Friday, May 30, 2025
Notes For May 30th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 30th, 1849, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the first book by the legendary American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, was published.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was Thoreau's account of a two week boat trip he'd taken with his brother John some ten years earlier. They had sailed from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and back.
The book was more than just a travel journal recording the sights and sounds of the title rivers; Thoreau also discussed history, poetry, religion, and other subjects, much like Mark Twain did in his classic memoir / travelogue, Life on the Mississippi.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was written as a memorial tribute to Thoreau's brother John, to whom he was very close. John had helped pay for Thoreau's tuition to Harvard.
After Thoreau was fired from his teaching job because he opposed corporal punishment and refused to administer it to his students, he and John founded their own school. Very progressive for its time, it was the first school to introduce the field trip to the curriculum.
Sadly, John died suddenly from tetanus a few years after their boat trip, passing away in Thoreau's arms.
Thoreau wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers while he was living in his famous cabin at Walden Pond. Unable to find a publisher for the manuscript, he self-published it. Only a couple hundred copies were sold, leaving the author in debt.
It took Thoreau four years to pay off his printing debt for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. After he made his last payment, the remaining unsold copies of his book were delivered to his home.
In his famous journal, he quipped, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."
Quote of the Day
"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting."
- Henry David Thoreau
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a short documentary on Henry David Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Enjoy!
Thursday, May 29, 2025
Notes For May 29th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 29th, 1906, the legendary English fantasy novelist T.H. White was born. He was born Terence Hanbury White in Bombay, India.
His father, Garrick, was a police superintendent and a drunkard, his mother Constance emotionally cold and distant. They separated when he was fourteen.
White's unhappy childhood would have a lasting effect on his personal life. He was a bisexual who preferred men, but also had relationships with women, several of whom he came close to marrying.
He was ultimately unable to maintain an enduring romantic relationship with anyone, writing in his diary that "It has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them."
As a student, White first went to Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire, then to Queen's College, Cambridge, where he majored in English and was tutored by L.J. Potts, a scholar and author who became a lifelong friend.
White referred to him as "the greatest literary influence in my life." While at Queen's College, White wrote his thesis on Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th century compilation of French and English Arthurian romances by Sir Thomas Malory. Though he never actually read the book, White's thesis on it would play a part in his future writings.
In 1932, White taught at Stowe School, a coed boarding school in Buckinghamshire, for four years. In 1936, he published his first book, a memoir called England In My Bones. With the success of the book, White left Stowe and moved into a workman's cottage.
There, he wrote, went hunting and fishing, and took up falconry. Two years later, White published his first novel, The Sword In The Stone, the first in his famous Once And Future King series of Arthurian fantasy novels.
The Sword In The Stone told the story of a poor young boy named Wart who befriends an old wizard, Merlyn, who becomes his tutor. Merlyn knows that the boy is destined to become the King of England - a destiny Wart fulfills by removing a magical sword embedded in a rock.
The Sword In The Stone received rave reviews and became a Book Of The Month Club selection in 1939. That same year, White, a conscientious objector, moved to Doolistown, Ireland.
There, he rode out the war years writing. He published two more Once And Future King novels, The Queen Of Air And Darkness, and The Ill-Made Knight.
In 1946, White moved to Alderney, one of the Channel Islands (where he lived the rest of his life) and published his next book, Mistress Masham's Repose, a children's fantasy novel.
It told the story of a 10-year-old orphan girl who discovers a group of Lilliputians (the tiny people from Jonathan Swift's classic novel, Gulliver's Travels) living nearby.
The following year, White - an agnostic - wrote another children's book, The Elephant And The Kangaroo, a retelling of the Noah's Ark story set in Ireland.
In the early 1950s, White wrote two nonfiction books, The Age Of Scandal (1950), a collection of essays about 18th century England, and The Goshawk (1952), an account of White's adventures in falconry as he tried to train a hawk.
In 1958, he completed his fourth Once And Future King novel, The Candle In The Wind. Around this time, White became a lecturer. His troubled personal life led him down the same path as his father: he drank heavily.
On January 17th, 1964, White's drinking caught up with him. During a lecture tour, he died of heart trouble while aboard a ship near Athens, Greece. He was 57 years old.
Later, in 1977, White's final Once And Future King novel, The Book Of Merlyn, was published posthumously.
T.H. White's fantasy novels were and still are venerable classics of the genre. In 1960, they were the subject of the famous Broadway musical, Camelot, which was adapted as a feature film in 1967. In 1963, Disney released an animated feature film adaptation of The Sword In The Stone.
J.K. Rowling cited the Once And Future King novels as a strong influence on her Harry Potter books, describing Wart as "Harry's spiritual ancestor." Critics compared Harry's wizard mentor Albus Dumbledore to Merlyn.
Quote Of The Day
"The only cure for sadness is to learn something."
- T.H. White
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of T.H. White's classic debut novel, The Sword In The Stone, performed by Alexander Scourby. Enjoy!
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Notes For May 28th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 28th, 1940, the famous Irish writer Maeve Binchy was born in Dalkey, Ireland. Her father William was a prominent barrister in Dublin. He and his wife both encouraged their children to be avid readers and to share stories at the dinner table.
Nobody loved telling stories more than Maeve. She once quipped, "I had a very happy childhood, which is unsuitable if you're going to be an Irish writer."
Maeve Binchy went to University College in Dublin, majoring in history and French, and after she graduated in 1960, she became a schoolteacher, teaching history, French, and Latin at a Catholic grade school in Dublin.
She spent her summer vacations indulging in her passion for travel. Binchy became such a popular teacher that her students' parents chipped in to send her on a trip to Israel. While there, Binchy wrote long, detailed letters home describing her adventures there, the country, the daily life, and the people that she met.
Her father, very impressed with her writing, typed up the letters and submitted them to the Irish Independent newspaper. When Maeve returned to Dublin, to her surprise, she found that she'd become a published writer.
Interested in journalism, Binchy landed a job as women's editor for The Irish Times. In the early 1970s, she switched to feature reporting and moved to London to be with Gordon Snell, a BBC broadcaster turned children's book writer and mystery novelist.
The couple had met and fallen in love with during Maeve's previous visit to London. They married in 1977. In 1980, they moved to Binchy's hometown of Dalkey and bought a cottage, where they remained for the rest of her life.
After returning to Dalkey, Binchy began her writing career, publishing two collections of her newspaper work and a collection of short stories. In between reporting assignments, she wrote her first novel, Light A Penny Candle, which was published in 1982.
Set during the outbreak of World War II, the novel tells the story of Elizabeth White, a young British girl sent to stay with a large Irish family, the O'Connors, whose daughter Aisling is Elizabeth's age. The girls form an inseparable bond of friendship that remains long after the war ends, as they write to each other frequently.
As a novelist, Binchy has been described as a modern day Jane Austen. Her novels mostly dealt with the trials and tribulations of Irish women in the 20th century. They are also steeped deep in Catholicism, though as the influence of the scandal-plagued Church ended in Ireland, it also ended in Binchy's writing.
(It was revealed that thousands of Irish children had been molested by Catholic priests over the past several decades, crimes that were known and covered up by the Church, which had pretty much controlled the Irish government until recently.
The Irish Church agreed to pay a nearly 150,000,000 euro settlement to the victims. In addition to the sexual abuse, it was also revealed that some 50,000 Irish children, confiscated from their young, unwed mothers whose families placed them in brutal Church-run homes, were kept in squalid Church-run orphanages and starved, viciously beaten, and exploited for cheap labor.
So great was the outrage that the Catholic Church finally lost its death grip on Ireland and her people. In a final, stinging knockout punch to the Church, same-sex marriage and abortion were legalized in Ireland, in 2015 and 2018, respectively.)
Eleven of Maeve's novels reached the New York Times bestseller list; in reader polls taken in Ireland and England, she was rated higher than James Joyce. She quipped that it was because most of her books were sold in airport bookshops and "if you're going on a plane journey, you're more likely to take one of my stories than Finnegan's Wake."
In 1995, Binchy's popular 1990 novel Circle Of Friends was made into a movie starring Minnie Driver and Chris O'Donnell. Unfortunately for fans of the book, in his adaptation, screenwriter Andrew Davies elected to give the film a completely different ending.
In 2000, Binchy announced her retirement from writing, but it proved to be short-lived. She returned to write several more novels. In addition to her novels and short stories, she was also a playwright, and her plays have been staged at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin.
For over 30 years, Maeve wrote a hugely popular monthly column called Maeve's Week for The Irish Times which was part advice column, part gossip column, and part humor column.
Throughout her long career, Maeve Binchy proved herself as one of Ireland's greatest writers. She died in July of 2012 at the age of 72.
Quote Of The Day
"I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks."
- Maeve Binchy
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a documentary on Maeve Binchy. Enjoy!
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Notes For May 27th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 27th, 1894, the legendary American writer Dashiell Hammett was born. He was born Samuel Dashiell Hammett in St. Mary's County, Maryland, on a farm called Hopewell and Aim. His mother, Anne Bond Dashiell, was a descendant of one of Maryland's oldest families. At 13, he left school to work.
In 1915, at the age of 21, Hammett landed a job at the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, where he worked for six years as an operative. This experience would plant the seeds of his writing career. Disillusioned by Pinkerton's role in strike breaking and other anti-union activities, Hammett quit the agency in disgust.
During World War I, Hammett served in the Army in the Motor Ambulance Corps, but illness cut his tour of duty short; first he'd contracted Spanish flu, then tuberculosis. He spent most of the war in a hospital in Tacoma, Washington. While there, Hammett met a nurse, Josephine Dolan, whom he would later marry.
Josephine bore him two daughters, Mary Jane in 1921 and Josephine in 1926. Shortly after his second child's birth, due to Hammett's tuberculosis, Health Services nurses told his wife that she and the kids shouldn't live with him. So, they took an apartment in San Francisco.
Hammett visited them on the weekends, but the separation took too great a toll on the marriage, and it fell apart. He started drinking and tried his hand at several jobs before beginning a writing career. His early work was a series of short stories featuring a detective with no name, referred to as The Continental Op.
The short stories led to two novels, Red Harvest (February 1929) and The Dain Curse (July 1929). In Red Harvest, the Continental Op arrives in a coal mining town called Personville to meet with a new client, but finds that the man has been murdered. The dead client's father, a local industrialist, tells the Op that warring criminal gangs are fighting for control of Personville.
The Op solves his client's murder. With the Chief of Police totally corrupt, the Op cleans up the town himself by extracting and distributing the information he needs to set up a final showdown between the criminal gangs, manipulating them into wiping each other out.
It has been suggested that Red Harvest was the inspiration for legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's 1961 masterwork, Yojimbo. Kurosawa often expressed his admiration for American hardboiled detective novels, citing them as an inspiration for several of his movies.
In 1929, Hammett became romantically involved with mystery writer Nell Martin, dedicating his novel The Glass Key to her. By 1931, their relationship ended and Hammett embarked on a lifelong affair with legendary playwright Lillian Hellman. They would never marry.
Hammett's writing matured after the publication and success of his Continental Op novels, his prose becoming more realistic and hardboiled. In 1930, Hammett published his classic novel, The Maltese Falcon, featuring one of the most iconic detectives of all time, Sam Spade.
Bitter and sardonic, Spade lets the police and other criminals think that he's a criminal while he works to nail the bad guys. The novel opens with Spade and his partner Miles Archer being hired by a woman, Miss Wonderly.
Their job is to tail Floyd Thursby, a man who allegedly ran off with Miss Wonderly's underage sister. When Archer and Thursby both end up murdered, Sam becomes the prime suspect.
Later, a man named Joel Cairo offers Sam $5000 to retrieve a valuable figurine of a black bird known as the Maltese Falcon. Then Cairo suddenly pulls a gun on Sam and decides to search Spade's office for the bird.
The case leads Sam on a collision course with Cairo, rotund crime boss Kasper Gutman, and Gutman's bodyguard, Wilmer Cook. The Maltese Falcon was filmed three times, in 1931, 1936, (as Satan Met A Lady) and 1941.
While the pre-Code 1931 version wonderfully captures the grittier elements of the novel, the other two were sanitized as per Production Code requirements. In the novel, Sam Spade has affairs with both his partner's wife and his female client.
Gutman and Cook were obviously homosexual lovers, and the effeminate Cairo was also gay. Despite these changes, the 1941 version, featuring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, is still the best of the three and rightfully considered an all-time classic film.
Hammett's 1934 novel, The Thin Man, also turned out to be a classic. Set in New York City during Prohibition, ex-private detective Nick Charles and his clever, witty wife Nora - a wealthy socialite - spend most of their time cheerfully drunk in speakeasies and hotel rooms.
Though he retired from the detective business, Nick finds himself investigating yet another crime, with Nora's help. As they try to solve a murder, Nick and Nora engage in snappy banter and imbibe vast quantities of alcohol. The case leads them into the rough world of gangsters, hoodlums, and the grotesque Wynant family.
The Thin Man would inspire a series of movies featuring the characters of Nick and Nora Charles, as well as a Thin Man TV series. It has been suggested that Dashiell Hammett modeled Nick and Nora after the personalities (and drinking habits) of himself and his longtime lover, Lillian Hellman.
The Thin Man would prove to be Hammett's last novel, some say because he'd suffered an incurable case of writer's block. He devoted the rest of his life to political activism. In the 1930s, Hammett, a ferocious and outspoken antifascist, joined the Communist Party and the League of American Writers, a group of left-leaning activist writers.
In 1942, Hammett, a disabled veteran of the first world war and ex-tuberculosis patient, pulled strings to get himself readmitted to the service. He spent most of World War II as a Sergeant stationed in the Aleutian Islands, where he edited an Army newspaper.
He came home from the war with more lung trouble, this time emphysema. Returning to political activism, Hammett was elected President of the Civil Rights Congress of New York in June of 1946 and devoted most of his time to working for the CRC.
In 1951, he would be brought to testify before a U.S. District Court judge about his CRC activities. He refused to testify to anything, pleading the Fifth Amendment to every question. Congress began a full investigation of Hammett.
Two years later in 1953, he was brought to testify before the HUAC - the notorious House Unamerican Activities Committee. Hammett openly testified to his own activities, but refused to cooperate with the committee and inform on others. As a result, he was blacklisted.
Both trials took a toll on Hammett's already declining health. He died of lung cancer a few years later in 1961, at the age of 66. As he was a veteran of two world wars, Hammett was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Dashiell Hammett was one of America's greatest writers, a former detective turned author of hardboiled detective stories and novels whose iconic characters - and the classic films they inspired - will live on forever.
Quote Of The Day
"When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it's good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You're not likely ever to get all these things, and you're not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don't, but that is - and should be - your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling."
- Dashiell Hammett
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Dashiell Hammett's classic novel, The Maltese Falcon. Enjoy!
Friday, May 23, 2025
Notes For May 23rd, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 23rd, 1910, the famous American children's book writer Margaret Wise Brown was born in Brooklyn, New York. The second of three children, she and her siblings suffered from their parents' rotten marriage. When Margaret had the opportunity to go to boarding school, she readily accepted.
Margaret graduated from Hollins College in 1932 with an English degree. She became a teacher, and in her spare time, an art student. But her true passion was writing, and she decided to write children's books. Her first, When the Wind Blew, was published in 1937.
Margaret Wise Brown would author dozens of children's books and work with different illustrators. Her most famous illustrator was Clement Hurd, who drew the pictures for her most famous book, a classic first published in 1947.
Goodnight Moon featured a story in the form of a rhyming poem which told of a bunny's unusual bedtime ritual: saying goodnight to various objects in his room. The story takes place entirely in the bedroom, and the incredibly detailed illustrations change slightly from page to page.
The subtle but noticeable changes in the same basic images were deliberately included so that the attentive child (or adult) reading the book would catch them.
The changes included socks that disappear, different numbers of books on the bookshelf, different stripes on the bunny's nightshirt, and the hands on the two clocks moving.
The gentle story and amazing pictures made Goodnight Moon an all-time favorite. Parents still read it to their young children at bedtime. The book would be adapted for cable TV in 1999 as part of the animated HBO special, Goodnight Moon and Other Sleepytime Tales.
Over the years, new editions of Goodnight Moon would be published with different illustrations, but the original edition, with Clement Hurd's memorable illustrations, is still in print. The most recent edition was digitally altered for being politically incorrect.
Unlike other classic children's books where the text or illustrations were cut or altered, it was the photograph of Hurd that was digitally altered to remove the cigarette he held, leaving his fingers extended, but holding nothing.
Other classic children's books by Margaret Wise Brown include The Little Island (1946), which won a Caldecott Honor recognition, and Little Lost Lamb (1947), which won the Caldecott Medal. She also wrote several books for the famous Little Golden Books line.
The extremely prolific Brown would write dozens of children's books. She once claimed that every morning, she would wake up with a "head full of stories" that she had to put on paper. She fought hard for royalties at a time when most publishers would only pay writers a flat fee for their manuscripts.
As a writer, she employed a pioneering "here and now" philosophy, believing that children would rather read stories based on their own lives, not fairy tales and fables.
Brown enjoyed a flamboyant personal life. An early feminist and openly bisexual, she once dated Prince Juan Carlos of Spain. Later, she began a relationship with poet, playwright, and actress Blanche Oelrichs.
Oelrichs was best known by her pen name, Michael Strange, and most famous for being the ex-wife of legendary actor John Barrymore, who had starred in her play, Clair de Lune.
In 1952, after her relationship with Oelrichs had ended, Margaret met John Stillman "Pebbles" Rockefeller Jr. at a party and it was love at first sight.
They became engaged, but sadly, while on a book promotional tour in France, she died suddenly from a pulmonary embolism - a complication from emergency surgery for an ovarian cyst. She was 42 years old.
After Brown's death, her will revealed that she had bequeathed the royalties for many of her books to Albert Clarke, a neighbor boy who was nine years old when she died. Clarke was a troubled boy who grew up to be a troubled adult. He squandered the millions he made from Brown's royalties.
Clarke once claimed that he was Brown's illegitimate son, a claim that was widely dismissed. However, since Brown was cremated and her ashes scattered in the sea near her home in Maine, the claim couldn't be disproved by a blood test.
Brown's sister, Roberta Brown Rauch, later discovered a cache of over 70 unpublished manuscripts that Margaret had written. Unable to get them published, Roberta kept them in a cedar trunk for decades. They were rediscovered by Amy Gary of the publishing firm WaterMark, Inc. in 1991.
Quote Of The Day
“In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child's need for quietness is the same today as it has always been - it may even be greater - for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.”
- Margaret Wise Brown
Vanguard Video
Today's video features the animated adaptation of Margaret Wise Brown's classic children's book, Goodnight Moon - narrated by Susan Sarandon. Enjoy!
Thursday, May 22, 2025
Notes For May 22nd, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 22nd, 1859, the legendary English writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. The son of a drunkard, his father's only accomplishment in life was siring an intellectually gifted child.
At the age of eight, Arthur Conan Doyle was sent to a Jesuit prep school called Hodder Place. From there, he attended a Jesuit university, Stonyhurst College, but after graduating in 1875, he cast off the yoke of Christianity and became an agnostic.
For the next five years, Conan Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. During this time, he began writing short stories. He sold his first story to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal before his 20th birthday.
In 1882, he joined his classmate George Budd in a Plymouth medical practice, but their relationship soon soured. Conan Doyle left for Portsmouth, where he set up his own medical practice. Unsuccessful at first, he began writing stories again while waiting for patients.
After many rejections, his debut novel A Study In Scarlet was published, first in 1887 by Beeton's Christmas Annual magazine, then in book form a year later, with illustrations by his father, Charles.
The novel's main character was a detective called Sherlock Holmes. The brilliant, analytical, and laid-back Holmes was assisted by his friend, Dr. John Watson, who also served as narrator for the duo's adventures.
When he wasn't solving crimes, Holmes' passions included playing the violin and enjoying a good game of chess. He was also fond of cocaine and morphine, which he used to escape from "the dull routine of existence."
As a detective, Holmes wasn't above deceiving the police or concealing evidence if necessary to solve the crime. His main nemesis was the evil Professor Moriarty, who possessed an intellect comparable to Holmes.
A Study In Scarlet was the first of four novels and 56 short stories to feature Sherlock Holmes, who would become one of the greatest iconic literary characters of all time.
Conan Doyle himself would later become a real life sleuth, investigating closed cases where he believed that the defendants had been wrongfully convicted.
In 1906, his first case, that of a half-English, half-Indian lawyer named George Edalji who had been wrongfully convicted of writing threatening letters and mutilating animals, led to the establishment of England's Court of Criminal Appeal one year later.
In addition to the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, Conan Doyle's large body of work also included a series of science fiction writings featuring the character of Professor Challenger.
Though he possessed a brilliant mind like Sherlock Holmes, he was far from laid-back and described as "a homicidal megalomaniac with a turn for science." Conan Doyle's first work to feature Professor Challenger, a novel called The Lost World, was published in 1912.
In it, Professor Challenger claims to have discovered a South American plateau where dinosaurs still exist. A skeptical reporter, Edward Malone, accompanies Challenger on an expedition and finds that the irascible scientist was right. Not only are there dinosaurs in the Lost World, but a race of ape-men as well.
Conan Doyle was a believer in the supernatural world and wrote two nonfiction books on it, The Coming Of The Fairies (1921) and The History Of Spiritualism (1926).
In the 1920s, he became friends with the legendary American magician Harry Houdini, but Houdini's work as a prominent debunker of spiritualism soon led to a bitter falling out between the two men.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted in 1902, an honor he believed was bestowed on him as the result of The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, a pamphlet he had written justifying England's role in the Boer War to an outraged world.
He later wrote a nonfiction book on the conflict called The Great Boer War. He died in 1930 of a heart attack at the age of 71. He will always be remembered as one of the greatest mystery writers of all time.
Quote Of The Day
"My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Vanguard Video
Today's video features the only filmed interview with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle known to exist - an early talkie shot for a 1929 Movietone News newsreel. Enjoy!
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
Notes For May 21st, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 21st, 1688, the legendary English writer and scholar Alexander Pope was born in London. As a young boy, Pope's education was complicated by the anti-Catholic laws enacted to establish the Church of England as the British empire's official clerical body.
Unable to attend public school, he was taught to read and write by his aunt. Pope began his formal education at Twyford School in Hampshire. Twyford was a Church of England public school, but its administrators chose to ignore the law and allow him to attend.
He would later attend Catholic schools which, though technically illegal, were tolerated in some towns. When he was twelve years old, Pope contracted Pott's disease, a rare form of tuberculosis that attacks the bones and deforms them.
The disease left him a hunchback and stunted his growth. He would grow no taller than 4'6", or 1.37 meters. Already a social pariah because he was Catholic, Pope's deformities alienated him further from society.
He would never marry, but he had many female friends, and wrote them witty letters. One woman, his lifelong friend Martha Blount, was allegedly his lover.
Pope's health problems, which also included respiratory trouble, high fevers, inflammation of the eyes, and stomach pain, didn't affect his mind. He gained a reputation for his intellect, his rapacious wit, and his satirical verse.
When his first poetry collection, Pastorals (1709), appeared in the sixth part of publisher Jacob Tonson's anthology Poetical Miscellanies, it made him an overnight sensation. He soon struck up friendships with fellow writers Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and John Arbuthnot.
Together, they formed the Scriblerus Club, which was dedicated to satirizing ignorance and pedantry via a fictional scholar named Martinus Scriblerus. Pope continued on his path of literary success with his poems The Rape of the Lock (1712) and Windsor Forest (1713).
The Rape of the Lock was one of Pope's most popular poems. The mock-heroic epic poem satirized the high society quarrel between Arabella Fermor (named Belinda in the poem) and Lord Petre, (the Baron) who had cut off a lock of her hair without her permission.
Pope mocks the conflict in an epic style; after Belinda's hair is stolen, she tries to get it back but it flies through the air and turns into a star. He later became friends with poet and playwright Joseph Addison and contributed to Addison's classic play, Cato.
He also wrote essays for magazines of the day such as The Guardian and The Spectator. His classic epic poem An Essay on Criticism was first published anonymously in 1711.
A satirical attempt to declare and refine his views as a poet and critic, the poem was said to be Pope's response to an ongoing debate on whether poetry should be a natural product of the poet's mind and heart or written according to predetermined, traditional rules like meter.
In his inimitable style, Pope deliberately leaves the poem unclear and full of contradictions. His own position was that while rules were necessary, so was the passion and imagination that gave poetry its mysterious, sometimes baffling qualities.
An Essay on Criticism featured the famous line, "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Pope's most ambitious projects were his English translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Beginning in 1717, his translation of the Iliad appeared in one volume a year over a six year period.
For his translation of the Odyssey, Pope, confronted with the arduousness of the task and his increasingly frail health, employed his friends William Broome and Elijah Fenton to work on the translation with him.
The entire translation was published under Pope's name; when word got out that he hadn't translated the entire work himself, his reputation took a hit, but the translation of the Odyssey still sold well. It first appeared in 1726.
Before he began work on the Odyssey, a volume of Shakespeare's plays transcribed and edited by Pope was published. The volume had been commissioned by Pope's publisher. It was hugely controversial - more like a revision of Shakespeare's plays than a transcription.
Pope cut over 1,500 lines and relegated them to footnotes, believing them to be of such poor quality that he doubted Shakespeare had ever written them. These lines, he thought, were the result of actors' interpolations. Poet Lewis Theobald wrote a scathing pamphlet denouncing the volume called Shakespeare Restored.
Among Pope's last great works were a series of poems called Imitations of Horace. Appearing between 1733-38, they were satires of life under King George II and the corruption of Robert Walpole's ministry, which Pope believed was tainting Britain. By the time he completed the series in 1738, his health began to deteriorate.
He planned to write an epic blank verse poem called Brutus, but he abandoned it and only a few lines have survived. Instead, he devoted his remaining years to revising his final masterwork, The Dunciad.
The four-book satirical epic poem told the story of how the goddess Dulness and her servants plunge Britain into a quagmire of imbecility, tastelessness, and ultimately, decay. Originally written in three books, Pope revised it and added a fourth book, which was published in 1742.
Alexander Pope died two years later, on May 30th, 1744. He was 56 years old.
Quote Of The Day
"If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to."
- Alexander Pope
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Alexander Pope's classic satirical epic poem, The Rape of the Lock. Enjoy!
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Notes For May 20th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 20th, 1937, the legendary English writer George Orwell (the pseudonym of Eric Blair) was wounded in action while fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He was shot in the throat by a sniper.
Orwell fought alongside the POUM, (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista - the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) which was allied with Britain's Labour Party, of which he was a member.
The POUM was one of several leftist factions which had formed a loose coalition to fight General Franco's fascists. Another member of this coalition was the Spanish Communist Party, controlled by the Soviet Union.
At the Soviets' insistence, the Spanish Communist Party denounced the POUM as a Trotskyist organization and falsely claimed that they were in cahoots with the fascists. Near the end of the war, the POUM was outlawed, and the Spanish Communist Party attacked its members.
Tragically, this infighting would break apart the coalition and give the fascists the opportunity to win the war. While George Orwell recovered from his injuries in a POUM hospital, he had a lot of time to think, and he came to hate Soviet communism.
Orwell would later become famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), both of which were brilliant allegorical satires of Stalinism. Animal Farm was a modern cautionary fable, while Nineteen Eighty-Four was a work of dystopic science fiction.
In the years since their publication, the right in the United States and Europe embraced these novels as the bibles of anticommunism. George Orwell became their hero, and this led to a popular misconception that he had been a staunch conservative - perhaps even a fascist - though he was really a lifelong socialist.
Just before leaving for Spain, he had written a nonfiction book called The Road To Wigan Pier. After publisher Victor Gollancz encouraged Orwell to investigate and write about the depressed social conditions in Northern England, he went to the poor coal mining town of Wigan, where he lived in a dirty room over a tripe shop.
He met many people and took extensive notes of the living conditions and wages, explored the mine, and spent days in the town's library researching public health records, working conditions in mines, and other data. The result was The Road To Wigan Pier (1937).
The book is divided into two parts. The first part is a straightforward documentary about life in Wigan. The second is Orwell's philosophical attempt to answer the question that if socialism can improve the appalling conditions in Wigan and such places around the world - which it can - then why aren't we all socialists?
Orwell places the blame on the ferocious prejudices of the white Christian middle class against the lower working class, the poor, and other people they associate with socialism, such as blacks, Jews, atheists, hippies, pacifists, and feminists.
He concludes that:
The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.
The lesson Orwell teaches us in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four is that even an ideal as noble as socialism can become corrupted and twisted into something far worse than the ills it seeks to cure, and we must not let that happen.
He remained a lifelong socialist and always hoped for a better world free of poverty, inequality, and social injustice. He died of tuberculosis in January of 1950 at the age of 46.
Quote Of The Day
"In our age, there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia."
- George Orwell
Vanguard Video
Today's video features rare newsreel footage of George Orwell during the Spanish Civil War - demonstrating how to make tea in a trench! Enjoy!
Friday, May 16, 2025
Notes For May 16th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 16th, 1939, The Day of the Locust, the classic final novel by the famous American writer Nathanael West was published.
Although he never achieved significant commercial success as a writer during his short life, today he is rightfully recognized as one of the greatest American novelists of the 1930s.
West, born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, like many fiction writers of the 1930s, worked as a Hollywood screenwriter. He had made a name for himself as a novelist with his dark, surreal tales of Depression-era America, such as Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and A Cool Million (1934).
In 1939, the year that The Day of the Locust was published, the stifling Production Code was in effect in Hollywood, and movies were considered clean, wholesome entertainment. In West's classic novel, he explores the dark side of the Dream Factory.
The characters include Tod Hackett, a talented young artist who has come to Hollywood to work as a set painter. He does this to support himself until he becomes a famous artist. Faye Greener is a beautiful young aspiring actress.
Faye's father, Harry Greener, is an aging, failed actor and former vaudeville comic who earns a meager living as a door to door salesman. Despite all the doors slammed in his face, Harry, the ultimate huckster, pushes on, oblivious to the effects of his job on his frail health.
Homer Simpson (yes, that's really his name) is a good natured oaf who's not very bright. Also a neurotic depressive, he has come to California for reasons of health. The poor, pathetic Simpson will become the most tragic character in this dark and grotesque story.
Other memorable characters include Abe Kusich, a conceited midget actor with a huge chip on his little shoulder, and Adore Loomis, an obnoxious eight-year-old aspiring child star with a talent for blues singing.
Adore's mother - the ultimate stage mother - is so ruthlessly ambitious (and demented) that she passes him off as a girl, hoping that he'll be the next Shirley Temple.
The price of stardom - the depths one would sink to in Hollywood in order to reach the height of success - is one of the main themes of the novel. Another theme is the garishness of excess.
One film producer keeps a lifelike, life sized dead horse made of rubber on the bottom of his swimming pool. Mrs. Jenning, a retired silent film star, runs a brothel, where she also screens pornographic films for her guests.
Faye Greener is the catalyst for the tragic undercurrent of the story that drives it to a shocking and brutal conclusion. She's a thoroughly amoral young woman, a manipulative sociopath willing to do anything and use anyone to get what she wants.
Of course, Tod ends up falling in love with her, but grudgingly settles for friendship, recognizing her amoral nature. He fantasizes about raping Faye or physically harming her in other ways as both a subconscious attack on her immorality and an attempt to suppress his secret desire to be just like her.
Homer Simpson also falls in love with Faye, but unlike the more realistic Tod, the poor, deluded Homer actually dreams of marrying Faye, settling down, and starting a family with her.
When he accidentally discovers Faye having casual sex with a would-be actor called Miguel the Mexican, his delusion is suddenly shattered. Homer decides to return to his Iowa hometown, but never does.
In the novel's violent, surreal ending, Homer wanders the streets in a state of shock and happens upon a crowd gathering outside a theater for a major movie premiere. While he stares blankly at the crowd, Adore Loomis appears and teases him yet again.
Homer finally snaps, and in the novel's most shocking scene, he literally stomps the child to death. When the crowd sees Homer attacking Adore, they riot and descend on him like a plague of locusts, killing him. Tod tries to save Homer, but gets lost in the milling throng.
The Day of the Locust received mixed reviews when it was published. It is now recognized as Nathanael West's greatest novel. Sadly, it would be his last. The year after it was published, West and his wife Eileen were killed in a car accident. He was 37 years old and she 26.
The Day of the Locust was adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1975. Directed by John Schlesinger with a screenplay by Waldo Salt, the film starred William Atherton as Tod Hackett, Donald Sutherland as Homer Simpson, and Karen Black as Faye Greener.
Burgess Meredith co-starred as Harry Greener, Billy Barty as Abe Kusich, and in a memorable supporting performance, Jackie Earle Haley as Adore Loomis.
Quote Of The Day
"Man spends a great deal of time making order out of chaos, yet insists that the emotions be disordered. I order my emotions. I am insane."
- Nathanael West
Vanguard Video
Today's video features the original theatrical trailer for the acclaimed 1975 feature film adaptation of Nathanael West's classic novel, The Day of the Locust. Enjoy!
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Notes For May 15th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 15th, 1890, the famous American writer Katherine Anne Porter was born. She was born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas. The fourth of five children, she was a descendant of the legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone. The famous writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) was her father's second cousin.
When Callie was two years old, her mother died of complications following the birth of her last child. Callie's father sent his children to live with his mother, and the children, especially Callie, adored their grandmother.
Seven years later, Callie's grandmother died suddenly. She and her siblings lived with various relatives or in rented rooms paid for by their father. At the age of 16, Callie ran off to marry her boyfriend John Henry Koontz, the son of a wealthy rancher.
In order to marry Koontz, Callie, a Methodist, had to convert to Catholicism, which she did. Her devout Catholic husband turned out to be an abusive drunk who once threw her down the stairs, breaking her ankle.
After suffering for nine years in a rotten marriage, Callie divorced her husband - a shocking thing for a woman to do in 1915. As part of her divorce decree, Callie had the court legally change her name to Katherine Anne Porter, which was the name of her beloved grandmother.
From there, Katherine fled Texas for Chicago, where she tried her hand at acting and singing, but that was cut short when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She spent two years in a TB sanitarium before it was discovered that she'd been misdiagnosed; she actually had bronchitis.
During her stay at the sanitarium, Katherine decided to become a writer. She began her writing career as a newspaper drama critic and gossip columnist. Then, during the 1918 flu pandemic, she contracted the virus and nearly died from it.
She was left in a frail state; her hair turned white and would remain white for the rest of her life. After regaining her health, Katherine moved to New York City's Greenwich Village, where she made her living as a ghostwriter and movie company publicist. She also wrote children's stories.
By 1920, she met some Mexican revolutionary leaders, including legendary painter Diego Rivera, and traveled to Mexico to cover the leftist revolution. She would split her time between Mexico and New York City, where she continued to write short stories and would become a master of the form.
One of her best known stories was The Jilting of Granny Weatherall. In it, the sick, elderly Granny lies on her deathbed. Her daughter Cornelia has been serving as her caregiver, but Granny considers herself a much better housekeeper than Cornelia.
The delirious Granny is still obsessed with George, the man who jilted her at the altar when they were a young couple. She later married her late husband John, and it was a happy marriage, but Granny never got over George and still loves him.
Meanwhile, she's visited by her priest, Father Connolly, whom she chides for being more interested in drinking tea and gossiping than in the welfare of her soul. She's also visited by her son, Jimmy.
What she really wants is to see her daughter Hapsy, who never comes to visit. It's suggested, but not directly implied, that Hapsy died at birth. Granny has a vision of Hapsy visiting her and holding a baby, but it's really another daughter, Lydia, who has come to visit.
Realizing that she's dying, Granny doesn't want to go yet and worries what will happen if she can't find Hapsy. She looks for a sign from God. No sign comes, and Granny, believing that she's been jilted again, dies in despair.
Katherine married her second husband, Ernest Stock, in 1926. The marriage would only last a year, ending when the philandering Stock gave her venereal disease. During both her marriages, she had tried to conceive children, only to suffer miscarriages and at least one stillbirth.
After divorcing Stock, she had a hysterectomy. During the 1930s, Katherine spent several years in Europe, continued writing short stories, and endured two more disastrous marriages. She continued to receive acclaim for her short story collections.
In the 1940s and 50s, she taught at several universities, including Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas. Her very unconventional method of teaching endeared her to her students.
As a short story writer, Katherine Anne Porter loved to delve into the dark side of human nature. Though she was best known for her short stories, she also wrote four novellas (she hated the term novella) and one full length novel, which would become a classic.
Ship of Fools, published on April 1st, 1962, (April Fool's Day) took Porter over twenty years to write. She was never really satisfied with it, calling it "unwieldy" and "enormous."
The novel received mixed reviews at the time of its publication, but has since been recognized for its brilliance and prescient insight into the human condition. It was an existentialist character study rather than a standard plot driven story.
It's the summer of 1931, and a cruise ship has left Mexico, bound for Germany. The ship contains a variety of passengers. Many are German expatriates, but there is also a drunken lawyer, an American divorcee, a Spanish noblewoman, two Mexican Catholic priests, and others.
In following these characters, Porter explores the nature of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and human frailty in general as she examines the attitudes that would enable Hitler to come to power, maintain dictatorial control, and plunge Europe into a devastating war. The story is full of passion, duplicity, and treachery.
Ship of Fools became the best selling novel of 1962 and a Book of the Month Club selection. The movie rights were snapped up immediately for $500,000 - the equivalent of about five million dollars in today's money. It provided Katherine with financial security for the rest of her life.
The feature film adaptation of Ship of Fools premiered in July, 1965. It was directed by Stanley Kramer, best known for classic films such as The Defiant Ones (1958), On The Beach (1959), and Judgement At Nuremberg (1961).
Featuring a screenplay by Abby Mann, Ship of Fools starred Vivien Leigh in her last film role. The film won an Oscar for Best Cinematography and was nominated for several other Academy Awards. It is rightfully considered one of the most acclaimed films of the 1960s.
In 1965, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter was published. It would win the author a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Twelve years later, in 1977, Porter, then 87 years old, published her last book, The Never-Ending Wrong.
The Never-Ending Wrong was a work of nonfiction - an account of the infamous trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, which Porter had protested against when it took place fifty years earlier.
Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian immigrant anarchists who had been tried, convicted, and executed for robbery and murder in Massachusetts. Their politically charged trial, controversial to this day, was tainted by racism and malicious prosecution, including coerced false testimony.
Katherine Anne Porter died in 1980 at the age of 90.
Quote Of The Day
“A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.”
- Katherine Anne Porter
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Katherine Anne Porter being interviewed by James Day on the 1970s PBS TV show, Day At Night. Enjoy!
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Notes For May 14th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 14th, 1962, A Clockwork Orange, the classic novel by the famous English writer Anthony Burgess, was published in London. The title comes from the British slang expression, "queer as a clockwork orange."
An antifascist parable set in a dystopic England of the future, it examined a major problem facing Britain at the time of its publication - skyrocketing juvenile delinquency and the government's inability to deal with it effectively.
The novel is narrated by its main character, Alex, who refers to himself as "Alexander the Large." A highly intelligent but psychopathic teenager, he leads the Droogs, a violent street gang comprised of his friends Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Alex introduces everyone and sets the scene in this unforgettable opening paragraph:
There was me, that is Alex, and my three Droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much, neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthmesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog and All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I'm starting off the story with.
The dazzling poetic prose is written in Nadsat, a language invented by Anthony Burgess for this novel. It's a dialect that combines standard English with British, Slavic, and Russian slang expressions and made-up words. Alex speaks this language as he tells his horrific story.
The novel opens with Alex and his gang at a milk bar, where they drink drugged milk to get themselves high and ready for committing random acts of violence. First, they gleefully beat an old, homeless drunkard. One night, while joyriding in a stolen car, the gang breaks into an isolated cottage.
They terrorize the occupants, beating the husband and raping his 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.
When Georgie challenges Alex for leadership of the gang, he puts down the rebellion by beating Georgie in a fight and slashing open Dim's hand. Then he takes them 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 from her injuries and Alex is accused of murder.
After spending a couple of years in prison, Alex becomes an involuntary participant in an experimental rehabilitation procedure called the Ludovico Technique, which is supposed to remove all violent and criminal impulses from the human psyche.
The prison chaplain is opposed to the Ludovico Technique. He argues that conscious, willing moral choice is a necessary component of humanity. Nevertheless, Alex is forced to undergo the procedure.
For two weeks, his eyes are wired open and he is forced to watch violent images on a screen while being given a drug that induces extreme nausea. It's basically a horrific form of aversion therapy.
When Alex recognizes the soundtrack to the violent film presentation as Beethoven's fifth symphony, he 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. To demonstrate this, they show how Alex is unable to react with violence even in self defense, and becomes crippled by extreme nausea when 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 and unable to defend himself from attack. He is promptly beaten up by a former victim.
The police arrive, and they're Alex's former gang member Dim and former rival gang leader Billyboy. They beat him savagely and leave him for dead. Later, he's befriended by a political activist who turns out to be the man whose wife Alex had raped during the home invasion.
When the activist finally recognizes Alex as the gang leader, he tortures him with the classical music he once loved. His life destroyed by the therapy that was supposed to make him a model citizen, a desperate Alex attempts suicide, but survives.
A huge scandal erupts and the embarrassed government officials agree to reverse the Ludovico Technique in order to quell the bad publicity. Afterward, they offer Alex a cushy job at a high salary, but he looks forward to returning to his violent ways.
He forms a new gang, but after watching them beat a stranger, Alex finds that he has tired of violence. He 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. first edition of the novel, the last chapter was cut. The publisher wanted the story to end on a dark note, with Alex looking forward to resuming his violent ways. He believed that the original UK edition ending, with Alex deciding on his own to reform, was unrealistic.
Anthony Burgess resisted the idea at first, but gave in because he needed the money. He would always regret allowing the final chapter of A Clockwork Orange to be cut from the U.S. edition. In America, the novel would not be published in its original version until 1986.
When legendary American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick adapted it as an acclaimed feature film in 1971, he based his screenplay on the U.S. first edition of the novel, ending the film on a dark note, with Alex smirking wickedly and saying, "They cured me all right!"
A huge success at the box office and widely praised by critics, A Clockwork Orange was one of the few X-rated films to be nominated for Academy Awards. The movie did have its detractors, due to its relentlessly dark tone and violence.
Passed uncut for release in the UK, the film sparked outrage when several violent juvenile offenders claimed that their crimes were inspired by it. After he and his family received death threats and their London home was picketed, Stanley Kubrick withdrew the film from circulation in the UK, where it would remain out of print until after Kubrick's death in 1999.
I've read both versions of the novel, and I prefer the U.S. first edition because its grim ending really brings home the main theme of the novel - that fascism is an evil far greater than the societal ills it promises to cure.
The cut final chapter makes for interesting reading, but it does seem unlikely that all the damage done by the horrific Ludovico Technique could be reversed, which leaves the reader wondering if Alex's ultimate rejection of violence was really the product of his own free will.
Today, both editions of A Clockwork Orange are available in the U.S., and the novel remains a classic work of literature.
Quote Of The Day
"It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself."
- Anthony Burgess on A Clockwork Orange
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a rare, 60-minute spoken word album of Anthony Burgess reading from his classic novel, A Clockwork Orange. Enjoy!
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
Notes For May 13th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 13th, 1907, the famous English writer Daphne du Maurier was born in London, England. Her father, Sir Gerald du Maurier, and her mother, Muriel Beaumont, were both prominent actors. Her grandfather was the famous writer and cartoonist, George du Maurier.
The Llewelyn-Davies boys, befriended by writer J.M. Barrie and used as the inspiration for the Lost Boys in Barrie's classic play, Peter Pan (1904) were her cousins.
Daphne du Maurier's first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931, but it would be her fourth novel, Jamaica Inn (1936) that made her name as a writer. Set in Cornwall in 1820, the novel told the story of Mary Yellan, a young woman forced to live with her Aunt Patience after her mother dies.
Her aunt's husband Joss is the keeper of the Jamaica Inn. When Mary arrives, she finds her aunt under the thumb of her vicious, domineering husband. Mary senses that something is definitely wrong at the gloomy, ominous Jamaica Inn, which has no guests and is never open.
Mary soon falls in love with Joss' younger brother Jem, who, although a thief, is not evil like Joss. As she tries to solve the mystery of the Jamaica Inn, Mary discovers that her uncle Joss is the leader of a murderous criminal gang.
She turns to the town vicar for help. After her aunt and uncle both turn up murdered, Mary finds a shocking clue that reveals the killer's true identity, placing her life in danger. Jamaica Inn would be adapted as a feature film by legendary English director Alfred Hitchcock in 1939.
The screenplay took great liberties with the novel, and du Maurier hated the film. Alfred Hitchcock would adapt more of her writings as feature films, including her next novel, which is considered her masterpiece.
Part suspense thriller, part Gothic romance, Rebecca (1938) is narrated by an unnamed woman who tells the story of her marriage to Maxim de Winter, a wealthy Englishman. She met him while working as a companion to a rich American woman on vacation in the French Riviera.
They fall in love, and after a courtship of two weeks, the narrator accepts de Winter's marriage proposal. After their wedding, they return to live at de Winter's beautiful West Country estate, Manderley.
The narrator soon realizes that her husband is haunted by the death of his first wife, Rebecca. Their sinister, controlling housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, was deeply devoted to Rebecca, and is determined to undermine her employer's new marriage by any means necessary.
She even manipulates the narrator into wearing a replica of one of Rebecca's dresses. After her attempt at manipulating the narrator into committing suicide fails, the narrator's husband makes a shocking confession.
Rebecca was an evil woman who tortured Maxim with her affairs and illegitimate pregnancy. Finally, Maxim could stand no more. He killed Rebecca and disposed of her body on her boat, then sunk the vessel.
After Rebecca's boat is raised, an inquest is held and Maxim is cleared of suspicion due to lack of evidence. Unfortunately, Rebecca's cousin (and lover) Jack tries to blackmail Maxim with evidence of his guilt...
Rebecca was adapted several times, first as a feature film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940. The film, which starred Sir Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The novel was also adapted as a play by its author. The play opened in London in 1940 and ran for over 350 performances.
In addition to her novels, Daphne du Maurier was famous for her short story collections. Her second short story collection, The Apple Tree (1952) contained six stories, including one of her most famous - The Birds.
Told from the viewpoint of Nat Hocken (a farm worker in coastal Cornwall) and his family, the story chronicles the inexplicable attacks on humans by birds in the area. The Birds would be adapted by Alfred Hitchcock as a classic horror film in 1963, starring Tippi Hedren.
In the title story, The Apple Tree, a widower believes that the old apple tree in his garden is possessed by the spirit of his neglected wife. du Maurier's 1971 short story collection Not After Midnight, features her second most famous story, Don't Look Now.
In it, married couple John and Laura Baxter are vacationing in Venice, trying to recover from the devastating, sudden death of their five-year-old daughter, Christine, which has strained their marriage.
In a restaurant, Laura meets two odd looking women - elderly identical twin sisters who have psychic knowledge of Christine. Meanwhile, John encounters a little girl who bears a striking resemblance to his dead daughter. Don't Look Now would be adapted as an acclaimed horror film in 1973 by the famous English director Nicolas Roeg.
du Maurier also wrote several works of nonfiction, including memoirs both of herself and her family members. She married Sir Frederick "Boy" Browning, a Lieutenant General in the British Army, and bore him a son and two daughters.
Biographers have noted that as a wife and mother, she was sometimes warm and loving, and sometimes cold and distant. Writer Margaret Forster, who worked with the approval and assistance of the du Maurier family, revealed in her biography that Daphne had a few affairs with women.
She vigorously denied being bisexual. Personal letters released after the author's death revealed, according to Forster, that Daphne was terrified that she might be a lesbian. She had been raised to hate homosexuals with a passion by her father, a virulent homophobic bigot.
Daphne du Maurier died in April 1989 at the age of 81.
Quote Of The Day
"When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person." - Daphne du Maurier
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Daphne du Maurier's classic short story, The Birds. Enjoy!
Friday, May 9, 2025
Notes For May 9th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 9th, 1920, the famous English fantasy writer Richard Adams was born in Newbury, Berkshire, England. In 1940, less than a year after England entered World War II, Adams was studying history at Worcester College, Oxford.
His education would be interrupted when he was drafted into the British Army. He served his tour of duty in the Middle East and India, but saw no action. After the war ended, Adams continued with his education and ultimately earned a Master's degree.
After earning his Bachelor's degree, he took a job as a civil servant - Assistant Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. When he wasn't working, Adams took up a new hobby - writing fiction. He loved making up stories to tell his daughters, Juliet and Rosamond.
The girls loved their father's stories, but one particular tale, a story about a group of rabbits searching for a new home, was their favorite. They insisted that Dad turn it into a book someday. So he did.
Watership Down, Richard Adams' first novel, was published in 1974. The modern fairy tale opened with Fiver, a young rabbit with the gift of prophecy, having a vision of his and his tribe's home being destroyed. Believing that the destruction is imminent, Fiver and his brother Hazel meet with the chief rabbit.
The chief scoffs at Fiver's prophecy, so he and Hazel flee the tribal burrow with a small band of rabbits who believe in the prophecy. They barely escape the Owsla - the chief's soldiers. Hazel becomes the leader of the group, and ex-Owsla soldiers Bigwig and Silver provide security.
Fiver has another vision, which leads them to Watership Down, the perfect location for their new home. Holly and Bluebell, two members of Fiver's old tribe, show up and tell him that his prophecy came true - their old tribal burrow was just destroyed by humans.
Realizing that their new tribe needs more females to grow, Hazel sends an emissary to a nearby burrow called Efrafa to ask if some of their females would like to live in Watership Down. Unfortunately, Efrafa turns out to be a brutal fascist dictatorship ruled by General Woundwort and his Nazi-like army.
Hazel and Bigwig successfully execute a plan to liberate some rabbits from Efrafa, but the refugees' peaceful new life at Watership Down turns to horror when the burrow is suddenly and savagely attacked by General Woundwort's army. Woundwort won't stand for any threat to his power.
The rabbits of Watership Down ultimately defeat General Woundwort's army, thanks to Hazel's ingenuity and Bigwig's bravery. With its epic themes of exile, survival, and heroism, Watership Down has been compared to such classic works as Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid.
The novel, which became an overnight sensation and runaway bestseller, received excellent reviews. The book critic for The Economist proclaimed that "If there is no place for Watership Down in children’s bookshops, then children’s literature is dead."
Peter Prescott, senior book reviewer for Newsweek, said:
Adams handles his suspenseful narrative more dextrously than most authors who claim to write adventure novels, but his true achievement lies in the consistent, comprehensible and altogether enchanting civilisation that he has created.
In 1978, Watership Down was adapted as an acclaimed animated British feature film written and directed by Martin Rosen. The film courted controversy during its U.S. theatrical run.
The trailer and promotional artwork led parents and children unfamiliar with the novel to believe that it was a Disneyesque tale of cute little rabbits. Instead, it was a dark, violent, and scary work of modern mythology.
Parents complained about the surprisingly graphic carnage in the PG-rated animated film. It would later be re-rated PG-13. It wouldn't be the last time that an animated adaptation of a Richard Adams novel raised the ire of parents.
Richard Adams' fifth novel, second only to Watership Down in popularity, was borne of his deep belief in and work for animal rights. The Plague Dogs (1977) told the story of two dogs, Rowf and Snitter, who escape from a laboratory where they were subjected to horrific tortures in the name of science.
Rowf, now old and cynical, was born in a laboratory and destined to be a guinea pig. As far as he's concerned, all humans are monsters. Snitter had a loving human master once, but after the man got killed in an accident, he was sold to the laboratory.
Ironically, Snitter, who endured the most torture, remains hopeful of finding another loving human master. The lab doctors performed horrific brain experiments on him; as a result, he suffers from frightening hallucinations and nightmares, whether he's dreaming or awake.
So, both dogs escape from the Animal Research, Scientific and Experimental laboratory (ARSE, get it?) and find themselves hunted relentlessly. When the starving dogs kill some sheep for food, the lab doctors (one of whom is a Nazi war criminal in hiding) gain volunteer hunters to pursue the animals.
A sensationalist newspaper reporter covers the story and ignites a media frenzy for his own selfish purposes. He ultimately blackmails the lab doctors into revealing that the experiments they conducted on the dogs are part of secret biological warfare research for the government.
Afraid that Rowf and Snitter may be infected with a deadly biological weapon, the reporter convinces the government to have the army exterminate the dogs. Will they survive?
Animator Martin Rosen, who previously adapted Watership Down, also adapted The Plague Dogs as an animated feature film, released in 1982. Once again, Rosen's film courted controversy during its U.S. premiere.
The PG rated film contained scenes of animal torture and other graphic violence. Later re-rated PG-13 and cut for its second videotape release, the full uncut version, much sought after by film lovers, is now available on Blu-Ray.
In 1982 - the year that the film adaptation of The Plague Dogs premiered - Richard Adams served as President of the RSPCA - The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Adams would write more great fantasy novels and some non-fantasy novels. His final published work, Leopard Aware, was a short story that appeared in 2010. It was written for charity - to raise money for the Born Free Foundation, a British conservation and animal rescue organization.
Richard Adams died in December of 2016. He was 96.
Quote Of The Day
“He spoke very well about the decency and comradeship natural to animals. 'Animals don't behave like men,' he said. 'If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill, they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.'”
- Richard Adams, from Watership Down
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 2012 interview with Richard Adams. Enjoy!
Thursday, May 8, 2025
Notes For May 8th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On May 8th, 1956, Look Back in Anger, the classic first play by the famous English playwright John Osborne, opened in London at the Royal Court Theatre. It introduced a character whose volatile nature would define a generation in England.
Look Back in Anger opens in a grim and seedy one-bedroom flat in the Midlands where Jimmy Porter, his wife Alison, and their friend Cliff Lewis live. Though college educated, Jimmy is of the lower class, his only means of support the candy counter that Cliff helps him run.
Jimmy's wife Alison comes from an upper-middle class family - more upper than middle class. Jimmy loathes them. When he's not reading the newspaper, he's ranting and raving about Alison's family and friends.
What really drives Jimmy's rage is Alison and Cliff's taciturn acceptance of their lot in life and the world around them. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West is at its apex.
British citizens are conditioned through right wing propaganda to be thankful for their so-called freedom, but Jimmy is anything but thankful for his lot in life. An intelligent university graduate, he sells candy for a living because that's best work he can get.
England's so called welfare program is a failure, thanks to the conservative government which serves the interests of the rich. Unable to provide a better life for himself and his wife, Jimmy's rage has reached the boiling point.
Struggling to find meaning in a meaningless existence, at one point he says:
I've an idea. Why don't we have a little game? Let's pretend that we're human beings and that we're actually alive. Just for a while. What do you say?
When Alison becomes pregnant with their first child, she's terrified to tell Jimmy, who, not knowing she was pregnant, said to her:
If only something — something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! If you could have a child, and it would die. Let it grow, let a recognizable human face emerge from that little mass of India rubber and wrinkles. Please — if only I could watch you face that. I wonder if you might even become a recognizable human being yourself. But I doubt it.
Meanwhile, Jimmy flies into a rage when Alison announces that her snobbish best friend Helena is coming to visit. Helena, shocked by the squalid surroundings, calls Alison's father, a retired colonel, and urges him to take Alison away from the flat. Which he does - while Jimmy is visiting a friend's mother.
The Colonel is also distressed by his daughter's living conditions. She tells him "You're hurt because everything's changed, and Jimmy's hurt because everything's stayed the same." Although he's out of touch with the modern world, the Colonel becomes a sympathetic character - he feels sorry for Jimmy.
After Alison is taken away, Helena moves in with Jimmy and Cliff. She and Jimmy still despise each other and come to physical blows, but they ultimately become friends, and when the curtain falls on the second act, they end up kissing passionately and falling on the bed.
In the third act, Jimmy and Helena have another fight, and she decides to leave. Cliff also decides to get his own flat, so Jimmy plans a final night out for the three of them. That night, Alison shows up out of the blue. Jimmy dismisses her coldly at first, but then she tells him about her pregnancy - and that she lost their baby.
Ashamed of her affair with Jimmy, Helena reconciles with Alison. As the final curtain falls, Jimmy and Alison reconcile with each other, taking up an old game they used to play together.
Look Back in Anger received fiercely mixed reviews after its premiere in London. Some critics were shocked and appalled by the searing play's anti establishment themes and nihilism, while others praised it as the breakthrough work it was. Critic Kenneth Tynan wrote the following in his rave review:
All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage - the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of 'official' attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour (Jimmy describes a [gay male] friend as 'a female Emily Bronte'), the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who does shall go unmourned...
...I agree that Look Back in Anger is likely to remain a minority taste. What matters, however, is the size of the minority. I estimate it as roughly 6,733,000, which is the number of people in this country between the ages of 20 and 30. And this figure will doubtless be swelled by refugees from other age-groups who are curious to know precisely what the contemporary young pup is thinking and feeling. I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade.
The hugely influential play defined an entire genre of anti establishment plays, novels, and films in 1950s and 60s England - the "angry young man" genre, named after the volatile character of Jimmy Porter. Look Back in Anger would be adapted in 1959 as an acclaimed feature film.
Directed by Tony Richardson and starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom, the screenplay was written by John Osborne and Nigel Kneale. The film would earn four BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Award) nominations.
John Osborne would write more classic plays, including The Entertainer (1957), Epitaph for George Dillon (1958), and Luther (1961). He died in 1994 at the age of 65.
Quote Of The Day
"I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don't walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong."
- John Osborne
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete live performance of Look Back in Anger. Enjoy!