chronically anxious and depressive" mother.
He was also glad that the school forced him to come out of his shell and develop social skills. His academic performance was strangely uneven. When he took the SAT (Standard Achievement Test) exams, his teachers were baffled by his scores. In math, he scored near zero, but his score on the written test was near perfect.
When Gibson was eighteen, his mother died. He left school without graduating and drifted through the United States and Europe, choosing a mostly solitary life and becoming part of the late 1960s counterculture.
In 1967, he was called to appear at a draft hearing, and honestly told the interviewers that his goal in life was to indulge in every mind-altering substance known to man. He was never drafted, but moved to Canada anyway.
He would later quip that he avoided the draft not out of conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, but to remain free to "sleep with hippie chicks" and smoke hashish.
After arriving in Canada, Gibson met a girl in Vancouver and spent the rest of the 1960s traveling with her, as he couldn't stand living amongst the community of his fellow American expatriates, which was was rife with depression, suicide, and hardcore drug abuse.
He financed most of his travels with the $500 he was paid for appearing in a CBC newsreel story about the hippie subculture in Yorkville, Toronto. During their travels, Gibson and and his girlfriend spent time in countries such as Greece and Turkey.
In 1972, Gibson and his girlfriend returned to Canada. They settled in Vancouver and married. Gibson earned most of his living by scouring thrift stores for rare items priced well below their value, which he would resell to collectors at a huge profit.
When he realized that instead of working, he could receive generous financial aid from the government by going to college, he enrolled at the University of British Columbia, (UBC) from which he graduated in 1977 with a degree in English.
Gibson considered entering a Master's degree program with the topic of his thesis being hard science fiction novels as a form of fascist literature, but he changed his mind and worked at various jobs including a three-year stint as a teaching assistant in a film history course at UBC.
He also indulged in his passion for punk rock music. Around 1980, he attended a science fiction convention in Vancouver, which turned him off the genre, even though he had already written several early works of science fiction.
Around this time, Gibson met John Shirley, who would become his lifelong friend. Shirley was a punk rock musician turned sci-fi / horror writer. He encouraged Gibson to submit his stories for publication and introduced him to fellow sci-fi writers Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner.
When they read Gibson's stories, they proclaimed them to be "breakthrough material." So, Gibson began submitting his work, and soon, his short stories were appearing regularly in magazines such as Omni and Universe 11.
William Gibson's stories were indeed breakthrough material, far outside the mainstream of science fiction. They were in the cyberpunk tradition, akin to the legendary early 1960s "cut-up" novels of Gibson's idol, William S. Burroughs.
Gibson's stories dealt with concepts like cyberspace - a term coined by Gibson which refers to a computer-simulated reality - and were written in the style of the pulp novels and noir films of the 1940s and 50s.
In 1984, Gibson's first novel was published. Neuromancer wasn't a commercial success, but word of mouth spread quickly and made the novel an overnight underground hit - a cult classic that sold over 6,500,000 copies worldwide.
It became the first novel to win all three major science fiction awards - the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award.
Neuromancer was the first novel in Gibson's classic Sprawl trilogy. It eerily predicts the development of the Internet and its World Wide Web. Set in a futuristic, dystopic Chiba, Japan, the novel tells the story of Henry Dorsett Case, a small time hustler who was once a talented computer hacker.
Then his employer caught him stealing, and as punishment, damaged his central nervous system with a mycotoxin, leaving him unable to access the global computer network with his brain-computer interface. Now, Case is an unemployable, suicidal drug addict.
While searching for a cure for his damaged nervous system in Chiba's "black clinics," Case is saved by Molly Millions, a "street samurai" and mercenary who works for Armitage, a shadowy ex-Green Beret officer.
Armitage offers to cure Case in exchange for his services as a hacker. Armitage fixes Case's nervous system but installs in his body sacs of mycotoxin that will burst if he fails to complete his work in time.
So, Case and Molly work together and form a close relationship. They don't know what Armitage really has planned, but they investigate and eventually discover the truth - he plans to merge two AI (Artificial Intelligence) entities, Wintermute and Neuromancer, into one all-powerful, godlike being.
William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy would include the novels Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). The trilogy brought the author out of obscurity and made his name as one of the all time great science fiction writers.
He would write more great novels, including the Bridge trilogy, Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999) as well as other novels and short stories.
In 1993, he wrote his first major nonfiction work, an article for Wired magazine called Disneyland with the Death Penalty, which was a stinging critique of life in modern Singapore.
Gibson describes Singapore as having a government that functions like a mega-corporation and is fixated on constraint and conformity, with a marked lack of creativity and humor. Life in Singapore is a "relentlessly G-rated experience."
It's a conservative Republican wet dream of meticulously clean streets, practically nonexistent crime, (thanks to a harsh capital punishment system where one can be executed for offenses such as drug smuggling) and a culture of mindless, vapid materialism where shopping becomes a nearly religious experience.
And yet, there are also no slums in Singapore, and instead of a visible sex trade, there are government sanctioned "health centers" which are really massage parlors where one can get far more than a massage.
The government enforces morality with strict censorship of movies, music, and the media. It places great value on marriage and procreation, and both organizes and enforces mandatory dating policies.
In his 1993 essay, Gibson predicted the explosion of online pornography and cast doubt on the resilience of Singapore's controlled, conservative society in the face of the mass exposure of its citizenry to the coming "wilds of X-rated cyberspace."
He speculated that "Singapore's destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable weirdness." Creative Review hailed Gibson's essay as "fabulously damning."
Singapore reacted to it with outrage, banning the sale of Wired magazine there. "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" became a famous catch phrase used to describe Singapore - especially by Singaporeans opposed to their country's authoritarian conservative government.
Two of Gibson's short stories were adapted as feature films. Johnny Mnemonic (1995), featuring a screenplay by William Gibson, starred Keanu Reeves in the title role. New Rose Hotel (1998), directed by Abel Ferrara, starred Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe.
Gibson also wrote for television. He penned the teleplays for two classic episodes of The X-Files (1993-2002) - Kill Switch and First Person Shooter.
William Gibson's latest novel, Agency, was published in January of 2020.
Quote of the Day
"To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing." - William Gibson
Vanguard Video
Today's video features William Gibson discussing his most recent novel, Agency, at the Politics and Prose bookstore and coffeehouse. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 16th, 1850, The Scarlet Letter, the classic novel by the legendary American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, was published in the United States.
The author, born in Salem, Massachusetts, changed the spelling of his name from Hathorne to Hawthorne to distance himself from the shameful acts of his relatives. His great-great-great grandfather, William Hathorne, was a magistrate infamous for his lack of compassion and extremely harsh sentences.
Hathorne's son John was even worse. John Hathorne served as a judge during the notorious Salem Witch Trials, where many innocent people were falsely accused of witchcraft, convicted in kangaroo courts, then tortured and executed.
John Hathorne was the only judge who refused to repent or express any regret for his contemptible actions during the Salem Witch Trials. His infamy would besmirch the Hathorne family name for generations.
The shame and guilt that Nathaniel Hawtorne felt for the actions of his ancestors and his own contempt for Puritanism moved him to write this, his greatest novel.
Set in a Puritan village in 17th century Boston, The Scarlet Letter told the story of Hester Prynne, a married woman whose much older husband had sent her ahead to America while he settled some business affairs.
He never came to join her in Boston and is presumed dead, lost at sea. In the meantime, the lonely Hester had an affair and became pregnant as a result.
The novel opens with Hester led from the town prison with her baby daughter Pearl in her arms and a piece of scarlet cloth in the shape of the capital letter A pinned to the breast of her dress - a penalty for her adultery.
The scarlet letter is a badge of shame that she must wear for all to see. Hester is led to the town scaffold, where she is forced to endure the verbal abuse of the town fathers. An elderly spectator asks what's going on, and a man in the crowd tells him.
The elderly spectator is actually Hester's missing husband, now a doctor living under the assumed name of Roger Chillingworth. He wants to take revenge on the man who seduced his wife. He reveals his true identity to Hester, but she won't reveal the identity of her lover.
Several years pass, and Pearl has become a willful and impish little girl. Hester supports herself and her daughter by working as a seamstress.
Still scorned by the community, they live in a small cottage on the outskirts of Boston. When town officials try to take Pearl away from her mother, the young, eloquent minister Arthur Dimmesdale intervenes to thwart their plans.
Dimmesdale appears to be dying, wasting away from a mysterious heart condition. Chillingworth takes him on as a patient, later moving in with him to provide round-the-clock medical care. The doctor believes that Dimmesdale's condition is psychosomatic, perhaps caused by guilt.
He begins to suspect that the minister is his wife's lover. One day, while Dimmesdale sleeps, Chillingworth discovers something that convinces him that his suspicions are correct - supposedly the capital letter A burned into the minister's chest.
Meanwhile, Hester Prynne's kindness, charity, and quiet humility finally earn her a reprieve from public scorn. When she and Pearl return home one night, they find Dimmesdale atop the town scaffold, trying to punish himself for his sins. They join him there.
The three hold hands, and Pearl asks the minister to publicly acknowledge that she is his daughter. He refuses. A streaking meteor forms a dull letter A in the night sky. Dimmesdale believes it's the sign of adultery, but the townspeople think that it means "angel," as a prominent member of the community died that night.
When Chillingworth refuses to abandon his plan for revenge, Hester tells Dimmesdale that Chillingworth is really her missing husband. The lovers decide to flee with Pearl to Europe, where they can live as a family.
They both feel a great sense of release and relief. Hester removes her scarlet letter and lets down her hair. In one of the novel's most striking metaphors, sunlight immediately breaks through the clouds and trees to illuminate Hester's joyous release.
The day before their ship is to sail, Dimmesdale gives his most eloquent sermon ever. Hester finds out that her husband has learned of her plans and booked passage on her ship. When Dimmesdale leaves the church, he sees Hester and Pearl standing before the town scaffold.
Dimmesdale impulsively takes them to the top and publicly confesses to being Hester's lover and the father of her child, exposing the mark supposedly seared into his chest. Pearl kisses him. Relieved of his burden, Dimmesdale collapses and dies.
Frustrated over being denied his revenge, a bitter Chillingworth dies a year later, and Hester and Pearl leave Boston. Although she is not his daughter, Pearl inherits all of Chillingworth's money.
Many years later, Hester Prynne returns to her old cottage alone and resumes her charity work. She receives letters from Pearl, now married to a European aristocrat and with children of her own. The townspeople finally forgive Hester for her indiscretion, and she - and the other women in town - feel a strong sense of liberation.
The Scarlet Letter is rightfully considered one of the greatest works of 19th century literature, and is still widely read and appreciated. It would be adapted numerous times for the radio, stage, screen, and television.
The most famous feature film adaptations were the brilliant 1973 version directed by legendary German filmmaker Wim Wenders, and the dreadful 1995 Hollywood version starring Demi Moore as Hester Prynne, which took great liberties with the novel and was widely - and rightfully - panned by critics.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the greatest writers of his generation. His other great works include the novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and the short story collections Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Tanglewood Tales (1853). He died in 1864 at age 59.
Quote Of The Day
"Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel, The Scarlet Letter. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 15th, 1956, My Fair Lady, the acclaimed hit musical based on the classic 1913 play Pygmalion by the legendary Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, opened on Broadway.
It premiered at the Mark Hellinger Theatre in New York City. The production then moved to the Broadhurst Theatre, and finally, to the Broadway Theatre, where it closed in 1962 after 2,717 performances.
Set in Edwardian London, My Fair Lady told the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics who meets a young flower seller named Eliza Dolittle when she tells off a young man named Freddy Eynsford-Hill for spilling her violets.
The ill-mannered Eliza speaks with an ear-torturing Cockney accent, her words filled with slang expressions and colloquialisms.
Professor Higgins makes a wager with his linguist friend Colonel Pickering, betting that Eliza could be taught to speak and act like a proper lady, after which, he will introduce her at the Embassy Ball. Pickering doesn't believe that he can make a lady out of such a vulgar girl.
Eliza moves into Higgins' house and begins taking lessons from him. Her father soon pays a visit, concerned that the Professor is compromising her virtue. Higgins buys him off with five pounds.
As Eliza's lessons progress, she grows frustrated and fantasizes about killing Higgins. But soon, the flower seller begins to bloom.
Eliza's first public presentation, at the Ascot Racecourse, proves successful, but then she suffers a relapse, returning to her Cockney vulgarity. This charms Freddy Eynsford-Hill, the young man she had met and scolded earlier. He falls in love with her.
Higgins continues with Eliza's lessons. She faces her final test at the Embassy Ball and passes with flying colors. Afterward, Colonel Pickering praises Higgins for his triumph in making a lady out of Eliza.
When she learns of their bet, she feels that Higgins used her and is now abandoning her. Their relationship ends in a huff when Higgins insults Eliza and she storms off. Soon, even Colonel Pickering becomes annoyed with Higgins, who has always been a self-absorbed misogynist.
When Eliza plans to marry Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Higgins realizes that he loves her, but can't bring himself to confess his true feelings to her. The musical ends on an ambiguous note, suggesting a possible reconciliation between Higgins and Eliza.
My Fair Lady became a huge hit, one of Broadway's most famous and popular musicals. It was written by the legendary team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe.
The original cast featured Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins, and a young, virtually unknown British actress named Julie Andrews as Eliza. The Original Cast Recording became the best selling album of 1957 and 1958.
George Bernard Shaw died in 1950; he never lived to see the Broadway musical adaptation of his play, Pygmalion. If he had, there wouldn't have been a musical for him to see.
In 1908, Shaw's classic play The Chocolate Soldier was adapted as an operetta, and he hated it so much that he vowed that none of his plays would ever be set to music again. He kept that vow for the rest of his life.
In 1964, eight years after the musical debuted on Broadway, My Fair Lady was adapted as a feature film, directed by George Cukor.
Rex Harrison reprised his role as Professor Higgins, but producer and studio boss Jack Warner decided to cast Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Dolittle instead of Julie Andrews.
This decision angered fans of the musical, but Warner was concerned that casting Andrews would be risky because she had no film experience. Then he found that Audrey Hepburn couldn't sing, so her vocals had to be dubbed by Marni Nixon.
But Julie Andrews got the last laugh - she gave an Oscar winning performance in the title role of the classic Disney movie musical Mary Poppins that year - beating Hepburn for the Academy Award!
Quote Of The Day
"All great truths begin as blasphemies." - George Bernard Shaw
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete live performance of My Fair Lady. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On March 14th, 1916, the famous American playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote was born. He was born Albert Horton Foote, Jr in Wharton, Texas. When he was ten years old, he determined to become an actor.
By the age of sixteen, Foote had convinced his parents to let him go to acting school. So, he moved to California, where he studied at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Two years later, he moved to New York City to continue his studies and begin his acting career in the theater. He scored several minor roles that got him noticed, but good parts were few and far between.
Foote decided that the best way to get good parts was to write his own plays, so he took up play writing. His first play, Wharton Dance, debuted in 1940. It was the first of many plays that were set in his Texas hometown.
Wharton Dance and Foote's other early plays would be produced Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and at many local theaters. He often acted in his own plays. In 1944, he debuted on Broadway with his play Only the Heart.
Although Horton Foote had originally become a playwright to help his acting career along, he found that he got far better reviews for his writing than his acting. So, he decided to become a full time playwright, and spent the rest of the 1940s writing for the theater. He wrote both mainstream and experimental plays.
By 1948, Foote found a new dramatic medium that he could write for, which would allow him to support himself and subsidize his theatrical career. It was called television, and in its golden age, live TV theater was hugely popular.
Foote wrote his first "teleplay" for the Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse in 1948. He would also write for other celebrated live drama series, including The United States Steel Hour and Playhouse 90, where Rod Serling made his name as a playwright before he created the legendary TV series, The Twilight Zone.
Besides writing original teleplays, Foote also adapted classic novels as teleplays. His skill at adapting novels as teleplays would lead him to become a screenwriter. He would also adapt his own plays for the screen and write original screenplays as well.
In 1962, Foote adapted Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird as a feature film. The movie, which starred Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and featured an incredible performance by 8-year-old Mary Badham as Scout Finch, is rightfully considered one of the greatest films of all time and one of the greatest novel adaptations of all time.
Foote personally recommended a young actor named Robert Duvall for the part of Boo Radley, and Duvall's stunning performance made his name as an actor. Gregory Peck would win the Best Actor Oscar for his role as Atticus Finch.
Horton Foote also won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay Adaptation, but he didn't go to the Oscars ceremony because he was sure that he wouldn't win. It was a mistake that he wouldn't make again.
Years later, in 1984, Foote won another Oscar, for Best Original Screenplay for Tender Mercies, which featured his old friend Robert Duvall as a broken down, has-been country singer struggling to rebuild his troubled personal life. This time, Foote attended the ceremony and accepted his Oscar in person.
Actress Tess Harper, who co-starred as Rosa Lee in Tender Mercies, famously described Horton Foote as "America's Chekhov," saying that "If he didn't study the Russians, he's a reincarnation of the Russians. He's a quiet man who writes quiet people."
The year after his original screenplay for Tender Mercies won him a second Oscar, he was nominated for a third Oscar for his screenplay adaptation of his own play, The Trip to Bountiful, which he wrote in 1962.
Throughout his incredible theatrical career, Horton Foote wrote nearly 60 plays. He was most famous for The Orphans' Home Cycle, a trilogy of plays that were each comprised of three one act plays.
All these works were written between the early 1960s and mid 1990s. They were set in Foote's Texas hometown and took place between the turn of the 20th century and the early 1930s.
In 1995, Foote brought back characters from The Orphans' Home Cycle for a new play called The Young Man From Atlanta that would win him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Horton Foote died in March of 2009, ten days short of his 92nd birthday. The following year, the last feature film he wrote was released. It was called Main Street.
Quote Of The Day
"I've redone plays of mine and made changes. A play is a living thing, and I'd never say I wouldn't rewrite years later. Tennessee Williams did that all the time and it's distressing, because I'd like the play to be out there in its finished form. And then you also have new interpretations. At the same time, you do realize how much you are at the mercy of your interpreters." - Horton Foote
Vanguard Video
Today's video features the first part of a 3+ hour interview with Horton Foote. Enjoy! Note: you can watch the whole interview on this site.
This Day In Literary History
On March 10th, 1926, the Book of the Month Club published its first selection through Viking Press. The Book of the Month Club was a mail order service for book lovers, founded by ad copywriter Harry Scherman and his partners, Max Sackheim and Robert Haas.
They first broke into the mail order book selling business in 1916 with their Little Leather Library, which contained "30 Great Books for $2.98" (about $82 in today's money) - miniature reprints of classic novels "bound in limp Redcroft."
In its first five years, the Little Leather Library sold 40,000 copies. After that, business slowed down, and customers clamored for new additions to their collection of "30 Great Books."
So, Scherman and his partners came up with an idea for a new mail order business, one that would automatically ship a new book to customers once a month for them to review. The customer could choose from the main selection or an alternate selection.
Both selections would be chosen by a panel of judges based on literary merit. If the customer didn't like a particular book after reviewing it for a period of time, he could mail it back and not be charged for it.
The new service was called the Book of the Month Club. To induce customers to join the Club, they would be given a list of available books and invited to chose a few of them for one ridiculously low price.
Then, as part of their membership, the customers would agree to purchase a few books "at regular Club prices" within a certain period of time. The so-called "regular" prices were always higher than those of other booksellers.
The Club published a monthly newsletter that allowed members to send in their own book reviews for others to read. The service would have a lasting impact on the publishing industry and the way books were marketed.
The first selection offered by the Book of the Month Club proved to be a shocker for the Club's 4,000+ members. It was Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman, the first novel of English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner.
In it, Laura "Lolly" Willowes is a 28-year-old spinster who suffers from the suspicion and disdain with which Edwardian (early 20th century English) society viewed unmarried women.
In Edwardian England, unmarried women couldn't be independent and self-reliant. They couldn't go out and earn their own money to support themselves. Instead, they had to live with relatives and perform thankless chores to earn their keep.
Lolly Willowes faces just such a situation, as she lives with her brother Henry, his wife, and their children. When she finally tires of living a life dedicated to meeting other people's expectations, she rebels in a rather unique way.
She becomes a witch, adopts a black cat, and makes a pact with the Devil to be a self-reliant woman and enjoy a life of peace, quiet, solitude, and independence. Or so she thinks.
The novel is actually a dreamlike Jane Austen-esque dark comedy written in an elegant, lyrical prose style. When Lolly meets a man she thinks is the Devil, she's surprised to find that he's handsome, charming, intelligent, understanding, and a good neighbor!
Lolly Willowes is a clever, darkly funny, metaphorical, existentialist novel of feminist determination that was way ahead of its time. It outraged the members of the fledgling Book of the Month club in 1926 who failed to grasp its metaphors and symbolism.
They saw it as a mockery of Christian family values - the very fabric of proper society - and a glorification of witchcraft, even though the supernatural elements were very understated.
The author, Sylvia Townsend Warner, was a controversial figure herself - she was an openly lesbian, outspoken feminist with an interest and expertise in the occult. Needless to say, she was the object of scorn and gossip in Edwardian England.
Although its first selection shocked and outraged its members, the Book of the Month Club became a huge success. Twenty years after it was founded, the Club had nearly a million members and its stock was traded publicly for the first time.
The Club would later merge with Doubleday and become Bookspan. Its business model would be used by other mail order services, including music and movie clubs, most famously the Columbia House Record and Tape Club, aka the Columbia House Music Club.
These successor services would come under fire for their shady business practices, including charging customers' credit cards for items they didn't want and refusing to honor membership cancellation requests.
Ironically, the services would be scammed out of their own money - a lot of money - by clever customers engaging in fraud schemes of their own. Ultimately, many services went out of business for these reasons.
Quote Of The Day
"Truth has beauty, power, and necessity." - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a lecture on Sylvia Townsend Warner and her classic novel Lolly Willowes - the Book of the Month Club's first title - recorded at the University of Glasgow. Enjoy!
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