This Day In Literary History
On June 27th, 1953, the famous American writer Alice McDermott was born in Brooklyn, New York. She was born into an Irish Catholic family, which would influence her writing.
Alice attended Catholic schools until college, where she studied at SUNY (State University of New York) Oswego and the University of New Hampshire.
In 1982, Alice burst onto the literary scene with her novel, A Bigamist's Daughter. It told the story of Elizabeth, a young woman who works as an editor for a sleazy vanity press whose bland office she compares to an unlicensed electrolysis salon.
Tupper Daniels, a handsome young writer, shows up with the manuscript for his first novel, which is about a bigamist. Tupper has a problem - he doesn't know how to end his novel, so he seeks Elizabeth's advice.
As she helps Tupper work on his novel, she falls in love with him. The novel's subject matter forces Elizabeth to recall the painful memories of her own father - a mysterious man who may have been a bigamist with two families.
Alice's second novel, That Night (1987), was a haunting period piece set in early 1960s Long Island and based on an incident from the author's childhood. The novel is narrated by 10-year-old Alice.
Sheryl, the nice teenage girl next door, is in love with Rick, a handsome hoodlum who belongs to a street gang. Rick's father is a doctor, his mother a schizophrenic.
Though her parents hate Rick, Sheryl sees the good in him. She also sees him as a kindred spirit who, like her, suffers at the hands of the soul-crushing suburbia they live in.
After Sheryl's father dies and she becomes pregnant, her mother sends her away and orders Rick to never see or contact her again. This provokes the troubled, lovesick boy to violence.
That Night, adapted as a feature film in 1992, was also a finalist for three major awards - the National Book Award, the PEN / Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Her next novel would again be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
At Weddings and Wakes (1992), set in early 1960s Brooklyn, was a melancholic, impressionistic tale that starkly and beautifully captured the poetry of one Irish Catholic family's pain and joy. Mostly pain.
Momma Towne is a widowed stepmother who lives with her three unmarried stepdaughters in a small, gloomy apartment. May is a kindly ex-nun, Veronica is a solitary, alcoholic spinster, and Agnes is a busy career woman.
A fourth stepdaughter, Lucy, lives on Long Island with her husband and children. Twice a week, Lucy and the children visit Momma, to whom Lucy complains about her unhappy marriage and her unfulfilled dreams.
During these visits, Lucy's children Margaret, Bobby, and Maryanne learn from their aunts and grandmother the often painful history of the family, which has been smothered by Catholicism and marinated in alcohol.
Alice's first award winning book, Charming Billy, was published in 1998. In this novel, the Irish Catholic family of Billy Lynch, a storyteller, dreamer, and hopeless alcoholic, gathers for his funeral.
Forty years earlier, Billy had been madly in love with an Irish girl named Eva, who went back to Ireland and tragically died of pneumonia before she could return to him. He married another woman and began drinking to forget Eva. He ultimately drank himself to death.
One of the mourners at Billy's funeral is Dennis, Billy's cousin and best friend. Dennis is accompanied by his unnamed daughter, who narrates the story. During the funeral, Dennis makes a shocking confession to his daughter: "Eva never died. It was a lie. Just between the two of us, Eva lived."
The stunned narrator then takes the reader along on her quest to find the truth and learn how her father could have told such a lie to a man he considered his best friend - a lie that drove Billy Lynch to despair, to drink, and ultimately, to his death.
Charming Billy won Alice McDermott the American Book Award and the National Book Award. Her 2006 novel, After This, takes place from the late 1940s through the 1970s.
After World War II ends, Mary, a 30-year-old spinster, finds herself swept up in a whirlwind romance with John Keane, her true love, whom she marries. The happy couple starts a family that will include four children.
Mary and John see themselves and their children as a good, traditional Irish Catholic family, but as the years pass, the winds of change steer the children away from tradition and faith.
Their eldest son Jacob is killed in Vietnam. Their younger son Michael, racked with guilt over the way he'd treated Jacob, seeks escape through drugs and casual sex. Their eldest daughter Anne quits college and runs off to London with her lover, and teenage Clare becomes pregnant.
Alice McDermott's most recent novel, Absolution, was published on October 31st, 2023. It tells the haunting story of two generations of women, unrelated but connected to each other, who are both deeply affected by America's tragic involvement in the Vietnam War.
Quote Of The Day
"I suppose I've never set out to write a novel in which nothing happens... only to write a novel about the lives of certain characters. That nothing 'happens' in their lives is beside the point to me; I'm still interested in how they live, and think, and speak, and make some sense of their own experience. Incident (in novels and in life) is momentary, and temporary, but the memory of an incident, the story told about it, the meaning it takes on or loses over time, is lifelong and fluid, and that's what interests me and what I hope will prove interesting to readers. We're deluged with stories of things that have happened, events, circumstances, actions, etc. We need some stories that reveal how we think and feel and hope and dream."
- Alice McDermott
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Alice McDermott discussing and reading from her most recent novel, Absolution, at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History On June 26th, 1892, the famous American writer Pearl S. Buck was born. She was born Pearl Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Her parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, were missionaries for the Southern Presbyterian Church. After they married, they went to China and set up a mission.
Three out of their four previous children, who were born in China, died from cholera and other ailments shortly after their birth, so the Sydenstrickers returned to the United States so Pearl's mother could give birth to her there.
The family returned to their mission in China when Pearl was three months old. She was given a Chinese name - Sai Zhen Zhu - and Chinese was her primary language.
She was tutored in Chinese language and history by a Confucian scholar, Mr. Kung. Her mother later taught her English. Pearl loved China and the Chinese people.
When she was eight, the Boxer Rebellion took place. It was a revolt against foreign imperialists and the Christian missionaries who were interfering with Chinese culture in their pursuit of converting and Westernizing the Chinese.
Pearl and her family were evacuated to Shanghai, where they spent almost a whole year living as refugees. The family then left China for San Francisco, only to return a year later, when the Boxer Rebellion had ended.
In 1911, Pearl left China again, this time to attend a women's college in America. After graduating in 1914, she returned to China and served as a missionary until 1933. In 1917, she married fellow missionary John Buck.
She later became a major figure in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy of the 1920s and 30s - a schism within the Presbyterian church that pitted liberals (modernists) against conservatives (fundamentalists).
In a 1932 article published in The Christian Century magazine, Pearl Buck voiced her support for Re-Thinking Missions, a controversial study by a Presbyterian lay group that argued for scrapping traditional missions.
Instead of trying to convert all the peoples of the world to Christianity, the study stated, a Christian mission's main function should be to help those in need through humanitarian efforts.
The study also stated that Christian missionaries should ally themselves with all religions instead of trying to win converts. In her article, Buck mocked the fundamentalists' biblical literalism. She said that the study was "the only book I have ever read that seems to me literally true in its every observation and right in its every conclusion."
Later that year, Buck gave a speech before a large audience at the Astor Hotel, where she elaborated on the views expressed in her article, describing the typical Christian missionary as "narrow, uncharitable, unappreciative, [and] ignorant."
Pearl also rejected the concept of original sin and the need to believe in the divinity of Christ in order to live a Christian life. She wrote another article that was published in Cosmopolitan, and established herself as a leading liberal voice in the Presbyterian Church.
The Re-Thinking Missions study, along with the efforts of Buck and other liberals outraged the conservative, evangelical faction in the church, and a schism resulted that saw most conservatives bolt from the Presbyterian Church. The few that stayed were willing to compromise and accept modernist ideas.
At the time of her participation in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, Pearl Buck had also established herself as a bestselling writer. Her first novel, East Wind:West Wind was published in 1930.
A year later, she would publish her most famous novel, The Good Earth (1931), which was the first in a classic trilogy of novels called The House of Earth.
The Good Earth told the epic story of Wang Lung, a poor Chinese peasant farmer who marries a slave girl named O-Lan, lives a hard life, then unexpectedly rises to prominence, only to encounter more hardships.
The second book in the trilogy, Sons (1933), follows Wang Lung's sons; the third book, A House Divided (1935), follows the third generation of Wang Lung's family.
The Good Earth won Pearl Buck the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. It was adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1937, starring Paul Muni as Wang Lung and Luise Rainer as O-Lan.
I was thirteen years old when I first read this great novel as an eighth grade social studies assignment back in the early 1980s. It remains one of my all-time favorite novels.
Pearl Buck used her experiences in China as the basis for her novels, and in doing so, helped introduce Chinese culture to the West. No stranger to controversy, she would later write China Sky (1941), a tale of the horrors of the Japanese invasion of China during World War II.
She also wrote Peony (1948), the haunting, riveting story of a Chinese servant girl, Peony, who is sold to a wealthy Jewish family and embarks on a forbidden romance with the family's only son.
During her amazing literary career, Pearl Buck wrote over 40 novels (four of them under the pseudonym John Sedges) and many short stories, including children's stories. Her last novel, The Rainbow, was completed before she died in 1973 at the age of 80. It was published posthumously the following year.
Quote Of The Day "The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."
- Pearl S. Buck
Vanguard Video Today's video features Pearl S. Buck being interviewed on The Merv Griffin Show in 1966. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On June 25th, 1903, the legendary English writer George Orwell was born. He was born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal, India, to an affluent family. His father, Richard Blair, was a civil servant. His mother, Ida, was a Frenchwoman.
When he was a year old, Orwell's mother moved him to England, settling in the town of Henley-on-Thames. As a young boy, Orwell met poet Jacintha Buddicorn. The two children became inseparable.
When they first met, Buddicorn found Orwell standing on his head in a field. When she asked him why he was doing that, Orwell replied "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up."
Orwell and Buddicorn spent a lot of time reading together, writing poetry, and dreaming of becoming famous writers. He also became close to the rest of the Buddicorn family and spent time hunting, fishing, and birdwatching with Jacintha's brother and sister.
While at prep school, Orwell wrote two poems that were published in the local newspaper. He won a scholarship, but during his college years, he proved to be an average student at best.
He co-created and co-edited a college magazine and spent more time writing for it than paying attention to his studies. He dropped out of school due to both his poor academic performance (which made future scholarships unlikely) and his desire to travel to the East.
In October of 1922, Orwell went to Burma, now known as Myanmar, where he joined the Indian Imperial Police. He was posted briefly to Maymyo, then to Myaungmya. By 1924, Orwell was promoted to Assistant District Superintendent and posted to Syriam. In 1925, he went to Insein, home of the second-largest prison in Burma.
A year later, he moved to Moulmein, where his grandmother lived. At the end of 1926, Orwell moved on to Kath, where he contracted Dengue fever. He was allowed to go home to England on leave.
While home and recovering, Orwell decided that he was tired of colonial life and police work. He resigned from the Indian Imperial Police and decided to become a writer. He used his experiences in Burma as the basis of his first novel, Burmese Days, which was published in 1934.
Orwell's first published work was a nonfiction book called Down And Out In London And Paris (1933), an account of his life as a struggling writer, as he worked at menial jobs to support himself while he wrote.
He had moved to Paris in 1928 because of its low cost of living and the bohemian lifestyle that attracted many aspiring writers. In 1929, Orwell fell ill and all of his money was stolen from his room at the boarding house where he lived. He later returned to London and took a job teaching at a boy's school.
Orwell's early books were published by Victor Gollancz, whose publishing house was an outlet for radical and socialist books. Orwell wrote two more novels, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936).
He later disowned these novels, claiming that they weren't his best works - he had just written them to earn money at a time when he was broke.Of the two, Keep The Aspidistra Flying is the better.
It's a grim black comedy about an aspiring poet, Gordon Comstock, who comes from an affluent, respectable family, but believes that in order to be a poet, one must denounce wealth. So, he quits his promising new job as an ad copywriter and takes a menial job while he writes.
Living in a grubby rented room, he both loves and loathes his new existence. Comstock finally feels like a real poet, but he resents having to work at boring menial jobs to support himself while he writes. His poverty is a frequent source of humiliation, and he soon becomes a deeply neurotic, absurd parody of himself.
Later, Gollancz encouraged Orwell to investigate and write about the depressed social conditions in Northern England, and 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, famously concluding 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 second section of The Road To Wigan Pier shows the early development of Orwell's personal philosophy and his skill as a satirist, both of which have been misconstrued as endorsements of conservatism or even fascism. He was really a lifelong socialist.
Not long after writing The Road To Wigan Pier, Orwell volunteered to fight General Franco's fascists in the Spanish Civil War, using his comrades in the Labour Party to get a letter of introduction.
In Spain, Orwell joined the POUM - the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification - which was allied with the Labour Party.The POUM had joined a coalition of leftist factions that supported the Spanish Republican government against the fascists. Another member of the coalition was the Spanish Communist Party.
The Spanish Communist Party was controlled by the Soviet Union, which wanted a communist Spain under Soviet control. Seeing the POUM as a Trotskyist organization, they falsely claimed that the POUM was collaborating with the fascists. Then they outlawed the party and attacked its members.
Falsely accused of being a fascist collaborator, Orwell came to hate Soviet communism. He still fought the fascists and was shot in the throat by a sniper. After recovering in a POUM hospital, Orwell and his wife barely managed to escape Spain following the fall of Barcelona.
Orwell's exposure to Soviet communism and its methods of propaganda and oppression, which broke the coalition and caused it to lose the war, would have a lasting effect on him and lead him to write his two greatest novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Animal Farm was an anti-Stalinist fable set on a farm where the animals are ruthlessly oppressed and exploited by the humans for whom they toil. So, the pigs Old Major, (who symbolizes Lenin) Napoleon, (Stalin) Snowball, (Trotsky) and Squealer (Soviet propaganda minister Vyacheslav Molotov) orchestrate a violent revolution.
The humans are overthrown and the animals are free, but soon, Napoleon assumes dictatorial power. He establishes totalitarian rule, and the animals' new utopia becomes even more oppressive and miserable than their existence under human rule.
Declared unfit for military service during World War II, (though he supervised broadcasts to India for the BBC to help the war effort) Orwell had completed Animal Farm in 1944, but no publisher would touch it because the Soviet Union was a key member of the Allies.
The highly acclaimed novel was published after the war ended and adapted as an animated British feature film in 1954. It would be adapted again in 1999 as a live-action American TV movie.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, was Orwell's last and greatest novel. In the distant future, England is now part of Oceania, a dystopic, totalitarian state. The main character, Winston Smith, is a civil servant - a historical revisionist for the propaganda ministry.
Oceania is forever at war with Eurasia, the Soviet totalitarian state. Living in the postapocalyptic ruins of London, Winston's job is to rewrite the past and make it conform to regime ideology. Fascinated by the true past,
Smith keeps a diary of his disillusionment with the regime. He soon embarks on a rebellion.
The regime's leader is an enigmatic dictator known as Big Brother, and he's always watching - literally. His face appears on posters and monitor screens. Citizens are under constant video surveillance, just like people in the UK are today, and encouraged to denounce each other to the Thought Police for expressing the wrong thoughts.
The phrase "big brother" was introduced into the English lexicon by Orwell's novel. Other clever touches include names such as the Ministry Of Peace, which deals with war, and the Ministry Of Love, a reeducation center where people are tortured until they submit.
Winston commits the ultimate crime against the sexually repressive regime - he falls in love with a woman named Julia, and they have a passionate affair. He and the girl try to escape detection but are arrested by the Thought Police, brought to the Ministry of Love, and tortured until they denounce each other.
Now reeducated - brainwashed - to be obedient, Winston is readmitted into the state as a citizen. He's calm, happy, and soulless, and as the novel's ominous final sentence observes, "He loved Big Brother."
A masterpiece of science fiction and political allegory, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June of 1949 to great acclaim. It remains a classic to this day and is often a subject of study for middle and high school English classes, resulting in bans and challenges.
Orwell managed to complete the novel despite being severely ill with tuberculosis. He also wrote frequently to friends, including his childhood sweetheart Jacintha Buddicorn, who was shocked to learn that the celebrated novelist George Orwell was her childhood sweetheart Eric Blair writing under a pseudonym.
He died of tuberculosis in January of 1950, at the age of 46. He'd had numerous lung problems over the years, including chronic bronchitis and pneumonia. He was also a heavy smoker - a habit he took to his grave.
His greatest literary legacy, the classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, would become the bible of anticommunism during the Cold War and still remains a favorite of the right today who appreciate it for all the wrong reasons.
George Orwell was a lifelong socialist who always hoped for a better world where the extremes of wealth and poverty didn't exist and everyone was truly equal. Nineteen Eighty-Four was a warning that even the noblest ideas can become corrupted and perverted if we allow them to be.
Quote Of The Day "There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter."
- George Orwell
Vanguard Video Today's video features the full length BBC documentary, George Orwell - A Life In Pictures. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History On June 24th, 1842, the legendary American writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce was born in Meigs County, Ohio. He was the tenth of thirteen children, all bearing first names that began with the letter A.
He grew up in Kosciusko County, Indiana, where his poor but intellectual parents instilled in him a deep love for reading. When he was fifteen, Bierce left home to become a printer's devil (apprentice) at a small Ohio newspaper.
In 1861, when the Civil War broke out, Bierce enlisted in the Union Army's 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. The following year, he was made a First Lieutenant and served on the staff of General William Babcock Hazen as a topographical engineer, mapping areas that would likely become battlefields.
He fought in the Battle of Shiloh, which at the time was the bloodiest battle in U.S. history. Bierce used the terrifying experience as the source for several short stories and a memoir, What I Saw of Shiloh.
He continued fighting in the war and received recognition for his daring rescue of a seriously wounded comrade under fire in the Battle of Rich Mountain, West Virginia. In June of 1864, Bierce himself was seriously wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.
He spent the summer on furlough and returned to active duty in September. He was discharged in January 1865, but resumed his military career in the summer of 1866, when he rejoined General Hazen on an expedition to inspect military outposts in the Great Plains.
In San Francisco, after receiving the rank of Brevet Major, Bierce resigned from the Army. He remained in San Francisco, where he became famous as both a contributor and an editor for many local newspapers and periodicals. On Christmas Day, 1871, he married his girlfriend, Mary Ellen "Mollie" Day.
She bore him two sons and a daughter, but the couple would separate in 1888 when Bierce discovered letters from a lover that constituted proof of Mollie's infidelity. They finally divorced in 1904.
Mollie died a year later. Bierce's sons died before him; his son Day was shot in a dispute over a woman, and his other son Leigh died of pneumonia - a complication of his alcoholism.
Ambrose Bierce lived in England from 1872-75, where he wrote and contributed to magazines. He returned to San Francisco, then left again to manage a mining company in the Dakota Territory.
After the company folded, he went back to San Francisco and resumed his career as a journalist. In 1887, he published a column called Prattle, becoming one of the first columnists and editorial writers for William Randolph Hearst's newspaper, The San Francisco Examiner.
In January of 1896, Hearst sent Bierce to Washington, D.C. to foil the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies' plan to have a Congressional ally sneak in a bill that excused the companies from having to repay massive government loans to build the First Transcontinental Railroad.
Bierce's coverage of the story - and his scathing satirical diatribes - resulted in such public outrage that the bill was defeated. His sardonic nature and scathing satire earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce." Despite his reputation, he was known to encourage young writers to pursue and perfect their craft.
As a writer himself, Ambrose Bierce was known for both his horror stories, which were on a par with the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and his satircal works. His best known horror story was An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge.
Published in 1891, it told the tale of a Confederate saboteur, Peyton Farquhar, who is caught and sentenced to be hung from Owl Creek Bridge. At the hanging, the rope breaks and Farquhar falls into the water.
He escapes and makes it to dry land. From there, as he tries to get home to his family, Farquhar finds that his senses have been heightened to superhuman proportions. He also experiences visual and auditory hallucinations.
When he finally arrives home, he runs to his wife. Just as he reaches out to her, Farquhar feels a searing pain in his neck and all goes black. It is revealed that he never escaped at all. He dreamed the whole thing just as he was hung, before the rope broke his neck.
An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge was adapted numerous times, the most famous adaptation being a French short film made in 1963 called La Rivière du Hibou, directed by Robert Enrico.
It won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject and was later aired on American television as an episode of the brilliant and acclaimed 1959-64 TV series, The Twilight Zone.
Ambrose Bierce was most famous for his satirical masterpiece, The Devil's Dictionary. Published in 1911, The Devil's Dictionary was a scathing, book-length parody of Webster's Dictionary, filled with humorous definitions of various words, such as:
LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.
PATRIOT, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.
CLERGYMAN, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.
The end of Ambrose Bierce's life turned out to be so strange that, had he lived, he might have written a short story about it. In October of 1913, at the age of 71, Bierce embarked on a tour of his old Civil War battlefields.
In December, after visiting locations in Louisiana and Texas, Bierce crossed the border into Mexico, where he became involved with the Mexican Revolution. He joined Pancho Villa's army as an observer, and later witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca.
Bierce followed Villa's army as far as Chihuahua. He wrote a letter to his close friend Blanche Partington, which was dated December 26, 1913. Then he mysteriously disappeared, vanishing without a trace - one of the most famous disappearances in literary history.
Some writers speculated that Bierce headed North to the Grand Canyon, where he committed suicide in a remote location. No evidence exists to prove this theory or the countless other theories about what happened to Bierce.
All investigations into his fate have thus far proved fruitless.
Quote Of The Day "Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first."
- Ambrose Bierce
Vanguard Video Today's video features a complete reading of Ambrose Bierce's classic horror story, An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On June 20th, 1905, the legendary American playwright and screenwriter Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. She was born to a wealthy Jewish family, and spent her childhood partly in New Orleans and partly in New York City.
Lillian studied at New York University and Columbia University. Then, at the age of 24, she traveled around Europe, settling in Bonn, Germany, where she continued her education.
It was 1925, and Lillian became interested in a student group dedicated to what she thought was the cause of socialism. Instead, it turned out to be a national socialist (Nazi) group that rejected her because she was Jewish.
Shaken, Lillian returned to the United States. There, she found work as a reader for the MGM film studio in Hollywood. It was her job to read novels, short stories, plays, and newspaper articles to determine if they would make good movies.
While in Hollywood, she met the legendary mystery writer Dashiell Hammett and fell in love with him. After divorcing her husband, she began a love affair with Hammett that would last nearly thirty years, until his death in 1961.
Hammett would base his famous characters Nick and Nora Charles, from his classic novel The Thin Man, on himself and Lillian Hellman.
In 1932, Lillian returned to New York City, where she wrote her classic, controversial play The Children's Hour. It premiered on Broadway in November of 1934 and ran for nearly 700 performances.
The Children's Hour was inspired by a real incident that took place in Scotland, circa 1810. The play is set at an all-girls boarding school run by close friends Karen Wright and Martha Dobie.
Mary Tilford, a student at the school, is spoiled, petulant, vindictive, and a pathological liar. Her cousin, Joe Cardin, is a handsome young doctor who plans to marry Karen.
Seething with jealousy, Mary falsely accuses Karen and Martha of having a lesbian affair and blackmails another student, Rosalie Wells, into corroborating her lies.
Karen and Martha sue for libel, but Mary's lies are believed. The women lose the case and their school. Joe still believes in Karen and won't leave her, even though his life has been ruined by the scandal.
Karen decides that they must break up for Joe's sake, but he persuades her to think things over. When Martha learns that Karen wanted Joe to leave her, she becomes consumed with guilt.
Martha is forced to come to terms with the fact that she really is a lesbian. When she finally admits her feelings to Karen, Karen coldly dismisses her, telling her that they never really felt that way about each other.
Martha tries to declare her love for Karen, but Karen won't have it and tells Martha she's going to bed. While sitting in her bedroom, Karen hears a gunshot. To her horror, she discovers that Martha has committed suicide.
The Children's Hour became a huge hit and was considered shocking by early 1930s audiences. Even though it was illegal to mention homosexuality on the Broadway stage at that time, the play was not closed by censors - because it was so good.
Lillian's success with The Children's Hour earned her a screenwriting job in Hollywood. When MGM picked up the film rights to her play, Lillian wrote the screenplay herself. Unfortunately, she was forced to change the story considerably.
The stifling Hollywood Production Code was in effect, and it forbade any mention of homosexuality on screen. So, in These Three (1936), Martha is secretly in love with Joe and falsely accused of having an illicit affair with him. Despite the change, the film got good reviews from critics.
As a screenwriter, Lillian was also known for her adaptation of Sidney Kingsley's hit Broadway play, Dead End. The bleak film, released in 1937, was the first to feature the Dead End Kids.
The Dead End Kids were a street gang whose members were poor youths from the slums of New York City's East Side desperate to escape their lives of poverty and despair. Some have no problem turning to crime, while others seek a better way out.
Another of Lillian's accomplishments as a screenwriter was her work for the then fledgling screenwriters' union, the Screen Writers Guild. Lillian fought hard to get her fellow screenwriters onscreen credit for their work and decent pay.
In 1936, with the Spanish Civil War capturing the attention of the world, Lillian sought to warn people of the growing threat of fascism. She joined other literary figures such as Dorothy Parker and Archibald MacLeish to fund an anti-fascist documentary, The Spanish Earth (1937).
The film famously miscredited Orson Welles as its narrator. It was in fact narrated by the legendary writer Ernest Hemingway.
Lillian went to Spain to offer her support to the International Brigades - the foreign soldiers from around the world who had volunteered to fight General Franco's fascist army. She did a broadcast to the United States on Radio Madrid while bombs were falling on the city.
Back in America, Lillian joined the Communist Party, but left after a couple years. She found her chapter of the party to be boring and ineffective: "[I] saw and heard nothing more than people sitting around a room talking of current events or discussing the books they had read."
After World War II broke out in 1939, Lillian, enjoying the success of her play The Little Foxes, grew frustrated by her country's isolationism. So, she wrote another play hoping to awaken Americans to the threat of Hitler.
Watch on the Rhine opened on Broadway in April 1941 - just eight months before Pearl Harbor. The play, which told of a German Resistance operative with an American wife who returns to Germany to rescue his comrades from the Gestapo, won Lillian the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
In 1943 and 44, Lillian applied for a passport so she could visit England but was denied twice because she was deemed an active communist, though she'd left the party a few years before and never rejoined. Her politics would come back to haunt her in the next decade.
Years later, in 1952, while enjoying the success of her classic play The Autumn Garden, Lillian found herself subpoenaed by the notorious HUAC (House Unamerican Activities Committee) for interrogation.
Lillian refused to apologize for her past membership in the Communist Party or denounce the party. Willing to testify about her own political beliefs and associations, she adamantly refused to name names and denounce others.
The HUAC desperately wanted Lillian to denounce her ex-boyfriend John F. Melby, who worked for the State Department, as a communist, but she refused. She wasn't charged with a crime by the HUAC after concluding her testimony, but the FBI increased its surveillance of her and began monitoring her mail.
The 1960s found Lillian enjoying the success of her last great play, Toys in the Attic (1960). Another film adaptation of The Children's Hour was released in 1961.
Although Karen and Martha are falsely accused of having a lesbian affair in this version, the Production Code, albeit loosened somewhat, was still in effect, so the lesbian aspect of the story is incredibly watered down.
Despite a stellar cast that featured Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, and James Garner in his film debut, The Children's Hour was mostly panned by critics and a flop at the box office.
Lillian had nothing to do with the production. She had just lost her longtime lover, Dashiell Hammett. She would later edit a collection of his short stories, The Big Knockover. The book featured an introduction by Lillian.
In the 1970s, Lillian wrote and published a series of memoirs. Part of the second book, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (1973), would be adapted as the 1977 Oscar winning feature film, Julia.
In 1979, Lillian's longtime enemy, writer and critic Mary McCarthy, was being interviewed on PBS's The Dick Cavett Show when she accused Lillian of fabricating her Pentimento memoir, saying "every word she writes is a lie, including and and the."
Lillian Hellman filed a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit against McCarthy, Dick Cavett, and PBS. The suit hadn't been settled when Lillian died of a heart attack in 1984 at the age of 79. Her executors decided to drop it.
Quote Of The Day
"Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped."
- Lillian Hellman
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a rare 1973 TV interview of Lillian Hellman. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On June 19th, 1947, the legendary Indian writer Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India. His father was a lawyer turned businessman, his mother a teacher.
Rushdie graduated King's College, Cambridge with a degree in history. He worked in advertising - for two different agencies - before trying his hand at writing.
In 1975, Rushdie published his first book, Grimus, a science fiction / fantasy novel that told the story of Flapping Eagle, a young Indian who receives the gift of immortality after drinking a magic potion.
He then wanders the Earth for 777 years, searching for his sister, who is also immortal. He ends up falling through a hole in the Mediterranean Sea, where he crosses over into a parallel dimension.
There, he arrives at a place called Calf Island, where fellow immortals, tired of the mortal world, live in their own community and sacrifice their freedom to maintain their immortality.
Grimus was pretty much ignored by critics and readers alike, but Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children, published in 1981, was a huge success and made him world famous.
The novel won him the Booker Prize that year, as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Midnight's Children introduced the magic realism style of writing that Rushdie's future works would become famous for.
The main character, Saleem Sinai, is born on August 15th, 1947, at the exact time that India becomes independent. He later discovers that all children born on that date, between 12 and 1AM, have telepathic powers.
Saleem embarks on a quest to gather together all his fellow telepaths and discover the meaning of their gifts. He then becomes swept up in the famous state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in June of 1975, which would last for almost two years.
During this time, Gandhi suspended elections and civil liberties and granted herself the power to rule by decree. It was one of the most controversial periods in Indian history, where many innocent people were arrested and held without charge.
These political prisoners were subjected to abuse and torture. The government used public and private media outlets for the purposes of propaganda. A notorious family planning initiative forced thousands of men to have vasectomies against their will.
During this period, Saleem Sinai becomes a political prisoner for a time, and Salman Rushdie uses Saleem's ordeal to level scathing criticisms of Indira Gandhi.
Rushdie's next novel, Shame (1983), dealt with political turmoil in Pakistan. It was followed by The Jaguar Smile (1987). The nonfiction book chronicled Rushdie's experiences with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the seventh anniversary of their rise to power.
The Sandinistas were supported by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, but his successor, Ronald Reagan, secretly and illegally financed right-wing Contra guerillas in their attempt to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government.
Nicaragua later won a historic case against the United States at the International Court of Justice, where the U.S. was ordered to pay twelve billion dollars in reparations for undermining Nicaragua's sovereignty.
In 1988, Rushdie published his most famous and most controversial novel, The Satanic Verses. In the dazzling, surreal narrative, two actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are trapped on a hijacked plane during a flight from India to Britain.
The plane explodes over the English Channel, but the two actors are magically saved. Farishta is transformed into the Archangel Gabriel and Chamcha is changed into a devil, both men possibly suffering from multiple personality disorder as the result of their ordeal.
The novel features numerous dream vision narratives. One of these tells the story of how the prophet Muhammad - the founder of Islam - had originally included in the Quran verses of prayer to three Persian pagan goddesses - Allat, Uzza, and Manat.
Muhammad later renounces these verses as the work of Satan and removes them, hence the title The Satanic Verses. Later, one of Muhammad's companions doubts the prophet's divinity and claims to have altered parts of the Quran as Muhammad dictated them to him.
Another narrative tells the story of a fanatical imam who returns from exile to incite the people of his country to revolt, without any regard to their safety.
These narratives provoked great outrage in the Muslim world. The Satanic Verses was banned in most Muslim countries. In the West, Muslim extremists firebombed bookshops selling the novel and held rallies where copies of the book were burned.
Some people associated with translating or publishing the book were attacked and seriously injured or killed; in February 1989, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - the spiritual leader of Iran - issued a fatwa condemning The Satanic Verses as "blasphemous against Islam."
The fatwa also called for Salman Rushdie's execution. A bounty was placed on the writer's head, and he was forced to live in hiding for years, under police protection. There were two failed attempts on Rushdie's life, one of them carried out by Hezbollah.
The UK government broke off diplomatic ties with Iran in protest of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In 1998, nearly ten years later, Iran, in an attempt to restore diplomatic relations, made a public statement claiming that it would neither support nor hinder assassination attempts on Rushdie.
In 2005, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reaffirmed the fatwa and the death sentence of Salman Rushdie. Two years later, the UK's Queen Elizabeth II knighted Rushdie for services in literature, angering Muslims around the world. In Pakistan and Malaysia, mass demonstrations took place in protest of Rushdie's knighthood.
A year leter, in response to the outrage of Muslim extremists over editorial cartoons satirizing Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper, Rushdie signed the manifesto Together Facing The New Totalitarianism, which was published in the French liberal newspaper, Charlie Hebdo.
Sadly, in January of 2015, two Muslim extremist gunmen invaded the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, screamed "Allahu Akbar!" ("God is great!") and started shooting. Twelve people were killed, including five cartoonists and two editors.
Death threats continue to be made against Rushdie. In January of 2012, he was scheduled to appear at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India, but had to cancel that appearance and the rest of his Indian tour.
Jaipur police warned Rushdie that hired assassins were planning to kill him either there or at another one of his appearances in India. He later investigated the police reports and concluded that the Jaipur police had deliberately lied to him.
Never one to back down, Salman Rushdie often appears as a discussion panelist and activist advocating for freedom of expression and other liberal causes. He is without a doubt one of the world's greatest writers.
Unfortunately, he remains a target of radical Muslims. In August of 2022, as Rushdie was about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, a man stormed the stage and stabbed him repeatedly. He survived - barely - but was blinded in one eye and lost the use of one hand.
In May of 2025, the convicted assailant, Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old Muslim from New Jersey, was sentenced to two concurrent terms totalling 32 years in prison - 25 years for attempted murder plus 7 years for injuring someone else. He is still awaiting trial on federal terrorism charges.
Salman Rushdie's most recent novel, Victory City, was published in February of 2023. Last year, he published Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, a memoir of his attempted assassination in Chautauqua.
Quote Of The Day "The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes."
- Salman Rushdie
Vanguard Video Today's video features Salman Rushdie discussing his recent memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, on an 86-minute UK livestream. Enjoy!
Radiguet's father was a cartoonist, he grew up during World War I, and life on the French home front during the Great War influenced his writing. He started drawing and writing poetry at an early age.
At the age of 16, Raymond Radiguet abandoned his studies at a technical school to pursue his interest in literature. He went to Paris and became associated with the Dadaist and Cubist movements in literature and art.
He contributed to the magazine Sic, his works appearing alongside those of writers such as Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, and Philippe Soupalt.
The young Radiguet's talent attracted the attention and admiration of legendary French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who took him on as a protege. Radiguet wrote a book of poetry, Cheeks On Fire, and a play called Pelicans.
However, it was his classic debut novel - written at the age of seventeen - that made him a huge success and an object of controversy. It was called Le Diable au Corps - The Devil in the Flesh (1923).
The story is set on the French home front during World War I. The narrator is a fifteen-year-old boy who tells the story of his affair with a young married woman.
The novel opens with the boy striking up a friendship with Marthe Lancombe, a nineteen-year-old woman about to be married. They both share an admiration for the great poet Charles Baudelaire. Soon, the boy is skipping school to help Marthe shop for furniture.
Not long after her wedding, Marthe's soldier husband is sent to the front. The boy, smitten with her, sees his opportunity. Soon, the schoolboy and the lonely young married woman embark on a passionate, but doomed affair. Marthe becomes pregnant, causing a scandal.
The novel created quite a scandal itself. Critics expressed outrage at the novel's glorification of adultery and depiction of adolescent sexuality, but were soon won over by the author's skillfully crafted narrative, written in a sober and objective style.
Raymond Radiguet's prose effectively captures the teenage boy's conflicting emotions - his pride in becoming a man and the pain caused by his lack of maturity and being thrust into an affair he's really too young to handle.
With the success of The Devil in the Flesh, Raymond Radiguet became the talk of Paris. How could this novel have been penned by an author barely older than his teenage protagonist?
Radiguet was proclaimed a genius. Although he denied it, The Devil in the Flesh was later revealed to be a semi-autobiographical novel based on Radiguet's real-life affair with an older woman.
A feature film adaptation of Devil In The Flesh would prove to be even more controversial than the novel. Italian director Marco Bellocchio's 1986 film was neither the first nor the last adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's classic novel.
Definitely the most famous film adaptation, it was the first mainstream feature film where a well-known, mainstream actress (Maruschka Detmers) engaged in uncensored hardcore sexual acts on screen.
All three characters become ensnared in a web of adultery, deception, and self-deception, culminating in Count d'Orgel's masquerade ball, where the guests wear masks and later reveal their true selves - in more ways than one.
Count d'Orgel's Ball was also acclaimed by critics and readers alike, but Radiguet never lived to bask in it. Shortly after completing the novel, he contracted typhoid fever. He died in December of 1923 at the age of twenty.
Radiguet's mentor, the great Jean Cocteau, was devastated. While trying to work on his own writing, he plunged into a quagmire of depression and drug addiction. From this despair would come Cocteau's classic novel, Les Enfants Terribles - The Terrible Children (1929).
Meanwhile, Count d'Orgel's Ball and other writings by Radiguet, including a second poetry collection, were published posthumously.
One can only imagine what the young genius Raymond Radiguet may have written, had his life not been tragically cut short.
Quote Of The Day "Listen to me. I have something terrible to tell you. In three days, I am going to be shot by the soldiers of God."
- Raymond Radiguet, spoken to Jean Cocteau shortly before his death.
Vanguard Video Today's video features a clip from the 1947 French feature film adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's classic novel, The Devil in the Flesh, in French with no subtitles. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On June 17th, 1972, five men were caught burglarizing the Watergate building, a complex of offices, hotel rooms, and apartments in Washington, D.C.
The burglars had been caught breaking into the part of the Watergate that housed the offices of the Democratic National Committee - the national headquarters of the Democratic Party.
Ben Bradlee, Editor-In-Chief of the prominent Washington Post newspaper, assigned two young investigative reporters to cover the seemingly innocuous story of the Watergate burglary. Their names were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Woodward and Bernstein soon realized that there was nothing innocuous about the burglary at Watergate. In fact, the same offices had been burglarized before. Using their investigative skills, confidential sources, and a secret informant known only as Deep Throat, they broke the Watergate burglary story wide open.
The five burglars were really White House operatives whose mission was to spy on President Richard M. Nixon's opposition in the upcoming election. After breaking into the DNC offices, they stole information and bugged the telephones. Then they got caught.
Nixon denied involvement and won re-election in November, but Woodward and Bernstein continued their investigation and were able to prove that Nixon not only knew about the Watergate burglary, but was also attempting to block the investigation of it.
In 1974, in order to avoid impeachment and removal from office, Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace. He would later be pardoned by acting President Gerald Ford, a highly controversial move that cost Ford the presidency in the next election.
Woodward and Bernstein's work in exposing the Watergate conspiracy earned the Washington Post a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. They later wrote a famous book about it called All The President's Men.
Published in 1974, the book became a bestseller. Woodward and Bernstein had been toying with idea of writing a book, but didn't commit to it until actor-filmmaker Robert Redford contacted them with an offer to buy the movie rights.
The acclaimed feature film adaptation of All The President's Men, which starred Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, was released in 1976. That same year, Woodward and Bernstein published The Final Days.
A sequel to All The President's Men, it chronicled the last months of the Nixon presidency. In 1989, it was adapted as an acclaimed TV movie starring Lane Smith as Richard Nixon. It was nominated for five Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were real heroes, the kind of journalists that, sadly, no longer exist and are sorely needed.
In 2005, their famous and mysterious informant Deep Throat revealed his true identity. He was Mark Felt, a former FBI associate director and White House insider.
In recent years, Bob Woodward wrote several books covering the presidency of Donald Trump, the most corrupt and unhinged American president in history, including Fear: Trump in the White House (2018), Rage (2020), and Peril (2021).
In these books, Woodward depicted a White House led by a dysfunctional president hopelessly out of his league and dangerously unable and unwilling to recognize let alone accept the vast scope of his incompetence.
Ironically, Trump granted Woodward hours of recorded interviews for Fear: Trump in the White House, believing he was in control of Woodward's narrative. After the book was published, Trump derided it and its author.
Quote Of The Day "The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture."
- Carl Bernstein
Vanguard Video Today's video features Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on an episode of The Kalb Report marking the 40th anniversary of Watergate. Enjoy!
My drabble, Family, has been published by Flash Flood.
Pamelyn Casto
My poem, Message in a Bottle to the Jakarta Beggar, was accepted for publication at Highland Park Poetry for their Message in a Bottle 2025 Summer Muses' Gallery. What's even nicer is that my poem was previously a poetry contest first place winner and published, so this is its second time around, but with a different publication.
I love the good news and love the second-time-around poems. (Last week I also learned that my senryu will be published by Failed Haiku.)
This Day In Literary History
On June 13th, 1865, the legendary Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats was born. He was born in Dublin, but spent most of his early childhood living in County Sligo.
Yeats' father, John, was a famous painter. His brother Jack would become an acclaimed artist as well. Young William, however, was interested in poetry, Irish folklore, and the occult.
The Yeats family belonged to the Protestant aristocracy, who were British loyalists. While William was growing up, a nationalist revival in Ireland caused the Protestants to fall out of power.
The Catholic Church was able to take power in Ireland because most nationalists were middle class Catholics. Protestants were seen as traitors to Ireland. Many nationalists who hadn't been Catholic before were now converting.
Although the Protestant William Butler Yeats would become one of Ireland's greatest nationalist heroes, he never converted to Catholicism. Yeats loathed the Catholic Church, which he believed was more interested in grabbing wealth and power than in Irish nationalism.
At the age of twelve, Yeats began his formal education after being educated at home by his father. He was a below average student. An early report card noted that he was "Only fair. Perhaps better in Latin than in any other subject. Very poor in spelling."
During his high school years, Yeats discovered a passion for poetry. Percy Shelley became one of his literary idols. By this time, his family had moved back to Dublin and William hung out with the city's writers and artists.
In 1885, at the age of twenty, Yeats had his first poems and an essay published in the Dublin University Review. His early work would be heavily influenced by Shelley, Edmund Spenser, and the pre-Raphaelite style.
Soon, however, Yeats would develop his trademark style of poetry, which was steeped deep in symbolism and influenced by Irish folklore, mythology, and the writings of William Blake.
Although other modernist poets were experimenting with free verse, Yeats preferred writing in traditional formats with rhyme and meter. One of his first major works was Mosada (1886), a play in verse.
While pursuing his interest in the occult, Yeats became a member of the famous Golden Dawn magical order and struck up a close friendship with fellow member and legendary occultist Aleister Crowley.
Around this time, Yeats struck up a friendship with Maude Gonne, an heiress, art student, and fellow Irish nationalist. He fell in love with her, but it was a mostly unrequited love.
Like Maude, Yeats had belonged to a then fledgling nationalist group called the Irish Republican Army (IRA). As the IRA became more militant, Yeats distanced himself from its violent wing.
He wanted no part of violence, believing that he and other writers could use their words to further the cause of Irish nationalism, which would be more effective than violence.
Yeats was devastated when Maude married another man, fellow nationalist Major John MacBride. However, the marriage soon came to an end - but not officially. Unable to divorce in Ireland, they went to Paris, only to be denied by the court there.
Maude remained in Paris with her son while John returned to Ireland. Maude and Yeats rekindled their friendship. They finally became lovers, but ultimately drifted apart.
By 1890, the Yeats family had moved to London, where William co-founded the Rhymers' Club, a group of poets that met regularly in a Fleet Street pub to read their work.
In 1899, Yeats and his friends Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and George Moore founded the Irish Literary Theatre, which was devoted to Irish and Celtic plays. Its first show was a double bill - Yeats's play The Countess Cathleen and Lady Gregory's Spreading the News.
Yeats would remain a lifelong Irish nationalist, but kept his political beliefs mostly to himself as violence escalated between the Irish nationalists and British police and soldiers. He continued to write nationalist poetry.
In 1916, Yeats proposed marriage to his old love Maude Gonne, whose estranged husband had been executed by the British. He really wanted to just take care of the poor woman, whose life had been ruined by her devotion to violent political activism and her addiction to drugs.
Yeats and Maude didn't marry. At 51 years of age, what he wanted most of all was to have a child. He ultimately married Georgie Hyde-Lees, a young woman of 25. Despite the age difference, their marriage was happy. They had two children.
Georgie shared Yeats's interest in the occult, especially spiritualism and automatic writing. They conducted seances in their home and experiments with trance states. This resulted in Yeats's nonfiction study of the paranormal, A Vision (1925).
By 1922, the Irish nationalists had won a surprising victory in the Irish War of Independence. Although the war actually ended in a truce, Southern Ireland was now a free state republic within the United Kingdom.
Yeats became a senator in the new republic; when the issue of legalizing divorce came up for debate, he fought hard against the Catholic Church's attempt to legislate its doctrine against divorce, calling the effort a modern inquisition.
In December of 1923, Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was a huge symbolic victory for an Irishman to win such a prestigious award so soon after Southern Ireland won its independence.
For Yeats, winning the Nobel Prize also resulted in financial success. His publisher took advantage of the publicity, and his book sales took off. Though his later poetry would still be steeped deep in mysticism, it would also become devoted to more contemporary issues.
William Butler Yeats died in 1939 at the age of 73. He remains one of Ireland's greatest poets.
Quote Of The Day
“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”
- William Butler Yeats
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a reading of William Butler Yeats' classic poem, The Stolen Child. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On June 12th, 1929, the legendary German writer Anne Frank was born. She was born Anneliese Marie Frank in Frankfurt, Germany. Her father, Otto Frank, was a Jewish businessman and decorated veteran of World War I, where he served as an officer in the German Army.
In March of 1933, municipal council elections were held in Frankfurt, and Adolf Hitler won dictatorial control, becoming Chancellor of Germany. Anti-Semitic demonstrations began, and the Frank family feared for their safety.
Anne Frank, her older sister Margot, and their mother Edith went to stay with Anne's grandmother in Aachen. Later, after receiving an offer to start a company in Amsterdam, Otto moved the family to the Netherlands.
In February 1934, Edith and the girls arrived in Amsterdam. Anne Frank was enrolled in a Montessori school, where she showed advanced aptitude in reading and writing. Her friend, Hanneli Goslar, later recalled that Anne started writing in early childhood, but always kept her writings a secret and wouldn't discuss them.
In 1938, Otto Frank started a second company, Pentacon - a wholesaler of herbs, spices, and pickling salts used to make sausages. His spice adviser, Hermann Van Pels, was a Jewish kosher butcher who had also fled Germany with his family.
Edith Frank's mother came to Amsterdam to live with the family in 1939. Their quiet life would change forever when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May of 1940.
After defeating the Dutch army, the Nazis set up an occupation government and enacted discriminatory laws requiring Jews to register themselves and be segregated from the non-Jewish population.
In April of 1941, Otto Frank took steps to keep Pentacon from being confiscated as a Jewish-owned business, enabling him to earn a small income with which to support his family. Otto had the company liquidated and the assets transferred to his employee, Jan Gies. Jan and his wife Miep were close friends of the Frank family.
On June 12th, 1942, Anne Frank received a diary from her father as a gift for her 13th birthday. She had seen the handsome book, bound in red and green plaid cloth and with a small lock on the front, in a shop window. It was actually an autograph book, but Anne used it as a diary.
The following month, Margot Frank received a letter from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration ordering her to report for transportation to a work camp. So, on July 6th, the family fled after Otto planted a fake note to trick the Nazis into thinking they went to Switzerland.
(Ironically, if Otto had moved the family to Switzerland as he originally planned to do, his wife and daughters would have survived the Holocaust. His tragic determination to remain in the country he considered his adopted homeland would haunt him for the rest of his life.)
The Franks moved into a hiding place - a three-story space located above the offices of Otto Frank's previous company, the Opekta Works. Anne called it the Secret Annex. A week later, they were joined by Hermann Van Pels, his wife Auguste, and their 15-year-old son, Peter. In November, Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and Frank family friend, moved into the Secret Annex.
In her diary, (which she called Kitty, after the main character in her favorite series of children's novels) Anne wrote about the Van Pelses and Pfeffer, and their daily lives in the hiding place. She described Hermann Van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer as self-centered and foolish and Auguste Van Pels as a calculating sociopath.
She became friends with Peter Van Pels, developed a crush on him, and experienced her first kiss. Later, Anne questioned her feelings for Peter, wondering if she really loved him or if it was because there was no one else.
While in hiding, the Franks' only connections to the outside world were Jan and Miep Gies, and Otto's former employees Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, and Bep Voskuijl, and her father, Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl.
These contacts provided the Franks and their roommates with information, food, and supplies, all of them knowing that if they were caught, they would be executed for helping to hide Jews. The food and supplies had to be purchased on the black market.
Anne continued to write in her diary, expressing her feelings about her family and their roommates. She came to hate Fritz Pfeffer, with whom she had to share a room. She wrote of her strained relationships with her mother and sister, (her relationship with her cold, distant mother was especially strained) and she wrote about what it was like to be confined, hidden, and fearful of discovery.
The main theme of the book is Anne's coming of age - her transformation from a silly, immature, and timid schoolgirl into a wise, intelligent, strong, and empowered young woman full of confidence and hope. Which was bitterly ironic considering her tragic fate.
In August of 1944, two years after they went into hiding, someone betrayed the Franks and their roommates. On August 4th, the German Security Police raided the Secret Annex and arrested everyone.
When Miep Gies came for a visit, she found the Secret Annex vacant. She discovered Anne's diary and other writings (in notebooks and on looseleaf paper) and saved them, hoping that Anne would survive to reclaim them.
The hiders were ultimately sent to Auschwitz, where Hermann Van Pels was gassed and Edith Frank died of starvation and illness after giving her food rations to her sick daughters.
Before she died, Anne and Margot Frank and Auguste Van Pels were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen death camp. Fritz Pfeffer was sent to the Neuengamme camp, where he died of a gastrointestinal infection.
At Bergen-Belsen, Anne caught a bad case of scabies. When typhus swept the camp, Margot contracted the disease and Anne cared for her until she died. Auguste Van Pels also died of typhus. Then Anne got it. With her health in severe decline and believing that her father had also died, she lost her will to live.
Anne Frank died of typhus in March of 1945, just three months before her sixteenth birthday - and just one month before Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the Allies.
At the end of the war, as the Red Army was about to liberate Auschwitz and the Nazis were evacuating, Peter Van Pels and other prisoners were forced into a long march and hard labor in a mine. Exhaustion and illness landed Peter in the sick barracks. He never recovered and died at 18 - just a few days after the liberation.
In 1945, Otto Frank, the only member of the Secret Annex hiders who survived, returned home to the Netherlands. After the Red Cross confirmed the deaths of Anne and Margot Frank, Miep Gies gave Anne's diary and other writings to her father.
Impressed with Anne's writing talent, the depth of her thoughts and feelings, and the way she chronicled the family's life in hiding - and remembering how she longed to be a writer - Otto considered publishing the diary.
Anne herself had wanted to publish her diary; she'd heard a radio broadcast in March of 1944 by Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government-in-exile who planned (after the war ended) to create a public record of the Dutch people's oppression under Nazi occupation.
Anne prepared her diary for future publication by editing, rewriting, and using pseudonyms for her family and their roommates. The Van Pels family became the Van Daans, and Fritz Pfeffer's name was changed to Albert Dussell - Dussell being the German word for idiot.
After Anne's death, Otto Frank edited her diary himself, restoring the Frank family's names, but retaining the other pseudonyms. He cut some sections, including Anne's harsh criticisms of her mother and biting comments about her parents' strained marriage. He also removed sections dealing with Anne's growing sexual awareness and her experiences with puberty.
Otto gave the edited manuscript to historian Annie Romein-Verschoor, and she tried, unsuccessfully, to get it published. When her husband Jan wrote an article about the diary titled Kinderstern (A Child's Voice), which was published in the Het Parool newspaper in April 1946, it attracted the attention of publishers.
Anne Frank's diary was first published in the Netherlands as Het Achterhuis (The Diary) in 1947, then again in 1950. It was published in Germany and France in 1950, and then in the UK in 1952, though in the UK, it was unsuccessful and went out of print the following year.
Surprisingly, the diary's first edition was most successful in Japan, where it sold over 100,000 copies. The first American edition was published in 1952 as Anne Frank: The Diary Of A Young Girl. In the U.S., the book was just as successful and critically acclaimed as it was in Germany and France.
In October of 1955, The Diary Of Anne Frank, a stage play adaptation by Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett, premiered on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Producers had originally asked Lillian Hellman to adapt the diary for the stage, but she turned them down, fearing that her adaptation would be too bleak.
A feature film adaptation of the play, starring a badly miscast but earnest Millie Perkins as Anne Frank and Shelley Winters as Mrs. Van Daan, was released in 1959. More adaptations followed, including a TV miniseries.
Over the years, the book's popularity has grown exponentially, selling over 25,000,000 copies worldwide. It often appears on middle school English and social studies teachers' assigned reading lists. I first read this amazing book in eighth grade, at the age of thirteen.
In 1999, Cornelius Suijk, a former director of the Anne Frank Foundation and president of the U.S. Center for Holocaust Education Foundation, announced that he possessed the sections of Anne Frank's diary deleted by her father, Otto, prior to the book's initial publication.
Suijk claimed that Otto Frank had given them to him and claimed the right to publish the missing pages. He planned to use the proceeds to help fund his U.S. foundation.
After a court battle, Suijk agreed to turn over the pages to the Dutch Ministry of Education in exchange for a $300,000 donation to his foundation. He did so in 2001, and the diary has since been republished in an uncut special edition called the Definitive Edition.
A companion volume was also published - Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex (1949) - a collection of short stories and an unfinished novel called Cady's Life, all written by Anne during her two years in hiding. It's a fascinating book that showcases her writing talent, which was considerable.
But her diary was her legacy, and it continues to inspire nearly 80 years after her death. It's a profoundly moving testament to the courage of an ordinary teenage girl trapped in extraordinary circumstances and a testament to the evils of racism and fascism - one of the most important documents of the Holocaust.
The Secret Annex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis and wrote her famous diary was turned into a museum called the Anne Frank House by the Dutch government. First opened to the public in 1960, it was rededicated by the Netherlands' Queen Beatrix after its second renovation in 1999.
In one year alone, over a million people visit the Anne Frank House. If you go there, you can still see the pictures of movie stars that Anne tacked up on her bedroom wall.
In January of 2022, a team of experts, including historians and an ex-FBI agent, identified the man they believe betrayed Anne Frank, her family, and their roommates. His name was Arnold van den Bergh, and he had been a member of Amsterdam's Jewish Council.
The team also claimed that Otto Frank knew that van den Bergh, who died in 1950, was the informer, but kept it a secret for two reasons: he didn't want to ruin the lives of the man's children, and he knew that like many other Jews, van den Bergh had been forced to make a Faustian bargain with the Nazis in order to save his family.
Otto was also concerned that revealing van den Bergh's identity to the world - revealing that Anne Frank was sold out and sent to her death by another Jew - would only serve to stoke the fires of anti-Semitism.
To this day, Holocaust deniers insist that Anne Frank's diary is a work of fiction - propaganda fabricated by her father or others - in a pathetic attempt to discredit it, despite the fact that handwriting analysis proved conclusively that it was Anne who wrote the diary.
Quote Of The Day "For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl."
- Anne Frank
Vanguard Video Today's video features a complete reading of The Diary of Anne Frank. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On June 11th, 1925, the famous American writer William Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia. His paternal grandparents were conservative slave owners, but his father and mother raised him to be liberal.
His father was a shipyard engineer who suffered from depression, an illness Styron would later struggle with himself. Styron's mother died when he was a boy, after a long battle with breast cancer.
When Styron was in third grade, his father took him out of public school and enrolled him in an Episcopal prep school, which he enjoyed immensely. He later enrolled in Davidson College, but dropped out to join the Marines near the end of World War II.
He was promoted to lieutenant, but Japan surrendered before his ship was to depart from San Francisco. The war over, Styron enrolled at Duke University, where he earned a degree in English and published his first short story in a student anthology. The story was heavily influenced by the writings of William Faulkner.
In 1947, after graduating from Duke, Styron took a job for the McGraw-Hill publishing house in New York City - a position he came to hate. Styron got himself fired and began writing his first novel, Lie Down In Darkness, which was published in 1951.
The novel, which received great critical acclaim, told the story (partly in a stream-of-consciousness narrative) of a troubled young woman named Peyton Loftis, whose emotionally distant, oppressive, and dysfunctional Virginia family ultimately drives her to suicide.
Lie Down In Darkness won William Styron the prestigious Rome Prize, which was awarded by the American Academy In Rome and the American Academy Of Arts And Letters. He couldn't go to Rome to accept the award - he was recalled to active duty in the Korean War.
Discharged a year later due to eye problems, Styron used his experience at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina as the basis for his novella The Long March, first published in a serial format in 1953. It would be adapted as a play for an episode of the famous Playhouse 90 TV series in 1958.
After his discharge from the Marines in 1952, Styron embarked on an extended trip to Europe. In Paris, he met and became friends with a group of writers including James Baldwin, Romain Gary, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, James Jones, Irving Shaw, and others.
The group founded the famous literary magazine The Paris Review in 1953. That same year, Styron went to Italy and finally accepted his Rome Prize for Lie Down In Darkness. At the American Academy, he was reunited with a young poet from Baltimore whom he had met before. Her name was Rose Burgunder, and he married her that same year.
Styron used his experiences in Europe as the basis for his novel Set This House On Fire, which was published in 1960. It told the story of a group of American expatriate intellectuals living on the Riviera. In the U.S., the novel received mixed reviews at best, but it was successful in Europe. The French translation was a bestseller.
Several years later, in 1967, Styron published his most controversial novel, The Confessions Of Nat Turner. It was a fictional memoir of Nat Turner, a real life historical figure who led his fellow slaves in a violent revolt against their evil white masters.
James Baldwin accurately predicted that the book would be controversial with black and white readers alike, saying that "Bill's going to catch it from both sides." Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, who were both prominent and respected black writers, defended Styron's novel publicly.
Despite this, several black critics assailed The Confessions Of Nat Turner for its allegedly racist stereotyping and a scene where Turner fantasizes about raping a white woman. Southern white readers weren't thrilled with the book, either. Nevertheless, it became a huge critical and commercial success, and won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In 1979, Styron published Sophie's Choice, another acclaimed novel that sparked controversy. Narrated by Stingo, a Southern writer Styron modeled after himself, the novel told the story of Stingo's love triangle with Sophie, a Polish Catholic who survived Auschwitz, and her Jewish lover Nathan, a paranoid schizophrenic.
Though he medicates himself with drugs (including cocaine) that he obtains from his employer, Pfizer, Nathan sometimes becomes frighteningly jealous, violent, and delusional. Haunted by her experiences during the Holocaust, Sophie finally reveals the secret that continues to torment her.
In Auschwitz, Sophie was forced to choose which of her two children would live. She sacrificed her daughter Eva so that her blond, blue-eyed, German-speaking son Jan could leave the death camp and be raised as a German.
Three years after its publication, Sophie's Choice was adapted as an acclaimed feature film that was nominated for five Academy Awards, with Meryl Streep winning the Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Sophie. In 1998, Styron's short story Shadrach was also adapted as a feature film.
In 1985, Styron won the Prix Mondial Cino Del Luca, a major international literary award. That same year, he suffered from severe depression. He wrote a memoir of his struggle with the mental illness called Darkness Visible: A Memoir Of Madness. It was first published in Vanity Fair magazine in December, 1989.
William Styron died in of pneumonia in 2006. He was 81.
Quote Of The Day
"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis."
- William Styron
Vanguard Video Today's video features a Paris Review interview with William Styron. Enjoy!
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