Friday, February 28, 2025
Notes For February 28th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 28th, 1749, the publication of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, (later shortened to Tom Jones) the classic epic novel by the famous English novelist and playwright Henry Fielding, was announced in the famous London newspaper, The General Advertiser.
This is how the announcement appeared:
THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES,
A FOUNDLING.
-- Mores hominum multorum vidit --
By HENRY FIELDING, Esq;
It being impossible to get Sets bound fast enough to answer Demand for them, such Gentlemen and Ladies as please, may have them sew'd in Blue Paper and Boards, at the Price of 16s. a Set, of A. Millar over against Catharine-street in the Strand.
At the time, it was customary for a novel to be published in a serialized format before it appeared in book form. Due to the controversial nature of this particular novel, it was published in book form before the serialized publication was completed.
Although it would be a hot property and sell a lot of copies, most scholars believe that the heavy demand mentioned in the newspaper ad was an exaggeration designed to create a demand for Tom Jones.
The novel, a bawdy romantic comedy / adventure, told the story of its title character. It opens with Squire Allworthy, a wealthy landowner, returning to his country estate in Somerset after a business engagement in London.
Allworthy is shocked to find an abandoned baby boy sleeping in his bed. A young woman named Jenny Jones - servant girl to the local schoolmaster and his wife - later confesses to being the baby's mother, but refuses to name the father.
The kindhearted Squire Allworthy decides to take in the baby, called Tom Jones, as his ward. Sophia Western, the neighbor's daughter, becomes Tom's childhood sweetheart.
Unfortunately, her father and Squire Allworthy have no intention of allowing Sophia and Tom to marry when they grow up. That's because Tom is illegitimate, and thus beneath a girl of Sophia's class.
Tom Jones grows up to have both a healthy appetite for women and a good heart like Squire Allworthy. The novel's liberal attitudes toward sexual promiscuity and prostitution made it quite controversial in its day.
Moralists denounced the novel as obscene, decrying its depiction of a hero who proves himself to be both noble and promiscuous. In reality, Tom's sexual exploits are played mostly for laughs, as the author's sense of humor played a huge part in his fiction.
The most controversial (and funniest) part of the novel finds Tom witnessing a half-naked woman being beaten by a man. Tom rescues her and brings her to an inn.
The woman, Mrs. Waters, is the wife of an army captain. She thanks her handsome young hero by making love to him. Later, Squire Allworthy reveals to Tom the horrible truth about Mrs. Waters - her maiden name is Jones. Jenny Jones. Tom just slept with his long-lost mother!
His childhood sweetheart and first great love, Sophia Western, whom he has tried to keep in touch with, goes through her own trials and tribulations, including the prospect of marriage to a man she detests - Lord Fellamar, a vile young nobleman who lusts for her.
Fellamar hatches a plan to trick Sophia into thinking that Tom Jones has been killed so that she'll agree to marry him. Rather than wait until their wedding night, Fellamar attempts to rape Sophia. Thankfully, her father arrives on the scene before he can.
True love triumphs in the end, as Tom and Sophia are reunited and another shocking secret is revealed: Jenny Jones was not Tom's mother. His real mother was Squire Allworthy's sister, Bridget.
Bridget had been seduced by a young man named Summer - the son of Allworthy's clergyman friend. Now a respectable gentleman, Tom declares his love for Sophia and she agrees to marry him, with the blessings of her father and Squire Allworthy.
Tom Jones would be adapted several times for the screen, stage, and television. The most famous adaptations were the 1963 British feature film starring Albert Finney in the title role, and the opera by French composer François-André Danican Philidor.
Quote Of The Day
"There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true."
- Henry Fielding
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Henry Fielding's classic novel, Tom Jones. Enjoy!
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Notes For February 27th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 27th, 1807, the legendary American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine. A child prodigy, he began his schooling at the age of three. At six, he was studying Latin and reading Miguel Cervantes' classic epic novel, Don Quixote.
Longfellow was thirteen when his first published poem, The Battle of Lovell's Pond, appeared in the Portland Gazette. Two years later, he enrolled at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. There, he met legendary writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who became his lifelong friend.
After graduating in 1825 at the age of eighteen, he was offered a job as professor of modern languages at Bowdoin, on the condition that he travel to Europe to learn more languages. So, he embarked on a three-year European tour, where he became fluent in French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese.
While in Madrid, Longfellow met legendary American writer Washington Irving, who encouraged him to become a professional writer. Longfellow based his second book, a travelogue called Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea (1835), on his European tour.
Back in America, when he wasn't teaching at Bowdoin, he translated French, Spanish, and German textbooks. His first book, published in 1833, was a translation of the works of medieval Spanish poet Jorge Manrique.
In 1831, Longfellow married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Storer Potter. She died three years later from illness following the miscarriage of their only child. Her husband was devastated. At the time, he had been teaching languages at Harvard and had become fluent in Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic.
After losing his wife, Longfellow threw himself into his work, mostly to escape his grief. He worked on more translations and began publishing the poetry collections that would make him famous, such as Voices in the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841).
To escape his loneliness, Longfellow socialized with fellow writers and scholars. In 1839, five years after he'd lost his wife, he found himself falling love again, with Frances "Fanny" Appleton, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. She wasn't interested in him.
Nevertheless, Longfellow determined to win her heart, writing to a friend, "Victory hangs doubtful. The lady says she will not! I say she shall! It is not pride, but the madness of passion." After a tumultuous seven year courtship, Fanny's dogged admirer won her heart.
It almost didn't happen when Longfellow published Hyperion, a Romance (1839), a novel inspired by their early courtship. The protagonist, Paul Flemming, a grief stricken American wandering through Germany, meets an Englishwoman named Mary Ashburton and determines to win her heart.
When Fanny learned that she was the inspiration for the character of Mary Ashburton, she was neither flattered nor amused. Longfellow wouldn't give up. When in a letter she finally agreed to marry him, he walked 90 minutes to her home rather than wait for a carriage.
The couple would remain together for eighteen years and have six children before tragedy struck again. In July of 1861, Fanny was trying to seal an envelope with hot wax when her dress caught fire. Her screams woke Longfellow from his nap, and he tried to save her.
Severely burned, Fanny was tended by a doctor who administered ether to her throughout the day and night. She died the next morning. Longfellow had been burned as well, but he would recover physically, growing a beard to hide his facial scars. Emotionally, he was destroyed.
Longfellow had used laudanum (a tincture of opium) to ease the pain of his burns; now physically healed, he used the drug to ease the pain of his depression. He feared that he might go insane and begged his family not to send him to an asylum. He determined to write again.
By now, Longfellow had become the most famous poet in America, and one of the richest writers as well. He continued to write poetry collections and novels. In 1867, he published his greatest work as a scholar - a translation of Dante Alighieri's classic poem, The Divine Comedy.
Longfellow also devoted his later years to social causes. A prominent abolitionist, he denounced slavery and supported the Union during the Civil War. He opposed a prewar compromise to allow slavery to preserve the union, but hoped that the Northern and Southern states could reconcile after the war ended.
As a poet, Longfellow was known as a master of lyric poetry. A versatile poet, he experimented with both traditional and free verse, using anapestic and trochaic forms, heroic couplets, ballads, sonnets, and blank verse - unrhymed iambic pentameter.
His greatest poems include Paul Revere's Ride, The Village Blacksmith, The Wreck of the Hesperus, and his classic epic poems, Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha, which was based on Ojibwe tribal legends.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow died of peritonitis in 1882 at the age of 75.
Quote Of The Day
"The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's classic epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha. Enjoy!
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Notes For February 26th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 26th, 1802, the legendary French writer Victor Hugo was born in Bensancon, France. He grew up during an important time in French history; when he was two years old, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor. By the time Hugo turned eighteen, the Bourbon Monarchy had been restored.
The opposing forces that shaped French history during this time were reflected in Hugo's parents. His father Joseph was an atheist and a high-ranking officer in Napoleon's army, while his mother Sophie was an extremely devout Catholic and Royalist.
Although Victor Hugo was close to his controlling mother, against her wishes, he married his childhood sweetheart, Adele Foucher. They had five children. Their first, Leopold, died in infancy. Hugo's eldest daughter, Leopoldine, died suddenly at the age of nineteen - shortly after her wedding.
Leopoldine and her husband were aboard a boat that capsized; she drowned, and her husband died trying to save her. Victor Hugo, traveling in the south of France with his mistress, was devastated when he read about Leopoldine's death in a newspaper. She had been his favorite daughter. He would write many poems about her life and death.
As a young writer, Victor Hugo's main influence was François-René de Chateaubriand, founder of the Romanticism movement in French literature. He vowed to be "Chateaubriand or nothing." Hugo's first book, a poetry collection titled Odes et Poésies Diverses, was published in 1822, when he was twenty years old.
It was well received and earned Hugo a royal pension from King Louis XVIII, but it was his 1826 poetry collection, Odes et Ballades, that established him as one of the greatest poets of his time.
Victor Hugo first made a name for himself as a novelist with his 1829 novella, Le Dernier jour d'un Condamné. (The Last Day of a Condemned Man). The story is narrated by a man condemned to death. He describes his life in prison and bears his soul to the reader.
He never identifies himself by name, nor reveals his crime, only hinting vaguely that he killed someone. On the day of his execution, he is reunited with his three-year-old daughter, who doesn't recognize him. The novella would have a profound influence on great writers such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Two years after his novella Le Dernier jour d'un Condamné was published, Hugo released what would become his first classic full-length novel. Notre-Dame de Paris, best known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), was a huge critical and commercial success.
The tragic love story dealt with social injustice - the recurring theme in Hugo's prose. Set in late 15th century Paris, the novel tells the tale of Quasimodo, a deformed hunchback who lives in the Notre Dame cathedral, where he serves as the bell ringer.
The townspeople despise and shun him because of his deformities, and his adoptive father, a depraved priest named Claude Frollo, cruelly mistreats him. Quasimodo soon falls in love with Esmeralda, a beautiful Gypsy dancer, who has captured the hearts of most men in town, including Claude Frollo.
Esmeralda's physical beauty is nothing compared to her inner beauty, as she is very kind and compassionate. When the lust-crazed priest sends Quasimodo to kidnap Esmeralda, he is caught, beaten, and ordered to remain out in the searing heat. Esmeralda brings him water.
When Esmeralda falls in love with Phoebus de Chateaupers, the captain of the King's Archers, the jealous Claude Frollo nearly murders him in a fit of rage, then frames Esmeralda for the crime. She is sentenced to be hanged, but Quasimodo saves her from the gallows and takes her to the cathedral.
There, she would be safe under the law of sanctuary, but then the King vetoes the law and commands his troops to take Esmeralda from the cathedral. Claude Frollo betrays her and hands her over to them, then watches her hang.
Quasimodo kills the evil priest, then goes to the graveyard, where he climbs into Esmeralda's grave and dies with her. A year later, the skeletons of Esmeralda and Quasimodo are found locked in an embrace.
Victor Hugo's greatest novel was his legendary masterpiece, Les Miserables (1862), a dazzling 1,200+ page epic novel that took the author 17 years to write. Originally published in five volumes, Les Miserables opens in Digne in 1815, as poor peasant Jean Valjean is released from prison.
He served nineteen years - five years for stealing bread to feed his starving sister, plus an additional fourteen years for his frequent escape attempts. Forced to carry a passport that identifies him as a convict, Valjean finds himself scorned by society.
He becomes so angry and bitter that when the kindhearted Bishop Myriel takes him in, he steals the man's silverware, and later, a young boy's silver coin. The Bishop saves Valjean from the police and inspires him to repent and make an honest man of himself.
Valjean decides to return the silver coin he stole, then finds that the theft has been reported. Another conviction would result in a life sentence, so he goes on the lam. Using the alias Monsieur Madeleine, Valjean follows the Bishop's advice and reinvents himself as an honest, productive citizen.
All the while, he is pursued relentlessly by police Inspector Javert. Later, Valjean reveals his true identity when Javert mistakenly arrests an innocent man named Champmathieu whom he thinks is Jean Valjean.
When Valjean has a chance to kill Javert and escape, he refuses to do so, and for the first time, the policeman recognizes the immorality of the law to which he has dedicated his life. It drives him to suicide.
In addition to the story of Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert, Les Miserables follows many other characters, who also face the specter of social injustice.
The novel, rightfully considered one of the greatest ever written, has been adapted numerous times for the stage, screen, and television. The most famous adaptation, a hit Broadway musical, was itself adapted as a film in 2012, starring Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean.
Victor Hugo became involved in politics, where he would fight the social injustices he had written about. In 1841, King Louis-Philippe elevated him to the peerage, and he entered the Higher Chamber as a pair de France, (nobleman) where he spoke out against the death penalty and other forms of social injustice. He advocated freedom of speech and a free press.
Hugo soon tired of the monarchy and became a supporter of the Republican form of government. Thus, when the Second Republic was formed in France following the 1848 Revolution, Hugo was elected to the Constitutional Assembly and the Legislative Assembly.
When Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) seized total power in 1851 and established an anti-parliamentary constitution, Hugo openly denounced him as a traitor to France. The writer went into exile, living in Brussels and Jersey before settling in with his family on the channel island of Guernsey, where he would live until 1870.
While in exile, Hugo used his influence to help fight social injustice in other countries. He also wrote and published his famous anti-Napoleon III pamphlets, which, although banned in France, made a huge impact there. When Hugo returned to France in 1870 to a hero's welcome, he was elected to the National Assembly and the Senate.
Victor Hugo's writings were also influenced by his religious views, which changed radically over the years. At first, he was a devout Catholic like his mother, but then he came to loathe the Church, which he perceived as being indifferent to the plight of the poor and the oppression of the monarchy.
That Hugo's novels made the Pope's official banned books list didn't help, and he saw over 700 attacks on Les Miserables by the Catholic press. Hugo developed a lifelong seething hatred of the Catholic Church.
When his sons died, they were buried without a crucifix or priest, and Hugo's will stipulated the same for his own death. Despite his deep hatred of the Church and religion in general, Hugo was known to be a very spiritual man who believed in the power of prayer.
His last great novel, Quatre-vignt-Treize (Ninety-Three) was published in 1874. He died in 1885 at the age of 83.
Quote Of The Day
"It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life."
- Victor Hugo
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a reading of Volume 1, Part 1 of Victor Hugo's classic epic novel Les Miserables. Enjoy!
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Notes For February 25th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 25th, 1917, the legendary English writer and composer Anthony Burgess was born. He was born John Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England. His confirmation name, Anthony, would be added to his legal name.
The next year, in November of 1918, Burgess' eight-year-old sister Muriel died of Spanish Flu, which had become a pandemic. Four days after his sister's death, his mother died of the disease. His aunt Ann (his mother's sister) raised him while his father worked as a bookkeeper and part-time musician.
He would later say that he believed his father resented him for surviving the pandemic that killed his sister and mother. When his father remarried, he was raised by his stepmother.
As a young boy, Anthony Burgess was a loner, despised by other children because he liked to dress well and could read before he started elementary school. Although his father was a musician, Burgess didn't care about music until he heard a dazzling flute solo while listening to classical music on the radio.
After the piece ended, a voice announced that he had been listening to Prélude à l'après-midi d'un Faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) by legendary French composer Claude Debussy. Awestruck, Burgess told his family that he wanted to be a composer.
Burgess' family refused to let him study music because there was no money in it. Music wasn't taught at his school, so when he was around fourteen, he taught himself to play the piano. Later, he enrolled at Victoria University of Manchester as a music major.
Unfortunately, the music department turned him down because of his poor grade in physics. So, he switched his major to English. While at university, Burgess met Llewela "Lynne" Isherwood Jones, whom he would marry after they graduated.
During World War II, Anthony Burgess served as a nursing orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was disliked for his practical joking and anti-authoritarian nature. Once, he knocked off a corporal's cap; another time, he deliberately overpolished a floor to make the other men slip and fall.
In 1942, he asked for a transfer to the Army Education Corps. He excelled as an instructor, and though he loathed authority, he was promoted to sergeant. He was stationed in Gibraltar, where his talent for languages came in handy.
Burgess debriefed Dutch expatriates and Free French for army intelligence. His anti-authoritarianism got him into trouble again while on leave in a nearby Spanish town: he was arrested for insulting the fascist leader Generalissimo Franco. He was soon released.
While he was serving in the Army, his pregnant wife Lynne was attacked during the blackout by four GI soldiers who had deserted. She lost the baby, and the Army denied Burgess' request for leave to see her.
When Burgess left the Army in 1946, he had attained the rank of sergeant-major. He spent the next four years as a lecturer in speech and drama, then took a job as a secondary school teacher.
In 1954, he joined the British Colonial Service as a teacher and education officer. He was first stationed in Malaya, an experience that would serve as the inspiration for his first three novels.
The first book in the trilogy, Time For A Tiger, was published in 1956. The novel is set at the Mansor School in Kuala Hantu, where British resident teacher Victor Crabbe determines to neutralize the threat posed by a young communist student who's been influencing his classmates and indoctrinating them in his cause.
The second book in the trilogy, The Enemy In The Blanket (1958), proved to be controversial for, of all things, its cover art. Burgess was shocked and appalled by his publishers' choice for the book's cover art.
They had chosen an illustration of a Sikh rickshaw driver pulling a white man and woman in his rickshaw. This was unheard of in Malaya, and considered extremely insulting. Burgess found himself falsely accused of racism.
In 1962, Anthony Burgess published what is considered his greatest novel - a bold, brilliant, experimental work of dystopic science fiction. Its title, A Clockwork Orange, came from the British slang expression, "queer as a clockwork orange."
The novel is set in a dystopic fascist England of the future. The novel is narrated by its main character, Alex, a brilliant but psychopathic teenager who leads a gang of "droogs" that includes his friends Pete, Georgie, and Dim.
Alex and his gang meet at a milk bar, where they drink drugged milk to get them ready for a night of violent mayhem. One night, while joyriding in a stolen car, the gang breaks into an isolated cottage. They terrorize the married couple that lives there and rape the wife.
When he's not out with his gang, Alex passes the time in his dreary home, escaping his poor excuse for parents by blasting the works of his favorite composer, "Ludwig Van," (Beethoven) and masturbating to violent sexual fantasies.
Later, Georgie challenges Alex for leadership of the gang, but is beaten in their fight and Dim's hand is slashed open. After putting down the rebellion, Alex takes his gang out for drinks at the milk bar.
Georgie and Dim have had enough, but Alex demands that the gang follow through with Georgie's plan for a "man-sized" job and rob a rich old woman who lives alone. The robbery is botched when the old woman calls the police - but not before she is assaulted and knocked unconscious.
The gang then turns on Alex, attacking him and leaving him to take the fall when the police arrive. The old woman later dies of her injuries and Alex is charged with murder. He's sent to a brutal prison to serve his time.
After serving a couple years in prison, Alex becomes an involuntary participant in an experimental rehabilitation procedure called the Ludovico Technique, which, in two weeks, is supposed to remove all violent and criminal impulses from the human psyche.
The prison chaplain angrily condemns the Ludovico Technique, arguing that conscious, willing moral choice is a necessary component of humanity. Nevertheless, Alex undergoes the procedure.
For two weeks, in a horrific kind of aversion therapy, Alex's eyes are wired open and he is forced to watch violent images on a screen while being given a drug that induces extreme nausea.
Unfortunately, the soundtrack to the violent film presentation includes works by Beethoven, and Alex begs the doctors to turn off the sound, telling them that's a sin to take away his love of music, and Beethoven never did anything wrong. They refuse.
After the procedure is completed, Alex is brought before an audience of prison and government officials and declared successfully rehabilitated. They demonstrate how Alex is unable to react with violence even in self defense, and is crippled by nausea whenever he becomes sexually aroused.
The outraged prison chaplain again protests the Ludovico Technique, accusing the state of taking away Alex's God-given ability to choose good over evil. "Padre," a government official replies, "There are subtleties. The point is that it works."
Alex is released from prison, but his life plunges into a downward spiral. He finds that the Ludovico Technique has rendered him physically unable to listen to his Beethoven or defend himself from attack.
First, he's beaten by a former victim. When the police are called, they turn out to be Alex's old gang mate Dim and rival gang leader Billyboy. They beat him, too.
Later, Alex is befriended by a political activist who turns out to be the man whose wife Alex had raped during the home invasion. When he finally recognizes Alex as the gang leader, he tortures him with the classical music he once loved.
Alex attempts suicide, and a scandal erupts. The embarrassed government agrees to reverse the Ludovico Technique in order to quell all the bad publicity. They offer Alex a cushy job at a high salary, but he looks forward to returning to his life of violent mayhem.
He forms a new gang, but after watching them beat a stranger, he finds that he has tired of violence. Alex contemplates giving up gang life, becoming a productive citizen, and doing what he secretly always wanted to do - start a family of his own. He wonders if his children would inherit the violent tendencies he once had.
In the U.S. edition of the novel, the last chapter was omitted by the publisher, who wanted the story to end on a dark note (with Alex looking forward to resuming his life of violence) because he believed that the original UK edition ending (with Alex realizing the errors of his ways) was unrealistic.
Another issue with the original UK ending is that the reader is left wondering if Alex's ultimate rejection of violence is the genuine product of his free will or a lingering effect of the Ludovico Technique.
When the legendary director Stanley Kubrick adapted the novel as an acclaimed film in 1971, he felt the same way, and based his screenplay on the U.S. edition of the novel. It was a huge critical and commercial success.
Featuring Malcolm McDowell in the career making starring role as Alex, the film was rated X for its original theatrical release. Though controversial for its explicit sexual content and extreme violence, the film won numerous awards and was nominated for several Oscars.
In the UK, the movie was passed uncut, but a conservative outcry erupted over the film's negative influence on teenage boys and dark humored sexual violence. It resulted in Kubrick and his family receiving death threats.
Their London home was also besieged by protesters, so Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange from circulation in the UK, and it wouldn't be seen there again for nearly thirty years, until after the director's death.
Today, both editions of A Clockwork Orange are available in the U.S., and it remains a classic work of literature famous for its dazzling experimental narrative. Alex speaks Nadsat, a lyrical dialect that combines British slang with modified Slavic and Russian slang and words specifically invented by the author.
Burgess would go on to write many more great novels, including The Wanting Seed (1962), Tremor of Intent: An Eschatological Spy Novel (1966), M/F (1971), and The End of the World News: An Entertainment (1982).
As a playwright, he would adapt A Clockwork Orange as a stage play; as a screenwriter, he wrote the screenplays for the popular TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and A.D. (1985) and contributed to the screenplays of feature films.
As a composer, his classical pieces were broadcast on BBC Radio. He translated Bizet's Carmen into English, and wrote an operetta based on James Joyce's Ulysses called Blooms of Dublin.
He also wrote a new libretto for Weber's opera, Oberon and wrote the book for the 1973 Broadway musical, Cyrano, basing it on his own adaptation of the classic play by Edmond Rostand.
Anthony Burgess' other literary works included poetry collections, children's books, and nonfiction works. He died of lung cancer in 1993 at the age of 76.
Quote Of The Day
"A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey."
- Anthony Burgess
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a full length BBC documentary on Anthony Burgess called The Burgess Variations. Enjoy!
Friday, February 21, 2025
Notes For February 21st, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 21st, 1903, the legendary French writer Anaïs Nin was born. She was born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris.
Her father, Joaquin Nin, was a Cuban pianist and composer. Her mother, Rosa Culmell, was a classically trained singer of French and Danish descent. She had two younger brothers, Thorvald and Joaquin.
When Anaïs was a young girl, her family traveled throughout Europe. They lived for a time in Spain and in America, then moved back to her mother's French homeland. There, they lived in an apartment rented from an American friend who had gone away for the summer.
Anaïs, then in her teens, stumbled across the man's collection of French erotic paperbacks and read them all. By then, she had already determined to become a writer, and had begun keeping the diaries for which she would become most famous.
At sixteen, she completed her primary education and became an artist's model. She had begun learning English while her family was living in America; soon she became fluent in English, though French would remain her primary language.
In March of 1923, at the age of twenty, Anaïs married her boyfriend, Hugh Parker Guiler, a banker who years later would reinvent himself as an experimental filmmaker named Ian Hugo. The couple settled in Paris and would maintain an open marriage.
While her husband was preoccupied with his banking career, Anaïs took up writing and flamenco dancing. Her first book, published in 1932, was an acclaimed work of nonfiction titled D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study. She wrote it in just over two weeks.
At the time of its publication, literary critics had begun turning their backs on Lawrence, the legendary English writer best known for his classic and controversial novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. Anaïs' masterful, scholarly study of Lawrence's works was an eyebrow raiser - no woman had dared praise his controversial writings before.
At the time she wrote her first book, Anaïs Nin was living the bohemian life in Paris. She met the legendary American writer Henry Miller, then a down-and-out expatriate trying to start his own career as a novelist. She let him read her diaries; they were a revelation to him.
Her writing had the poetry and passion that his lacked. With Anaïs as his muse, Miller wrote his classic debut novel, Tropic of Cancer (1934), which made his name as a writer. Meanwhile, Anaïs worked on her own fiction.
While they tried to keep their writing careers going, Anaïs and Henry struggled to make ends meet, as France had also fallen victim to the Great Depression. They and their writer friends soon discovered they could make a dollar per page writing pornographic literature for an anonymous private collector.
At first, they did it more for their own amusement than for the money, but soon it became an important source of income during the hard times of the Depression, as a dollar per page back then is equivalent to about $20 per page in today's money.
Believe it or not, for Henry Miller, writing decent erotica in those days was a struggle. Anaïs Nin, however, was brilliant at it. Her erotica, told from a woman's perspective, was dazzling, poetic, sensual, and even philosophical at times, while also surprisingly graphic.
She explored all the known sexual taboos, including male and female homosexuality, sadomasochism, and incest. Though she retained her original manuscripts for these stories, she never intended to have them published.
Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller became close friends and ultimately lovers. When Miller's wife June arrived in Paris, the relationship would become something of a ménage à trois. Though Anaïs came to love June and found herself attracted to the woman, she preferred men.
In 1936, Anaïs published her first novella, House Of Incest, which would prove to be one of her most famous works of fiction. The Nin family had feared that it was going to be an expose of a recent incestuous affair between Anaïs and her father.
Instead, it was a novella filled with surrealist prose poetry, metaphors, and psychological symbolism, based on a series of dreams she had. Anaïs would later chronicle the actual incestuous affair in her famous diaries.
Shockingly, one of her therapists had encouraged her to seduce, then abandon her father as an act of revenge for his abandonment of her when she was a young girl. The therapist believed that this would leave Anaïs feeling empowered. It didn't.
In the summer of 1939, with the winds of war brewing, Anaïs and her husband left Paris and moved to New York City. She would remain in America for pretty much the rest of her life. In 1947, she met Rupert Pole, an ex-actor sixteen years her junior, in an elevator while on her way to a party. They began dating, then ran off together.
The couple married in Arizona before moving to California. While Anaïs would live with Rupert until her death in 1977, she annulled their marriage in 1966 for tax reasons - and because she had never formally divorced her first husband.
Anaïs continued to write fiction and maintain her diaries. In 1958, she began publishing Cities of the Interior, her classic "continuous novel" which appeared in a series of five volumes. The most famous volumes were the third, The Four-Chambered Heart, and the fourth, A Spy in the House of Love.
While living in California, Anaïs struck up friendships with experimental filmmakers and appeared in a few films. Her most famous film role was of the goddess Astarte in Kenneth Anger's classic film, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1956). She also appeared in Maya Deren's classic experimental film, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946).
Over the years, Anaïs' famous diaries would be published in a series of eleven volumes. They would also appear as collections of excerpts, the most famous of which was Henry and June: From a Journal of Love (1986).
Henry and June: From a Journal of Love contained excerpts from Anaïs' diaries chronicling her relationships with Henry Miller and his wife, June. This memorable volume would be adapted by director Philip Kaufman as the highly acclaimed and controversial 1990 feature film Henry & June.
Starring Fred Ward as Henry Miller, Uma Thurman as June, and, in a bravura performance, Maria de Medeiros as Anaïs Nin, it was the first movie to be rated NC-17, which had replaced the X rating.
Bowing to pressure groups, most theaters banned NC-17 rated pictures as they had X-rated films, and Henry & June played on only a few hundred screens nationwide. It earned most of its profits in video sales and rentals, which were unaffected by the NC-17 rating.
Still, film critics, most famously the legendary film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, decried the film's rating as undeserved and protested the NC-17 rating in general as unnecessary and continuing the X rating's tradition of imposing censorship on filmmakers.
(Since most theaters, especially shopping mall multiplexes, refused to play X or NC-17 rated movies, filmmakers were forced to cut their pictures to obtain a lower rating in order to get a wider distribution and hopefully make a profit.)
By 1976, Anaïs was losing her battle with cancer when a publisher approached her about releasing a volume of her famous erotic short stories, which everyone knew about but nobody had seen - except for the anonymous patron who had paid her to write them.
She still didn't want to publish them, but her ex-husbands Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, both of whom she still loved, had fallen into poverty. She figured that the money could be used to help them out. She died in January of 1977 at the age of 73. Six months later, Delta of Venus was published.
As the publisher had expected, the short story collection became a huge hit, though Anaïs Nin had considered the stories an embarrassment because they were more caricature than serious writing and had been penned for a private patron's money rather than written for publication.
Nevertheless, they provided a memorable exhibition of Nin's talent for erotic literature. They also added to her legacy as a feminist icon. With the success of Delta of Venus, a second erotic short story collection, Little Birds, was published in 1979.
Quote Of The Day
"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."
- Anaïs Nin
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Anaïs Nin reading from her famous diaries. Enjoy!
Thursday, February 20, 2025
Notes For February 20th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 20th, 1926, the famous American writer Richard Matheson was born in Allendale, New Jersey. Born to Norwegian immigrant parents, he would grow up in Brooklyn, New York.
In 1943, after graduating from high school, he joined the military and served as an infantry soldier during World War II. After the war ended, Matheson enrolled at the University of Missouri, where he earned a degree in journalism.
His first published short story, Born of Man and Woman, appeared in 1950, in an issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The story is narrated in broken English by the grotesque mutant eight-year-old son of a normal couple.
The "normal" parents keep their son chained up in the cellar and beat him frequently. When the mutant boy breaks the rules and sneaks upstairs to spy on his parents, he discovers that he has a normal little sister whom he never met or knew existed.
Encouraged by his first sale, Matheson moved to California, hoping to become a professional writer. There, he married his girlfriend, Ruth Ann Woodson. They had four children, three of whom (Chris, Ali, and Richard Christian Matheson) would also become writers.
Richard Matheson's first novel, Someone is Bleeding, was published in 1953, but his third novel, I Am Legend (1954), made his name as a writer. In it, a man named Robert Neville finds that he is apparently the last man left alive on Earth.
A pandemic quickly wiped out the rest of the world's population, but Neville is immune for some reason. He soon discovers that he is not alone; the world is still inhabited by the infected - who have become vampires that crave his blood.
The disease has mutated and the vampires can now spend brief periods of time in the daylight. After overcoming alcoholism and depression, Neville tries to find a cure for the disease before the vampires become indestructible.
I Am Legend would be adapted three times as a feature film: The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price, The Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend (2007) starring Will Smith as Robert Neville.
Matheson's classic 1956 novel, The Shrinking Man, told the story of Scott Carey, a man exposed to radiation after accidentally ingesting an insecticide. The combination of the two alters Carey's biochemical structure, causing him to shrink in size a little every day.
Most of the story finds Carey at only seven inches tall. Ordinary small objects and creatures become terrifying. As he keeps shrinking, Carey soon realizes that he won't shrink to death, as he'd feared. Instead, he'll keep shrinking until he's the size of an atom.
The Shrinking Man is actually a scathing satire of 1950s white middle class manhood. When Scott Carey shrinks to doll size, he finds that he is no longer the man of the house. Now, his wife and children are intimidating him for a change - a huge blow to his ego and masculinity.
The Shrinking Man would be adapted by the author himself as the cult classic film The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). It would also be adapted as The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), a comic fantasy about the dangers of industrial chemicals and deceptive advertising.
Lily Tomlin starred as an average housewife and mother whose exposure to chemicals in everything from laundry detergents to foods, combined with her unique body chemistry, causes her to shrink a little every day. When she reaches doll size, she becomes a media sensation.
In 1958, Matheson published A Stir of Echoes, a supernatural horror novel about a mild-mannered working class fellow, Tom Wallace, who is hypnotized at a party by his brother-in-law. Wallace doubts the effectiveness of hypnosis until a post-hypnotic suggestion unlocks formidable psychic powers within him.
Suddenly able to read minds and predict the future, Tom's life plunges into a downward spiral. Then the ghost of a murder victim begins haunting him, desperately searching for justice and peace. This memorable novel would be adapted as the horror film Stir of Echoes in 1999.
Matheson's 1975 fantasy novel Bid Time Return told the story of playwright Richard Collier, recently diagnosed with an inoperable, terminal brain tumor, who uses his mind to travel back in time to meet Elise McKenna, a famous stage actress from the past, after falling in love with a portrait of her.
Bid Time Return was adapted as a feature film titled Somewhere In Time in 1980, directed by Jeannot Zwarc (best known for his previous film Jaws 2) and starring Christopher Reeve and Jayne Seymour. Taking liberties with the novel, it was panned by critics and a box office dud, but it attracted a cult following over the years.
Richard Matheson's success as a novelist and short story writer got him noticed by television. He would write fourteen episodes of the classic TV series, The Twilight Zone (1959-64). His memorable episodes include the classic Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.
In this episode, an aerophobic salesman (William Shatner) notices something terrifying during his flight - a gremlin clinging to the plane's wing, trying to destroy the aircraft. Is it real or all in his mind?
Another great Twilight Zone episode Matheson wrote was Little Girl Lost. In it, a little girl falls out of her bed in the middle of the night and tumbles through a gateway into another dimension. Her father must go through and attempt a daring rescue before the door closes forever.
Little Girl Lost has been credited as an inspiration for the classic 1982 horror film Poltergeist, produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper, and was parodied in a segment of one of the Treehouse of Horror Halloween episodes of The Simpsons.
Matheson and his close friend, writer Charles Beaumont, who also wrote for The Twilight Zone, belonged to the Southern California Writing Group in the 1950s and 60s. Other members included Ray Bradbury, William F. Nolan, Jerry Sohl, and George Clayton Johnson.
In the 1970s, Matheson wrote the screenplays for two TV movies, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, which were based on a horror novel by Jeff Rice called The Kolchak Papers. The popular movies would spawn the short lived cult classic TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75).
The first of Matheson's TV movies, The Night Stalker (1972), received record ratings for a TV movie. Darren McGavin starred as Carl Kolchak, a shrewd, nosy, obnoxious, wisecracking newspaper reporter covering a series of bizarre murders in Las Vegas.
All the victims were completely drained of blood. The police think they're dealing with an insane serial killer, but Kolchak's investigation leads him to something more terrifying - a vampire. After Kolchak destroys the vampire, the police launch a cover-up and run him out of town.
The sequel, The Night Stangler (1973), finds Kolchak in Seattle, uncovering another supernatural mystery - identical series of murders that have occurred every 21 years since 1931. The killer is on the prowl again, draining more victims of their blood.
This time, instead of a vampire, the killer is a former Civil War surgeon who discovered an elixir of life that grants him immortality. The formula must be taken every 21 years and requires a quantity of human blood from unwilling donors.
Richard Matheson wrote over two dozen novels and numerous short stories, as well as film and TV screenplays. He won several awards and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010. His final novel, Generations, was published in 2012.
He died in 2013 at the age of 87.
Quote Of The Day
"Life is a risk; so is writing. You have to love it."
- Richard Matheson
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a Writers Guild Foundation interview with Richard Matheson. Enjoy!
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Notes For February 19th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 19th, 1917, the famous American writer Carson McCullers was born. She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her mother was the granddaughter of a Confederate war hero, her father a watchmaker and jeweler.
As a child, Carson McCullers was a musical prodigy. She began taking piano lessons at the age of ten. For her fifteenth birthday, her father gave her a typewriter. Nevertheless, she aspired to become a concert pianist.
In September of 1934, when she was seventeen years old, McCullers left home on a steamship bound for New York City, where she planned to study piano at Juilliard. Unfortunately, she lost her tuition money and was unable to attend the school.
McCullers then worked menial jobs while she taking creative writing classes at both Columbia University and New York University. By 1936, at the age of nineteen, her first short story, Wunderkind, was published in Story magazine.
She'd found a new passion and decided to become a writer. A year later, in 1937, she married her husband, Reeves McCullers, an ex-soldier turned aspiring writer. They would separate in 1940. That year, Carson McCullers published her breakthrough debut novel, which established her as one of the greatest writers of her generation.
Set in the Depression-era American South, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter told the story of four ragtag misfits whose varied lives have several things in common - loneliness, isolation, and seemingly unattainable dreams.
Mick Kelly is a restless 14-year-old tomboy with androgynous looks and musical talent forced to be a mother to her siblings and go to work to support her family; Jake Blount is an alcoholic itinerant laborer whose socialist convictions get him into trouble.
Dr. Benedict Copeland, a black physician, suffers from both tuberculosis and his desire to help free his people from racist oppression. Biff Brannon is a married cafe owner whose masculine appearance masks his inner struggle with his bisexuality.
All four characters are connected by a mutual friend, John Singer, an intelligent deaf-mute who can write, sign, and read lips. They all find peace in Singer's kindness, wisdom, and willingness to listen to and understand them. What they don't know is that Singer is just like them, suffering in silence.
His companion of ten years - a big Greek man and fellow deaf-mute named Spiros Antonapoulos - became mentally ill and was institutionalized by a relative. While Singer was there to listen to other people's problems and comfort them, there is no one to listen to Singer and comfort him, which ultimately leads to tragedy.
All the characters in the novel are sad and intriguing, but there is nothing sentimental about their sadness. In fact, one of the novel's main themes is the selfish nature of loneliness and emotional detachment. The most intriguing characters are Mick Kelly and Biff Brannon, with their sexual ambiguity.
At first, Mick dresses like a boy and acts like one, too. But after experiencing her first romantic relationship with Harry, a Jewish neighbor boy, which results in her first sexual experience, Mick changes her appearance, dressing and acting more like a lady.
Biff Brannon, impotent and emotionally distant from his wife, finds himself sexually attracted to the boyish-looking Mick, but rather than act on his impulses, he keeps his emotional distance.
When Mick starts dressing and acting like a woman, Biff loses sexual interest in her, but warms up to her emotionally. After his wife Alice dies, Biff feels little grief - their marriage was loveless - but he starts wearing her clothes and perfume.
There is also a strong homoerotic tone to the relationship between John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos - in the beginning, the two deaf-mute men walk together arm in arm, and later, Singer longs for his institutionalized companion - but they are not specifically described as a gay couple.
Carson McCullers was only 23 years old when The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was published. For such a young novelist to have crafted such a deep and profound novel is amazing. The book became an overnight success, receiving rave reviews.
Critics admired McCullers' handling of racial issues (Dr. Copeland is angry with his fellow blacks who refuse to stand up for their rights and choose to accept their unequal status in society with aplomb) and the evils of anti-communist hysteria.
Her novel would foreshadow the coming of both the civil rights movement and the anti-communist witch hunts that would take place a decade after its publication, conducted by Joseph McCarthy, the notoriously corrupt Republican Senator from Wisconsin.
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter would be adapted as a feature film in 1968, (starring Alan Arkin as John Singer) and as a stage play in 2005.
In 1946, McCullers published another classic novel, The Member of the Wedding. It told the story of Frankie Addams, a lonely and alienated 12-year-old tomboy who dreams of running away to join her brother and his new wife on their honeymoon in Alaska.
The semi-autobiographical novel was based on McCullers' childhood. It explores the nature of racial and sexual identity, as Frankie is close to her family's black maid and wishes that people could "change back and forth from boys to girls." She would later adapt her novel as a Broadway play.
The issues of sexual identity raised in The Member of the Wedding came from the fact that McCullers herself was bisexual and had struggled with her own identity. Her volatile marriage didn't help matters.
After her separation, she moved in with George Davis, the editor of Harper's Bazaar, but ended up remarrying Reeves McCullers in 1945. Three years later, while suffering from depression, she attempted suicide.
Five years after that, in 1953, Reeves tried to convince Carson to commit suicide with him. She left him and he killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills. Her 1957 play, The Square Root of Wonderful, was an attempt to come to terms with these painful experiences.
Carson McCullers was sickly throughout her life; she suffered strokes since childhood and contracted rheumatic fever when she was fifteen. By the time she was 31, strokes had paralyzed her left side completely.
She died of a brain hemorrhage in 1967 at the age of fifty. Her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, which she dictated during the last few months of her life, was published posthumously in 1999.
Quote Of The Day
"The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination."
- Carson McCullers
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a rare 1956 interview with Carson McCullers. Enjoy!
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Notes For February 18th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 18th, 1885, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the classic novel by the legendary American writer Mark Twain, was published. It was a sequel to his previous classic, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
Set in the pre-Civil War South, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn finds Tom Sawyer's best friend Huck Finn on an adventure of his own. The novel opens with Huck under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas.
The widow, along with her sister Miss Watson, are attempting to "sivilize" Huck. While he appreciates their efforts, he feels stifled by civilized life. With help from his best friend Tom Sawyer, Huck sneaks out one night.
When Huck's shiftless father Pap, a nasty, abusive drunkard, suddenly appears, Huck wants no part of him. Unfortunately, Pap regains custody of Huck and they move to the backwoods, where Pap keeps Huck locked in his cabin. Huck escapes and runs away down the Mississippi River.
He soon meets up with Miss Watson's slave, Jim, who has also run away, after Miss Watson threatened to sell him downriver, where life for slaves is brutal. Although he's headed for Cairo, Illinois, Jim's final destination is Ohio, a free state where slavery is illegal.
He hopes to buy his family's freedom and move them there. At first, Huck is unsure about whether or not he should report Jim for running away. Throughout the novel, as Huck travels with Jim and talks with him, the two form a close friendship.
Huck begins to change his mind about slavery, people, and life in general. He comes to believe that Jim is an intelligent, compassionate man who deserves his freedom. One day, Huck and Jim find an entire house floating down the river. They enter it, hoping to find food and valuables.
Instead, in one room, Jim finds the body of Huck's father, Pap, who was apparently shot in the back while robbing the house. Jim won't let Huck see the dead man's face and doesn't tell him that it's Pap.
Later, to find out what's going on in the area, Huck dresses up in drag and passes himself off as a girl named Sarah Williams. He meets a woman and enters her house, hoping that she won't recognize him as a boy.
She tells him that there's a $300 bounty on Jim's head, as he is accused of killing Huckleberry Finn! The woman becomes suspicious of Huck's disguise. When she tricks him into revealing that he's a boy, Huck runs off. He warns Jim of the manhunt, then they pack up and flee.
As Huck and Jim continue their journey, they encounter more people and more trouble. First, they get caught in the middle of a blood feud between two families, the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. Then they rescue two clever con men and get caught up in their schemes.
Huck is outraged when one of the grifters turns Jim in for the reward. Even though it's against the law and a sin, (it's considered theft) Huck helps Jim escape after rejecting the advice of his conscience and famously declaring, "All right, then, I'll go to Hell!"
Around this time, Huck witnesses the attempted lynching of a Southern gentleman, Colonel Sherburn. The Colonel turns back the lynch mob with his rifle - and a long speech about the cowardly nature of "Southern justice."
Although Huck had helped Jim escape from custody, he is soon recaptured. Later, Huck learns that Miss Watson died, and in her will, she freed Jim. When Jim tells Huck that the dead man they found in the floating house was his father, he realizes that he can finally go home.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is rightfully considered an all-time classic work of American literature. Although geared toward young readers, the novel has become a favorite of readers of all ages. It has been adapted numerous times for the radio, stage, screen, and television.
A month after it was first published, a public library in Concord, Massachusetts, banned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from its shelves, calling the novel tawdry, coarse, and ignorant. It was the beginning of a controversy that continues to this day.
From its first publication through the early 1950s, bans and challenges to the novel were the result of its condemnations of slavery and lynching, and its depiction of a black slave who proves to be more intelligent and compassionate than the white Southerners who had enslaved him.
Since the late 1950s, (when the Civil Rights movement began to gain momentum) the novel has faced bans and challenges in classrooms and school libraries from black activists for its frequent use of the racial epithet nigger and for its allegedly racist stereotyping of blacks.
Twain scholars point out that in using nigger, the author criticized white Southerners' racism by letting them speak their own ugly language. Those who decry the novel as racist fail to place it in its proper historical context.
In 2011, NewSouth Books, a publishing house in Alabama, issued a controversial new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - a bowdlerized edition with all uses of the word nigger changed to slave, and the word injun deleted entirely.
Suzanne La Rosa, co-founder of NewSouth Books, claimed that the changes make the novel more acceptable for the classroom, but scholars derided it as an attempt to whitewash the long history of white Southerners' virulent racism, which continues to this day.
Nevertheless, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains an all-time classic work of literature.
Quote Of The Day
"In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."
- Mark Twain
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Enjoy!
Monday, February 17, 2025
IWW Members' Publishing Successes For The Week Ending 2/16/25
Pamelyn Casto
OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters just published my essay, A Close Reading of Spencer Holst's "The Zebra Storyteller. You can see Holst's fable along with my analysis of it here.
Friday, February 14, 2025
Notes For February 14th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 14th, 1895, The Importance of Being Earnest, the classic play the by legendary Irish writer Oscar Wilde, opened in London. Wilde had written the first draft of the play in just three weeks. It was the fastest play he ever wrote.
The Importance of Being Earnest was also Wilde's most famous play. In this satire of the foibles and hypocrisy of the British upper class, young aristocrat Jack Worthing invents a fictional younger brother named Earnest.
Jack uses his fictitious sibling as a way of getting out of trouble. Sometimes he pretends to be Earnest to pursue women. When Jack's friend and fellow aristocrat Algernon Moncrieff learns about Earnest, he also assumes Earnest's identity for his own duplicitous purposes.
Jack and Algernon's plans backfire when the women they're pursuing think they're in love with the same man called Earnest. In a surprise twist, it turns out that Algernon, who has been impersonating Jack's fictitious sibling, really is Jack's long lost brother.
The Importance of Being Earnest earned rave reviews and became a hit. It's considered Oscar Wilde's best play. It would also be his last. It closed after 83 performances because of a scandal that had ensnared the playwright.
Wilde was a bisexual who, although married to a woman and the father of her children, preferred men. During his time - the Victorian era in England - homosexuality was considered both a disgrace and a crime under British law punishable by imprisonment.
The Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde's male lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, publicly accused Wilde of being a "posing sodomite," so Wilde made a complaint of criminal libel against him. The Marquess was arrested and released on bail.
A team of detectives led his lawyers to London's gay underground, and details of Wilde's associations with male prostitutes, transvestites, and gay brothels were soon uncovered and leaked to the press, which assailed him nonstop.
Queensberry's lawyers claimed that the libel was done for the public good. He was acquitted and Wilde found himself arrested for "gross indecency" - a term for homosexual acts that were illegal under British law.
The jury in Wilde's first trial failed to reach a verdict. At his final trial, presided by Justice Sir Alfred Wills, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to the maximum of two years imprisonment - a sentence that the judge believed was too lenient for the crime of homosexuality.
Wilde served his sentence at three different prisons. By the time of his release, prison life had left him in poor health. He spent his last years abroad in self-imposed exile, living under the alias Sebastian Melmoth.
The name was based on St. Sebastian (a Christian martyr believed to have been gay) and the main character of Melmoth The Wanderer, a Gothic novel written by Wilde's great uncle, Charles Robert Maturin.
Wilde was broke, so his wife, who refused to meet with him or let him see his children, sent him money when she could. He took up with his first lover, Robert Ross, and they spent the summer of 1897 together in Northern France, where Wilde wrote his classic poem, The Battle Of Reading Gaol.
Despite the objections of their families and friends, Wilde later reunited with Bosie Douglas, and they lived together in Italy in late 1897. But they broke up again, for good.
Wilde settled at the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris, where, it has been said, he lived the uninhibited gay lifestyle that had been denied him in England. He died of cerebral meningitis on November 30th, 1900, at the age of 46.
Some have speculated that the meningitis was a complication of syphilis, but Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, said that it was a complication of a surgical procedure, most likely a mastoidectomy. Wilde's own doctors blamed the meningitis on an old suppuration of the right ear.
Quote Of The Day
"By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."
- Oscar Wilde
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete live performance of Oscar Wilde's classic play The Importance of Being Earnest. Enjoy!
Thursday, February 13, 2025
Notes For February 13th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 13th, 1991, the famous auction house Sotheby's announced that the original draft of Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) had been discovered. Specifically, the first half of Twain's original draft manuscript, which had been thought lost.
The story of this major discovery began with a 62-year-old librarian from Los Angeles. Her aunt, who had lived in upstate New York, recently passed away. Six trunks full of her papers were sent to her niece. When the librarian finally got around to sorting through these papers, she made an incredible find.
Her grandfather, James Gluck, a lawyer and rare book collector, had acted as Twain's literary agent. Twain had sent Gluck the second half of his completed first draft of Huckleberry Finn to sell to the Buffalo and Erie Library in Buffalo, New York. He had once lived in Buffalo.
Twain had lost the first half of his manuscript, which is why Gluck only received the second half. For many years, it was believed that the first half had been lost forever. Then a librarian in Los Angeles sorted through trunks filled with her late aunt's papers.
There, in one of the trunks, she found the lost first half of Twain's original draft of Huckleberry Finn. Stunned, she asked Sotheby's to authenticate the manuscript. They had it shipped by armored car and plane to New York City, and found that it was indeed Mark Twain's lost original first half of Huckleberry Finn.
Since the manuscript contained the author's handwritten corrections and notes, there could be only one explanation for its existence: Twain had found the lost first half of his manuscript and sent it on to James Gluck in Buffalo. By then, he was already working on his second draft and gave no further thought to the original.
Finally put together as a complete whole, the original version of Huckleberry Finn is an amazing discovery. In addition to extended original scenes with more detail, it also included additional scenes that did not appear in the final version of the novel.
One of these additional scenes was a 15-page passage where, on a stormy night, Jim the runaway slave tells Huck Finn stories of his encounters with ghosts and corpses. Deemed too dark and macabre for a novel geared toward children, this scene had to be cut.
After a legal battle between Gluck's heirs, the Buffalo and Erie Library, and the University of Berkeley's Mark Twain Papers Project over the rights to the manuscript, an amicable settlement was reached between the parties.
The Buffalo and Erie Library retained the physical manuscript papers and all three parties would share equally in the royalties when the manuscript was published. Many publishing houses were chomping at the bit for the opportunity to publish it.
In 1995, Random House won the the bidding war for the right to publish the original version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Quote Of The Day
"Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
- Mark Twain
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a segment from the TV series 60 Minutes on a recent censorship controversy surrounding Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Notes For February 12th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 12th, 1938, the famous American writer Judy Blume was born. She was born Judith Sussman in Elizabeth, New Jersey. As a little girl, she recalled, "I spent most of my childhood making up stories inside of my head."
In 1961, she graduated New York University with a Bachelor's degree in education. Two years earlier, she married her first husband, John Blume, with whom she had two sons. They divorced in 1976; though Judy retained John's surname, she described their marriage as "suffocating."
Not long after her divorce in 1976, Blume married physicist Thomas Kitchens. The marriage ended two years later. She described it as "A disaster, a total disaster. After a couple years, I got out. I cried every day. Anyone who thinks my life is cupcakes is all wrong."
It wouldn't be until 1987 that Judy found her soul mate in George Cooper, a law professor turned nonfiction writer, and married him.
Judy Blume had been working as a teacher in 1969 when her first book was published, a funny picture book called The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo. Her children were in preschool at the time.
The following year, Blume established herself as one of the best young adult novelists of her time with two poignant and provocative novels, Iggie's House and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
Iggie's House told the story of Winnie Barringer, a young tomboy who is devastated when her best friend Iggie moves away. The Garbers, an African-American family, move into Iggie's old house and Winnie makes friends with the kids - Glenn, Herbie, and Tina.
Winnie soon learns an unforgettable lesson in the evils of racism when another neighbor, Mrs. Landon, a virulent bigot, determines to drive the Garbers out of the neighborhood. Winnie also observes the effects of Mrs. Landon's racism on her daughter, Clarice.
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is a memorable coming of age story centered on 11-year-old Margaret Simon. Margaret is the child of an interfaith marriage - her father is Jewish, her mother Christian.
Margaret's parents have no use for religion, so she wasn't raised in any faith. This irks her because her friends all have a religious affiliation and practice their faiths. Her Jewish grandmother is determined to see her raised as Jewish, which annoys both her parents.
Margaret's mother reveals that she's been estranged from her Christian parents for over a decade because they were fiercely opposed to her marrying a Jewish man. Meanwhile, Margaret strikes up a friendship with Nancy, the girl next door, and meets her friends Gretchen and Janie. They form a club called the Pre-Teen Sensations.
Together, they cope with the onset of puberty, with Margaret experiencing anxiety over getting her period and having to wear a bra. She also has her first real romance with a boy. Then, Margaret's mother makes the mistake of writing to her estranged parents.
Margaret's Christian grandparents pay an unexpected visit, revealing themselves to be virulent anti-Semites and demanding that Margaret be raised a Christian. Margaret's furious Jewish grandmother gets into a fight with them, and Margaret, who can't stand it anymore, explodes at all of them.
She tells them that she wants nothing to do with their god or their religions, and if she ever changes her mind, she'll decide what, if anything, she believes in. Her parents applaud her. The novel ends with Margaret finally getting her period and happy that she's become a woman.
This fantastic and controversial novel is often attacked by conservatives for its sexual frankness and attitude toward religion and always appears on the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged books.
In 2023, it was adapted as a highly acclaimed feature film co-produced by Judy Blume and with excellent performances by newcomer Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret and Kathy Bates as her Jewish grandmother.
Freckle Juice (1971) is another funny children's picture book about a young boy named Andrew who wants freckles like his friend Nicky has. Sharon, a girl in Andrew's class, sells him a recipe for "Freckle Juice" for fifty cents.
Andrew makes a batch of Freckle Juice - which contains disgusting ingredients - and drinks it, but no freckles appear. He's been swindled. Meanwhile, Nicky, who hates his freckles, buys a recipe from Sharon that's guaranteed to remove them!
Other memorable Judy Blume young adult novels include It's Not the End of the World and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, both published in 1972. In It's Not the End of the World, sixth grader Karen finds her life suddenly turned upside down.
Karen is overjoyed when her teacher turns out to be Mrs. Singer, the very nice teacher she desperately wanted. Unfortunately, Mrs. Singer, who got married over the summer, now acts like a total witch.
Meanwhile, Karen's parents' marriage disintegrates. They fight constantly and seem to really hate each other. When Karen's father announces his plans to file for divorce, her mother is finally happy - until Karen's angry teenage brother Jeff blows up at Mom and runs away from home.
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is the first in a series of memorable novels featuring the Hatcher family. Peter Hatcher is a smart yet naive nine-year-old boy in the fourth grade. His 2-year-old little brother Farley, known by his nickname Fudge, is a holy terror.
The irrepressible Fudge wreaks all sorts of havoc around the house and out in public, and always gets away with it - while Peter is expected to be his brother's well behaved keeper. When Fudge gets into trouble, Peter gets the blame. Angry and resentful, he still loves his brother.
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing would be followed by Superfudge (1980), Fudge-a-Mania (1990), and Double Fudge (2002). A spinoff of the Fudge series, Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, was published in 1972.
This memorable novel featured Peter Hatcher's annoying classmate and sort-of friend Sheila Tubman in her own coming of age story. Though she has an abrasive, self-confident personality, Sheila suffers from several crippling phobias - fears of spiders, dogs, and swimming - which are the source of her secret shame.
When Sheila's family stays at a big house in Tarrytown, New York for the summer, she goes to camp and strikes up a friendship with Merle "Mouse" Ellis, an easygoing, tomboyish girl her age whose genuine courage inspires Sheila to conquer her fears.
In addition to her young adult novels, Judy Blume has also written novels for teenage and adult readers, which remain controversial to this day. Her novels for teenagers, beginning with Deenie (1973), dealt honestly with teen sexuality, including masturbation.
For this reason, disgruntled individuals and conservative groups have often tried to ban Blume's teen novels from high school library shelves. Her first novel geared toward adult readers, Wifey (1978), also drew criticism.
Wifey was set in the time of its publication - the 1970s. The main character, Sandy Pressman, is a bored New Jersey housewife who decides to bring life to her stagnant existence by having a passionate affair with her old high school boyfriend.
This was a time of sexual revolution - when conservative social mores gave way to liberalism and couples began experimenting with swinging and open marriages. Sandy soon discovers evidence that her husband is having an affair of his own...
Blume was sharply criticized for publishing Wifey under her own name instead of using a pseudonym. Even though the book was subtitled "An Adult Novel by Judy Blume," the author's young readers - especially her adolescent readers - took an interest in it.
Depsite the controversy, Wifey and Blume's other adult oriented novels Smart Women (1983) and Summer Sisters (1998) all became critical and commercial successes. To date, her works have won over 90 awards.
Her most recent book, In The Unlikely Event, was published in June of 2015. Set in the early 1950s, it tells the story of Miri Ammerman, a fifteen year old girl struggling to deal with both adolescence and the three plane crashes that take place in her New Jersey hometown within a three month period.
The novel was based on actual events in Judy Blume's life. Three plane crashes took place in her hometown, Elizabeth, New Jersey, from late 1951 through early 1952, claiming a total of 118 lives. Her father, a dentist, was called on to help identify the victims.
Quote Of The Day
"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear."
- Judy Blume
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Judy Blume discussing her most recent novel, In The Unlikely Event, live at the Politics & Prose bookstore and coffeehouse. Enjoy!
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Notes For February 11th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 11th, 1778, the legendary French writer and philosopher Voltaire made a triumphant return to Paris after a 28-year exile.
Voltaire (the pseudonym of Francois-Marie Arouet) was born to a middle class family. As a young man, he entered law school, but quit to become a writer. He began his literary career as a playwright.
As a young man, while working as secretary to the French ambassador to the Netherlands, he fell in love with a Protestant girl, but his devout Catholic father prevented him from marrying her, kindling within him a seething lifelong hatred of the Church and religion in general.
In addition to his plays, he wrote poetry and prose; these works were of a polemic nature, and he possessed a rapacious wit. He was condemned by the establishment as a dangerous radical. In 1717, he published his classic epic poem La Henriade, a satirical attack on the French monarchy and the Church.
The poem resulted in Voltaire's arrest. He was jailed in the Bastille for almost a year. Imprisonment failed to temper his poison pen, and by 1726, he found himself in trouble again.
Outraged by Voltaire's retort to his insult, Chevalier de Rohan, a young aristocrat, obtained a royal lettre de cachet from King Louis XV - a warrant for Voltaire's arrest and imprisonment without trial.
To avoid serving more time at the Bastille, Voltaire fled to England. He returned to Paris almost three years later. He continued to write and publish polemical essays, poetry, and prose.
His essay collection Philosophical Letters on the English praised the constitutional monarchy of England for its respect for human rights and condemned the French monarchy for its violations of them.
Its publication marked the beginning of an escalating outrage over Voltaire's writings. He would flee arrest again, then return. Eventually, King Louis XV banned him entirely from France.
He moved first to Berlin, then settled in Switzerland, where he wrote his classic comic novel Candide and lived for 28 years.
When Voltaire finally returned to Paris in February of 1778, he was met with a hero's welcome. Around three hundred people came to visit him. He died three months later at the age of 83.
Quote Of The Day
"An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination."
- Voltaire
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of The Philosophy of Voltaire, an essay by the famous writer, philosopher, and historian Will Durant. Enjoy!
Monday, February 10, 2025
IWW Members' Publishing Successes For The Week Ending 2/9/25
Pamelyn Casto
Three of my poems have been published by Shot Glass Journal. They are Words and Butterflies, That No One Remembers, and That Cold Autumn Morning.
Friday, February 7, 2025
Notes For February 7th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On February 7th, 1867, the famous American children's book writer Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in Pepin, Wisconsin. She was born in a log cabin built by her father, Charles Ingalls. Many years later, a replica of the cabin would be built on the same plot of land and turned into a museum dedicated to Laura.
Laura grew up with her sisters Mary, Carrie, and Grace. Her baby brother, Charles Frederick, died in infancy. Laura's parents, Charles and Caroline, were pioneers with restless spirits. From Wisconsin, they moved West, first settling on the Kansas prairie in an area considered Indian territory.
A few years later, they would settle in a town that Laura would make famous - Walnut Grove, Minnesota. From there, they would stay with relatives in South Troy, Minnesota, then move on to Iowa, and ultimately, to South Dakota.
Charles Ingalls worked at many different jobs. In Walnut Grove, when he wasn't farming, he served as the town's butcher and its Justice of the Peace. In Iowa, he helped run a hotel. When he settled in South Dakota, he worked for the railroad.
As for Laura Ingalls, she first became a schoolteacher, landing her first teaching position two months before her 17th birthday. She taught in one-room schoolhouses. A year later, at the age of eighteen, Laura married her boyfriend Almanzo Wilder, who was ten years her senior. She bore him a daughter, Rose. She also had a son who died shortly after he was born.
Laura didn't care much for teaching, and employment opportunities for women were very limited at the time, so after she married, she devoted her time to building a home with her husband. After their daughter Rose was born, the couple's prospects seemed bright, but then they suffered several disasters.
First, Almanzo Wilder was stricken with a nearly fatal case of diphtheria. He survived, but was left partially paralyzed. He would regain almost full use of his legs, but walk with a cane for the rest of his life.
On top of that, Laura's newborn son died, the couple's home and barn burned down, and a severe drought destroyed their crops and left them in debt, unable to grow anything on their 300+ acres of land.
Laura Ingalls Wilder would chronicle these early hardships in The First Four Years, a long lost manuscript discovered after Rose Wilder's death in 1968 and published in 1971.
After staying with Almanzo's affluent parents in Spring Valley, Minnesota, the couple moved to Florida, hoping that the climate would be good for Almanzo's health. Instead, he and Laura couldn't stand the Southern heat and humidity - or the locals.
So, they moved to DeSmet, South Dakota, where Almanzo became a day laborer and Laura found work as a seamstress. The couple saved their money, and four years later, in 1894, they bought land in Mansfield, Missouri, which they christened the Rocky Ridge Farm.
It would take several years before the farm provided a decent income for the Wilders. At first, the only money they made came from selling firewood Almanzo had chopped while clearing out the land. So, he had to work at other jobs while Laura took in boarders and served food to railroad workers.
By 1910, the Rocky Ridge Farm had become a huge success. In addition to a wheat farm, it also served as a poultry farm and a dairy farm, and contained a huge and abundant apple orchard. The Wilder family was able to move out of their small rented home and into a ten-room dream farmhouse on their own land.
The following year, intrigued by her daughter Rose's budding writing career, Laura Ingalls Wilder, then 44 years old, decided to try her own hand at writing. She accepted an offer to submit an article to the Missouri Ruralist magazine. Her article would lead to an offer to write a column and work as an editor for the magazine.
Laura's column, As a Farm Woman Thinks, became a huge hit thanks in part to her expertise in farming and rural living. She was also well educated and well read, and concerned about what was going on in the world.
Though her column was popular, Laura never did make the leap to larger markets like her daughter, whose writings were being published by national magazines. But she was happy just writing her column.
By the late 1920s, Laura and Almanzo had scaled back their farm's operations considerably and were preparing to enjoy a comfortable retirement, having invested most of their savings in the stock market. Then, in September of 1929, the market crashed, wiping them out and ushering in the Great Depression.
The Wilders were left penniless and dependent on their daughter for support. Rose was able to support them with her writings, but Laura wanted to earn money writing as well. She also wanted to preserve her memories of a time long forgotten, when she was the young daughter of pioneers. So, she decided to write a children's novel based on her own childhood.
With Rose's blessing and help from her surviving sister Carrie, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her first book, When Grandma was a Little Girl, which would be published as Little House in the Big Woods in 1932. It won her the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.
This book follows Laura at the age of five, and takes place when the Ingalls family was living in their log cabin in Pepin, Wisconsin. Little Laura begins learning her homesteading skills, everything from making butter, cheese, and maple syrup to preserving meat and harvesting the garden.
Little House in the Big Woods became a hit. Over the next decade, Laura published seven more books in the series, each chronicling a different period in her life. The most famous book was the third, Little House on the Prairie (1932), which found the Ingalls family living in Kansas before being forced to move to Walnut Grove, Minnesota.
Laura Ingalls Wilder's memorable series of children's novels would win her Newbery Awards and bring her international fame. They also made the formerly penniless author a huge amount of money.
After her seventh book, These Happy Golden Years, was published in 1943, Laura quit writing fiction and devoted the rest of her years to writing about and promoting her libertarian philosophy. She died in February of 1957 - three days after her 90th birthday - of diabetes complications.
Some time after Laura's death, a controversy brewed about who really wrote the Little House series of children's novels. Some scholars believe that Laura's daughter Rose, a professional editor and ghostwriter, actually wrote them. Others reject this theory completely.
Most believe that the truth lies in between. Rose Wilder always served as her mother's editor, even back when Laura was writing her column for the Missouri Ruralist magazine. The stories told in the Little House novels were always Laura's, but Rose edited her mother's original manuscripts and prepared them for publication.
Laura herself would probably say that her novels were a collaborative effort. She loved working with her daughter and trusted Rose's editing skills.
In September of 1974, a series premiered on American TV called Little House on the Prairie. Though it was named after the third book in Laura Ingalls Wilder's series and mostly based on the Ingalls family's time spent living in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, it would include elements from all of her books, including the time when Charles Ingalls helped run a hotel in Iowa.
Featuring executive producer, director, and head writer Michael Landon as Charles Ingalls and Melissa Gilbert as Laura, the Little House on the Prairie TV series would run for nine years and become one of the most popular and beloved TV series of all time.
Quote Of The Day
“The real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.”
- Laura Ingalls Wilder
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a full length presentation on the life and legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Enjoy!