Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Notes For March 31st, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 31st, 1836, The Pickwick Papers - the classic first novel by legendary English writer Charles Dickens, was published. Like most novels of the time, it first appeared in a serialized format, published in twenty monthly installments.
When the first installment was published on this date, only 400 copies were printed. By the time the 15th installment came out, it was being published in press runs of 40,000 copies.
Originally titled The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, the novel had originally been commissioned by publishers Chapman and Hall as captions to accompany humorous drawings by illustrator Robert Seymour.
The members of the Pickwick Club, founded by a wealthy old gentleman named Samuel Pickwick, travel through remote areas of the English countryside by coach, then report back on their adventures when they return. Alfred Jingle, an English mangling actor, charlatan, and practical joker, joins them and plays tricks on them.
Charles Dickens wasn't the publishers' first choice to write the book, but their senior editor had been impressed by his earlier collection of serialized writings, Sketches by Boz, which had also been written to accompany illustrations.
Sketches combined nonfiction articles with short stories. Dickens was just 21 years old when he wrote them. His Pickwick writings were also originally published under the pseudonym Boz, which was the childhood nickname Dickens had given his brother Augustus.
Robert Seymour had conceived the original idea for Pickwick, but creative control of the series went to Charles Dickens, who took the idea and improved on it vastly. Seymour had previously suffered a nervous breakdown after a nasty row with Gilbert A'Beckett, editor of Figaro in London magazine.
The conflict, over money owed Seymour and the illustrator's parody of another writer's work, resulted in Seymour resigning and A'Beckett mounting a cruel public smear campaign against him. The illustrator returned to work after A'Beckett was replaced as editor.
Now, Seymour found himself in another bad situation. His original idea for Pickwick had been given to someone else, who made it his own and improved it. Seymour was never given credit for his creative input.
To add insult to injury, he wasn't even credited as illustrator. The publisher listed the byline as "Edited by Boz with Illustrations." Before the second installment of Pickwick was completed, a distraught Seymour committed suicide with his shotgun.
Seymour's widow publicly blasted Charles Dickens and the publishers, claiming that the first two installments of Pickwick were her husband's idea, i.e., that he told Dickens what to write. Actually, the opposite was true; Dickens had creative control.
Robert Seymour had struggled to come up with illustrations to complement Dickens' writing, frustrating the author to the point that he advertised for a new illustrator. After Seymour's death, Dickens took over as editor of the publication and saved it from bankruptcy.
Scholars have agreed that although Robert Seymour came up with the original idea for The Pickwick Papers, if he'd had creative control over the series, the final product would have been completely different and nowhere near as successful.
It was Charles Dickens' distinctive style of writing that made the novel what it was. When The Pickwick Papers was issued in book form, the publishers defended themselves and Dickens with the following disclaimer:
Mr. Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word to be found in this book. Mr. Seymour died when only twenty-four pages of this book were published, and when assuredly not forty-eight were written... all of the input from the artist was in response to the words that had already been written.
Taking a final pot shot at the troubled illustrator, the disclaimer goes on to say “that he took his own life through jealousy, as it was well known that Seymour’s sanity had been questioned."
Suicide was considered a scandalous act by Victorian society and a felo de se (felony to self) by the law, so Seymour was denied a Christian burial. His estate went to the government, and his widow couldn't receive any royalties for his work on The Pickwick Papers.
Despite the controversy surrounding its conception, The Pickwick Papers made Charles Dickens' name as a novelist. His second novel would make him a legend. It was named after its main character - a poor orphan boy called Oliver Twist.
Quote Of The Day
"'I am ruminating,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'on the strange mutability of human affairs.' 'Ah! I see — in at the palace door one day, out at the window the next. Philosopher, Sir?' 'An observer of human nature, Sir,' said Mr. Pickwick. 'Ah, so am I. Most people are when they've little to do and less to get.'"
- Charles Dickens, from The Pickwick Papers
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Charles Dickens' classic first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Enjoy!
Friday, March 27, 2026
Notes For March 27th, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 27th, 1923, the famous poet Louis Simpson was born. He was born in Jamaica to a Scottish father and a Russian mother. He emigrated to the United States at the age of 17, settling in New York City.
Louis soon enrolled at Columbia University, where he majored in English. One of his professors was the famous writer and critic, Mark Van Doren. In 1943, Simpson cut his education short to enlist in the U.S. Army, as World War II was raging.
He became a member of the Army's 101st Airborne Division. He served as a courier for the company captain, which required him to deliver orders from company headquarters to officers at the front. Thus, he saw action in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.
While stationed in France, Simpson's company fought a fierce and bloody battle against Nazi forces which had ambushed them on the west bank of the Carentan France Marina. The battle would inspire Simpson to write his classic poem Carentan O Carentan, which included these memorable verses:
There is a whistling in the leaves,
And it is not the wind,
The twigs are falling from the knives
That cut men to the ground.
Tell me, Master-Sergeant,
The way to turn and shoot.
But the Sergeant's silent
That taught me how to do it.
O Captain, show us quickly
Our place upon the map.
But the Captain's sickly
And taking a long nap.
Lieutenant, what's my duty,
My place in the platoon?
He too's a sleeping beauty,
Charmed by that strange tune.
Carentan O Carentan
Before we met with you
We never yet had lost a man
Or known what death could do.
After the war ended, Louis Simpson enrolled at the University of Paris and continued his studies. He then returned to New York City, where he worked as a book editor while doing his graduate studies. He earned a PhD from Columbia University.
He would become a respected professor of English and poetry, teaching at not only Columbia University, but also at the University of California - Berkeley and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Simpson's first poetry collection, The Arrivistes, was published in 1949. In the beginning, he was strongly devoted to traditional verse and was acclaimed for this work. However, as the years passed, he moved away from traditional styles and embraced free verse.
Whether he worked in formal or free verse, as a poet, Simpson was always known for both his strong sense of narrative and for his lyricism, which was never compromised by his narrative voice.
Louis Simpson's 1963 poetry collection, At the End of the Open Road, won him a Pulitzer Prize. Edward Hirsch, critic for the Washington Post, described it this way:
A sustained meditation on the American character... the moral genius of this book is that it traverses the open road of American mythology and brings us back to ourselves; it sees us not as we wish to be but as we are.
In this poem from At the End of the Open Road, titled In California, Simpson tips his hat to one of his favorite writers of free verse, the great Walt Whitman:
Here I am, troubling the dream coast
With my New York face,
Bearing among the realtors
And tennis-players my dark preoccupation.
There once was an epical clatter --
Voices and banjos, Tennessee, Ohio,
Rising like incense in the sight of heaven.
Today, there is an angel in the gate.
Lie back, Walt Whitman,
There, on the fabulous raft with the King and the
Duke!
For the white row of the Marina
Faces the Rock. Turn round the wagons here.
Lie back! We cannot bear
The stars any more, those infinite spaces.
Let the realtors divide the mountain,
For they have already subdivided the valley.
Rectangular city blocks astonished
Herodotus in Babylon,
Cortez in Tenochtitlan,
And here's the same old city-planner, death.
We cannot turn or stay.
For though we sleep, and let the reins fall slack,
The great cloud-wagons move
Outward still, dreaming of a Pacific.
In addition to his poetry collections, Louis Simpson also wrote nearly a dozen works of nonfiction including studies of famous poets from T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams to Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath.
He lived on Long Island until his death in September of 2012 at the age of 89.
Quote Of The Day
“The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.”
- Louis Simpson
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Louis Simpson reading one of his poems. Enjoy!
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Notes For March 26th, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 26th, 1920, This Side of Paradise, the classic first novel by the legendary American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published. In the summer of 1919, Fitzgerald, then 22 years old, had broken up with his girlfriend, Zelda Sayre.
Depressed, he spent most of the summer drunk before returning to his family's home in St. Paul, Minnesota. There, he began writing again, resuming work on his first novel, which had been rejected by publishers.
The original draft of the novel was titled The Romantic Egotist. Fitzgerald's rewrite was practically a brand new novel; only 80 pages of his original manuscript made it into the 300+ page final draft, which was retitled This Side of Paradise.
He hoped that if he became a successful novelist, he could win Zelda back. She had dumped him because she thought he would never be able to provide her with a comfortable living.
On September 4th, 1919, Fitzgerald had a friend deliver his completed manuscript to Max Perkins, an editor at Scribner's in New York. The novel was nearly rejected by the other editors, but on Perkins' insistence, they accepted it.
(Max Perkins, one of the greatest book editors and publishers of all time, not only discovered and edited F. Scott Fitzgerald's work, he also discovered and edited the novels of other great writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, and helped them get published.)
He believed that Fitzgerald was a major talent, and that This Side of Paradise would be a bestseller. The author pleaded for an immediate release, but was told that his novel wouldn't be published until the spring.
So, on March 26th, 1920, This Side of Paradise was published by Scribner's in a first edition press run of 3,000 copies. It sold out in three days, confirming Fitzgerald's prediction that he would become an overnight sensation.
Between 1920 and 1921, nearly 50,000 copies of the novel were printed. The author didn't earn a huge income from his first novel, but it sold well. He made just over $6,200 in 1920 - almost $100,000 in today's money - and the novel's success helped him earn more from his short stories, which made up the bulk of his income.
This Side of Paradise was a dark and lyrical tale of love warped by greed and status-seeking. It told the story of Amory Blaine, a poor but handsome young Midwesterner, from his early years and his education at Princeton through his service in World War I and his return home.
Blaine learns a hard lesson when his attempts at romance with wealthy debutantes fail miserably and leave him heartbroken. The novel ends with his famous summation, "I know myself, but that is all."
The style Fitzgerald employed for his first novel was a mishmash of straightforward narrative and narrative drama intertwined with letters and poems by the protagonist, Amory Blaine.
This is not a surprise, considering that Fitzgerald cobbled together different writings to form the novel. And yet, the end product turned out to be brilliant and gave readers and critics a preview of the genius that would produce The Great Gatsby five years later.
The success of his first novel wouldn't be the only prediction of Fitzgerald's to come true. After the book was accepted by Scribner's, he won Zelda back and they became a couple again.
A week after the novel was published, they were married. Unfortunately, their alcoholism and Zelda's worsening mental illness would doom their relationship. His health ravaged by his heavy drinking, F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44 after suffering his third and final heart attack.
Quote Of The Day
"All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel,This Side of Paradise. Enjoy!
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Notes For March 25th, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 25th, 1925, the famous American writer Flannery O'Connor was born. She was born Mary Flannery O' Connor in Savannah, Georgia. She described herself as "a pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex."
When she was six years old, she taught her pet chicken to walk backwards. The story made the local news, then was picked up Pathe News for one of its national newsreels. O'Connor and her chicken appeared in a newsreel segment titled Little Mary O'Connor and Her Trained Chicken.
When she was fifteen, her father died of lupus, a hereditary disease that ran in the O'Connor family. She was devastated by the loss. She graduated from the Peabody Laboratory School in 1942 and went on to earn a Social Sciences degree at the Georgia State College for Women, now known as Georgia College State University.
A year later, in 1946, she was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she had enrolled to study journalism. While in the Writers' Workshop, she became friends with some important writers and critics who taught there, including Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, and Paul Engle.
Writer and essayist Andrew Lytle, also the longtime editor of the Sewanee Review, was an early admirer of Flannery O'Connor's work. He published her short stories and others' essays on her work.
Poet and novelist Paul Engle, the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was the first to read and critique the early drafts of what would become O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood (1952).
Flannery O'Connor's writings were heavily influenced by her experiences growing up a liberal Catholic in the fiercely conservative, fundamentalist Protestant "Bible Belt" of the American South. Her style was a unique form of Southern Gothic.
Her backward (often grotesquely backward) Southern characters would undergo a transformation bringing them close to her way of thinking. She didn't shy away from controversial subjects such as racism, poverty, and the dangers of fundamentalism.
O'Connor was best known as a master of the short story, foreshadowing and irony her trademarks. She published two short story collections, A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge, published posthumously in 1965 - a year after her death.
The title story of A Good Man is Hard to Find was her most famous and brilliant short story. In it, an unnamed old woman accompanies her son Bailey and his family on their vacation to Florida. She really wants to go to Georgia to see her childhood home, and pesters Bailey until she gets her way.
The old woman's directions lead the family down an abandoned dirt road, and she realizes that her childhood home is in Tennessee, not Georgia. Frustrated, she spooks her cat, which attacks Bailey and causes him to have an accident. No one is seriously injured.
Not wanting to face Bailey's wrath, the old woman fakes an injury to gain sympathy. The family waits for a passerby to help them. A car pulls up and some men get out. One is a shirtless, bespectacled man with a gun.
He seems to be a good Samaritan, but the old woman recognizes him as an escaped murderer called The Misfit. When she identifies him as The Misfit, he tells his accomplices to murder the family. The old woman begs for her own life and tries to preach to him about Jesus.
This makes him angrier, and he tells her that he doesn't want to waste his life serving someone who may not exist, nor does he want to displease a God who may exist. Frustrated by this paradox, his philosophy is "There's no pleasure but meanness."
When the old woman reaches out to The Misfit and calls him her child, he recoils and shoots her three times. After his accomplices murder the rest of the family, The Misfit cleans his glasses and thinks about the old woman.
He sums her up by saying that "she would have been a good woman... if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." When one of his accomplices mentions how much fun they had killing the family, The Misfit angrily chides him, saying "It's no real pleasure."
Another one of Flannery O'Connor's great stories was The Life You Save May Be Your Own. It told the haunting tale of an old woman so desperate to marry off her mute daughter Lucynell that she ends up paying a poor drifter to marry the girl.
Although mute and simple, Lucynell is so beautiful that when a young man sees her asleep at a diner counter, he comments that "She looks like an angel of God." Her husband abandons her, then later, while driving as a storm is breaking, he notices a road sign that says "Drive carefully - the life you save may be your own."
O'Connor's novels took her distinctive style even further, painting dark portraits of religion and faith. Wise Blood (1952) was a dark comedy about an American soldier, Hazel Motes, who returns home after serving in Korea.
He carouses with a prostitute, then embarks on a new career path - after meeting some religious hucksters, he decides to become one himself. His war experiences convinced him that the only way to escape sin is to have no soul.
So, Motes founds the "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ," casting himself in the role of prophet. He begins to believe in his own false prophecy, which leads to his tragic and surreal downfall.
The Violent Bear It Away (1960) told an even darker story of the perversion of religion and faith. The novel opens with the death of Mason Tarwater, an insanely religious old man. Tarwater had been grooming his great-nephew Francis (whom he kidnapped shortly after he was born) to be a prophet.
After Tarwater dies, Francis goes to stay with his anti-religious uncle Rayber. Despite Rayber's intentions and Francis's own determination to resist his calling, the boy can't escape the fact that he's losing his mind.
Francis ultimately accepts his "destiny" to become a prophet and goes completely mad - both of which occur after he is drugged and raped by a man who had given him a ride.
In 1951, Flannery O'Connor was diagnosed with lupus - the disease that killed her father. The doctors gave her five years to live, but she lived for fourteen years, writing two novels and over two dozen short stories.
She also wrote over a hundred book reviews which appeared in two local Catholic newspapers. She died of lupus complications in 1964 at the age of 39. Nearly sixty years after her death, she remains one of America's most celebrated writers.
Quote Of The Day
"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, and brutal."
- Flannery O'Connor
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a rare recording of Flannery O'Connor reading her classic short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find. Enjoy!
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Notes For March 24th, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 24th, 1955, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the classic play by the legendary American playwright Tennessee Williams, opened on Broadway. The play focused on a Southern family in crisis - the affluent Pollitt family.
The Pollitts hide their dark secrets under a cloak of respectability. The extended family has gathered to celebrate the 65th birthday of patriarch Big Daddy Pollitt, the richest cotton grower in the Mississippi Delta.
The family knows that Big Daddy is dying of cancer and won't live to see another birthday, but have conspired to keep him (and his wife, Big Mama) from finding out about his terminal condition.
All of Big Daddy's kin ingratiate themselves to him, hoping to receive the lion's share of his huge estate when he dies - all of them except indifferent son Brick Pollitt, who, along with his wife Maggie, (the Cat) are having serious marital problems.
Brick is an aging, injured, detached alcoholic ex-football hero who neglects his wife and spends most of his time drinking and railing against mendacity. A desperate Maggie reveals to Brick that she had an affair with his best friend Skipper, even though she knew that Skipper was secretly gay.
Suspecting that her husband might also be gay, Maggie seduced Skipper to prevent anything from happening between the two men. The affair drove Skipper to drink, despair, and suicide.
A disgusted Big Daddy has similar suspicions. He accuses Brick of drinking to escape his guilt over not saving Skipper from suicide - because he and Skipper were more than just best friends.
Furious, Brick reveals that Big Daddy is dying. Maggie, knowing that the old man never made out a will, panics and fears that he'll disinherit Brick. She escaped a miserable childhood of grinding poverty and despair when she married into the rich Pollitt family.
The prospect of being poor again terrifies her, so she falsely claims to be pregnant to win her father in-law's sympathy. Later, Maggie throws away Brick's liquor, telling him:
We can make that lie come true. And then I'll bring you liquor, and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into!
The original Broadway production was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Ben Gazzara as Brick, Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie, and legendary folksinger-actor Burl Ives as Big Daddy.
Gazzara's understudy was a young actor named Cliff Robertson, who would go on to become a star of stage, screen, and television. But when Gazzara left the play, Jack Lord replaced him.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won Tennessee Williams a Pulitzer Prize - his second. He won his first Pulitzer for his famous play, A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1958, three years after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway, a feature film adaptation was released.
Directed by Richard Brooks, it starred Paul Newman as Brick and Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie, with Burl Ives and Madeleine Sherwood reprising their Broadway roles as Big Daddy and Big Mama.
Unfortunately, due to the stifling Hollywood Production Code in effect at the time, the screenplay toned down Tennessee Williams' play considerably, removing all the sexual elements of the story.
Richard Brooks was not the studio's first choice to direct the film; it had been offered to George Cukor, but he turned it down in disgust after reading the bowdlerized screenplay.
As for Tennessee Williams' reaction, he hated the movie so much that he told people on line for the premiere not to see it, yelling "This movie will set the industry back 50 years! Go home!"
Quote Of The Day
"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory."
- Tennessee Williams
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete live performance of Tennessee Williams' classic play,Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Friday, March 20, 2026
Notes For March 20th, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 20th, 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the classic novel by the legendary American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, was published. Like most novels of the time, it first appeared in a serialized version. It was published by The National Era, an abolitionist magazine.
The author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and her husband, Calvin Stowe, were both ferocious abolitionists and dedicated their home to the Underground Railroad - the famous secret network of safe houses for fugitive slaves traveling en route to free states.
In 1850, Congress, bowing to pressure from the South, tried to tighten the screws on the Underground Railroad by passing the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it illegal for people - even those in free states - to help fugitive slaves.
The law also compelled local law enforcement to arrest fugitive slaves and provide assistance to the vicious bounty hunters privately hired to track runaway slaves.
The free states reacted with outrage to the Fugitive Slave Act, which resulted in gross abuses. Many openly defied it. Several free states passed laws granting personal liberties, including the right to a fair trial, to fugitive slaves.
Wisconsin's state Supreme Court declared the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional. The law failed to disrupt the Underground Railroad; by the time it was passed, the network had become far more efficient. Afterward, it grew as the unjust law inspired scores of moderate abolitionists to become passionate activists.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was written as a response to the Fugitive Slave Act - to educate people about the horrors of slavery. The novel told the unforgettable story of a kind and noble slave whose faith and spirit cannot be broken by the evils of slavery.
The novel opens on a Kentucky farm owned by Arthur and Emily Shelby, who like to think that they're kind to their slaves. However, when he needs money, Arthur has no problem selling two of his slaves without regard to where they might end up.
The slaves are Uncle Tom, a wise and compassionate middle-aged man, and Harry, the son of Emily's maid, Eliza. The Shelbys' son George, who looked upon Uncle Tom as a friend and mentor, hates to see him go.
Uncle Tom and Harry are sold to a slave trader and shipped by riverboat down the Mississippi. While on the boat, Uncle Tom strikes up a friendship with Eva, a little white girl. When she falls into the river, he saves her life.
Her grateful father, Augustine St. Clare, buys Uncle Tom from the slave trader and takes him to his home in New Orleans. There, the friendship between Uncle Tom and Eva deepens. Sadly, Eva becomes severely ill and dies - but not before sharing her vision of heaven.
Moved by how much Uncle Tom meant to Eva, her father vows to help him become a free man. His racist cousin Ophelia is moved to reject her prejudice against blacks. Unfortunately, Augustine St. Clare is killed at a tavern, and his wife reneges on his promise to help Uncle Tom.
She sells him at auction to Simon Legree, who owns a plantation in Louisiana. Legree is an evil, perverse, sadistic racist who tortures his male slaves and sexually abuses the women. When Uncle Tom refuses to follow an order to whip another slave, Legree beats him savagely.
The beating fails to break Uncle Tom's spirit or his faith in God. The sight of Uncle Tom reading his bible and comforting other slaves makes Legree's blood boil. He determines to break Uncle Tom and nearly succeeds, as the daily horrors of life on the plantation erode the slave's faith and hope.
Just when it seems that Uncle Tom will succumb to hopelessness, he has two visions - one of little Eva and one of Jesus himself. Moved by these visions, Uncle Tom vows to remain a faithful Christian until the day he dies.
He encourages two fellow slaves, Cassy and Emmeline, to run away. When Simon Legree demands that Uncle Tom reveal their whereabouts, he refuses. A furious Legree orders his overseers to beat Uncle Tom to death.
As he lay dying, Uncle Tom forgives the overseers, which inspires them to repent. George Shelby arrives with money to buy Uncle Tom's freedom, but sadly, it's too late. Uncle Tom dies before he can become a free man.
George returns to his parents' farm in Kentucky and frees their slaves, telling them to always remember Uncle Tom's sacrifice and unshakable faith. That's actually just a bare outline of this classic epic novel.
The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin caused a national uproar. In the North, it was regarded as the bible of abolitionism and inspired many closet abolitionists to come out and join in the fight against slavery.
In the South, the book was regarded as an outrage. It was called utterly false and slanderous - a criminal defamation of the South. Many Southern writers who supported slavery wrote literature dedicated to debunking Harriet Beecher Stowe's expose of the horrors of slavery.
Their writings, called "anti-Tom" literature, portrayed white Southerners as benevolent supervisors of blacks - a helpless, child-like people unable to survive without the direct supervision of their white masters.
To defend herself against the South's accusations of slander and defamation, Stowe wrote and published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), a nonfiction book documenting the horrors of slavery that she both witnessed herself and researched, which inspired her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The book included surprisingly graphic descriptions of the sexual abuse of female slaves, who, in addition to being molested or raped by their white masters and overseers, were also prostituted and forced to "mate" with male slaves to produce offspring that would fetch a good price on the auction block.
When Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared in book form in 1852, it was published in an initial press run of 5,000 copies. That year, it sold 300,000 copies. Its London edition sold 200,000 copies throughout the United Kingdom. It became a hit throughout Europe as well.
Ironically, by the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, the book was out of print in the United States, as Stowe's original publisher had gone out of business. She found another publisher, and when the book was republished in 1862, the demand for copies soared.
That same year, Harriet Beecher Stowe was invited to Washington D.C. to meet with President Abraham Lincoln, who supposedly said to her, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
The novel would be adapted many times for the stage, screen, radio, and television. In the 20th century, Uncle Tom's Cabin courted a new controversy that continues to this day. African-American activists have accused the abolitionist novel of being racist itself, with its use of racial stereotypes and epithets.
These accusations, like the accusations of racism leveled against Mark Twain's classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), come from a failure to place the novel in its proper historical context and consider its overall message.
Quote Of The Day
"I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation."
- Harriet Beecher Stowe on her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Thursday, March 19, 2026
Notes For March 19th, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 19th, 1933, the famous American writer Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey. His parents were of Ukrainian-Jewish descent. Roth graduated from Newark's Weequahic High School in 1950. He attended Bucknell University and earned a degree in English.
For his graduate studies, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he earned a Master's degree in English and worked briefly as an instructor in the university's creative writing program.
Roth continued his teaching career, teaching creative writing at the University of Iowa and Princeton University. Later, he would teach comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania until he retired in 1991.
While at the University of Chicago, Roth met legendary novelist Saul Bellow and Margaret Martinson, who would become his first wife. Though they separated in 1963 and she was killed in a car accident five years later, she would have a huge impact on his writings and inspire female characters in several of his novels.
Philip Roth began his writing career by publishing short stories and reviews in various magazines. He reviewed movies for The New Republic. In 1959, his first book was published, and it established him as a major talent.
Goodbye, Columbus contained the title novella and five short stories, all of which were steeped deep in Judaism - specifically, Jewish American culture and customs.
The title novella told the story of Neil Klugman, an intelligent college graduate who has remained a poor, working class Jew with a low-paying job. He works at a library and lives with his aunt and uncle.
Neil falls in love with Brenda Patimkin, a student at Radcliffe who comes from a wealthy Jewish family. What begins as a simple summer romance evolves into a complex story of existential angst, as class differences begin to derail Neil and Brenda's relationship.
Goodbye, Columbus won Roth the National Book Award and was adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1969, starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw as Neil and Brenda. Though celebrated by critics and most readers, some Jewish groups objected to Roth's less than flattering portrayal of certain Jewish characters.
In the short story Defender of the Faith, a Jewish American Army sergeant resists when three lazy draftees try to manipulate him into granting them special favors because they are fellow Jews.
In 1962, Philip Roth and the acclaimed black novelist Ralph Ellison appeared on a panel to discuss minority representation in literature. The questions directed at Roth soon turned into denunciations, and he was accused of being a self-loathing Jew.
The label dogged him for most of his career, but Roth would strike back at his Jewish critics with his classic 1969 novel, Portnoy's Complaint, a scathing, raunchy black comedy. It's an experimental novel that takes the form of one long monologue.
The neurotic, middle-aged Alexander Portnoy rants to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel, in a monologue loaded with neuroses, complexes, and of course, sexual hang-ups. He rages at his inability to enjoy sex.
Portnoy is a self-loathing Jew who rages at the injustice of having to grow up Jewish in a gentile dominated country full of anti-Semitism. He rages at his overbearing mother, which burdens him with the heavy chains of guilt. But it's sex that frustrates him most of all.
As a teenager, Portnoy masturbated excessively, not out of lust, but as a form of narcissism. Both attracted to and repelled by gentile women, he uses and abuses them and gives them demeaning nicknames such as "the Pumpkin" and "the Monkey."
Portnoy's absurdly funny sexual exploits are described graphically - so graphically that the novel proved to be quite a shocker for readers in 1969. The book was banned in Australia. When publisher Penguin Books defied the ban and secretly printed copies of the book, the authorities tried to prosecute them and failed.
Philip Roth would write many more great novels. He was most famous for his series of Zuckerman novels, which are narrated by Roth's alter ego, Jewish writer Nathan Zuckerman. The first Zuckerman book was The Ghost Writer, published in 1979.
His 1997 Zuckerman novel, American Pastoral, won him the Pulitzer Prize. In it, Zuckerman attends his 45th high school reunion and runs into his old friend, Jerry Levov, who tells him the tragic life story of his older brother, Seymour "Swede" Levov, who recently died.
Most of the story deals with the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 70s, as Swede's teenage daughter Merry protests the horrors of the Vietnam War by becoming a domestic terrorist and bombing a post office. Years later, she remains in hiding.
American Pastoral was adapted as a feature film in 2016, directed by Ewan McGregor, who also starred in it with Jennifer Connelly and Dakota Fanning.
Other Roth novels of note include The Human Stain (2000), where Nathan Zuckerman tells the story of his new neighbor Coleman Silk, a 71-year-old college professor who falls victim to an unjust accusation.
Silk is accused of racism by two black students, which leads to his resignation. It's later revealed that Silk is actually a light-skinned black man who, for most of his life, has been passing himself off as a white Jew to escape racist persecution.
The Human Stain was adapted as a film in 2003. Directed by Robert Benton, it starred Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk and Gary Sinise as Nathan Zuckerman.
The Plot Against America (2004) is a fascinating piece of "what if" historical fiction. In it, conservative aviation hero Charles Lindbergh (in real life an anti-Semite and Hitler supporter) defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election and becomes President of the United States.
As Lindbergh establishes a cordial relationship with Hitler and keeps the U.S. out of the war, American Jews - including Roth's family - worry what will become of them.
One of Lindbergh's top cronies is car magnate Henry Ford, who in real life was a virulent anti-Semite and the author of a racist nonfiction book called The International Jew - the World's Foremost Problem (1920).
The Plot Against America was adapted as an HBO miniseries in 2020. Created and written by David Simon and Ed Burns, it starred Winona Ryder, Morgan Spector, and John Turturro.
In addition to his novels and short stories, Roth wrote nonfiction works, including an autobiography. His final novel, Nemesis, was released in October of 2010. Set in 1944, it told the story of a Jewish community in Newark, New Jersey struggling to cope with a polio epidemic.
Philip Roth died in May of 2018 at the age of 85.
Quote Of The Day
"Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts."
- Philip Roth
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a full length BBC documentary on Philip Roth. Enjoy!
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Notes For March 18th, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 18th, 1932, the legendary American writer John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. As a young boy, he would watch his mother - an aspiring writer - as she wrote short stories and tried to get them published:
One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk.... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in – and come back in.
Updike served as class president and graduated high school as valedictorian. He won a full scholarship to Harvard, where he frequently contributed articles and drawings to the Harvard Lampoon, later serving as its president until he graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with an English degree.
Instead of writing, he decided to become a graphic artist and enrolled at The Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford. His wife, Mary Pennington, whom he married a year earlier, went to England with him.
When they returned to the U.S., Updike planned to become a cartoonist, and was soon a frequent contributor of both cartoons and short stories to The New Yorker. His first published books were The Carpentered Hen (1958), a poetry collection, and The Same Door (1959), a collection of short stories.
In 1960, Updike and his family moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he would write his first novel, the first in a highly acclaimed series. It was called Rabbit, Run (1960). It told the story of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a 26-year-old kitchen gadget salesman.
Rabbit is desperate to escape the confines of an unhappy marriage and an unfulfilling middle class life. A former high school basketball player, he impulsively decides to visit Marty Tothero, his old coach.
He has dinner with Tothero and two girls, one of which is Ruth Leonard, a part-time prostitute with whom he has an affair. Rabbit abandons Ruth when his pregnant wife goes into labor. After his baby daughter is born, he reconciles with his wife, but it doesn't last, and he returns to Ruth.
His alcoholic wife starts drinking again, and accidentally drowns the baby. Rabbit tries to reconcile with her once more, but at the funeral of their daughter, his inner turmoil explodes. Proclaiming his innocence in the baby's death, Rabbit runs away and returns to Ruth.
When she tells him that she's pregnant with his child, he's relieved that she decided not to have an abortion, but he won't divorce his wife. He seemingly abandons Ruth yet again, but his fate is unclear as the novel ends.
Updike followed it with three sequels: Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990). Rabbit is Rich won him the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Rabbit at Rest won Updike another Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. The 500+ page epic novel, which ends the series with the main character's death, is considered one of his masterworks.
The two award winning sequels made him one of only three writers to win two Pulitzer Prizes. The other writers were William Faulkner and Booth Tarkington.
John Updike would write other great series of novels including the Bech series, the Scarlet Letter Triology, and the memorable Eastwick books - The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and The Widows of Eastwick (2008).
He also wrote over a dozen solo novels, over a dozen short story collections, poetry collections, and nonfiction works. In 2006, he wrote Terrorist, a timely novel about the evils of religious extremism.
It told the story of Amad Ashmawy Mulloy, an American born devout Muslim teenager who lives in New Jersey with his liberal Irish-Catholic mother, whom he both loves and hates.
He struggles to balance his strict religious practice with the modern Western world in which he lives. Amad's only real friend is Jack Levy, his high school guidance counselor - a Jewish man who rejected his own religion.
When Amad develops sexual feelings for a girl, he represses his natural impulses as per the requirements of his Islamic faith. His frustrations lead him down a path of religious extremism.
Fearing that his education in Western schools will strengthen his growing doubt about his religion, he decides to leave school and become a truck driver. His truck driving skills and religious extremism lead to his recruitment by a terrorist cell.
Amad becomes part of their plot to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in New York. On the day of the attack, his accomplices fail to show up at their planned meeting place, so he decides to carry out the suicide mission alone.
Driving a bomb-laden truck, Amad runs into Jack Levy, who begs him not to go ahead with the attack and warns him that the whole plot was a government sting.
Amad's friend and co-conspirator Charlie Chehab was an undercover CIA agent and the other terrorists beheaded him when his cover was blown. Jack also admits to having an affair with Amad's mother.
As he approaches the location of the bombing with Jack in tow, Amad finally reconsiders his extremist beliefs and decides that God doesn't want him to kill anyone. He and Jack return home to New Jersey.
John Updike is rightfully considered to be one of the greatest writers of his generation. He won over two dozen awards, including his two Pulitzer Prizes. He died of lung cancer in January 2009 at the age of 76.
Quote Of The Day
"Writing... is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable... writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy."
- John Updike
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 90-minute interview with John Updike on CSPAN-2's Book TV. Enjoy!
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Notes For March 17th, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 17th, 1948, the legendary American science fiction writer William Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina. Though he spent most of his childhood in Wytheville, Virginia - his parents' hometown - his family moved frequently due to his father's position as a manager for a large construction company.
While his family lived in Norfolk, Virginia, Gibson attended Pines Elementary School, where his teachers never encouraged him to read, much to the chagrin of his parents. Around this time, his father died, choking to death in a restaurant while on a business trip.
The family returned to Wytheville, which was a small Appalachian town, a place that Gibson described as "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent, but was deeply distrusted." He hated it.
Living in such a disturbing and surreal atmosphere led William Gibson to become a shy, withdrawn adolescent who kept to himself. When he was twelve, he "wanted nothing more than to become a science fiction writer."
A year later, without his mother's knowledge or permission, he bought an anthology featuring works by the Beat generation's greatest writers - William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs would become Gibson's favorite writer and a major influence on his work.
As a teenager, Gibson rejected his religion and read voraciously, with the works of Burroughs and Henry Miller being his favorites. At school, his grades were poor, so his mother threatened to send him to boarding school.
To her surprise, he was enthusiastic about going to boarding school, so she sent him to the Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson. Gibson hated the structure of the school, but he was glad to escape from Wytheville and his "chronically anxious and depressive" mother.
He was also glad that the school forced him to come out of his shell and develop social skills. His academic performance was strangely uneven. When he took the SAT (Standard Achievement Test) exams, his teachers were baffled by his scores. In math, he scored near zero, but his score on the written test was near perfect.
When Gibson was eighteen, his mother died. He left school without graduating and drifted through the United States and Europe, choosing a mostly solitary life and becoming part of the late 1960s counterculture.
In 1967, he was called to appear at a draft hearing, and honestly told the interviewers that his goal in life was to indulge in every mind-altering substance known to man. He was never drafted, but moved to Canada anyway.
He would later quip that he avoided the draft not out of conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, but to remain free to "sleep with hippie chicks" and smoke hashish.
After arriving in Canada, Gibson met a girl in Vancouver and spent the rest of the 1960s traveling with her, as he couldn't stand living among the American expatriate community, which was was rife with depression, suicide, and hardcore drug abuse.
He financed most of his travels with the $500 he was paid for appearing in a CBC newsreel story about the hippie subculture in Yorkville, Toronto. During their travels, Gibson and and his girlfriend spent time in countries such as Greece and Turkey.
In 1972, Gibson and his girlfriend returned to Canada. They settled in Vancouver and married. Gibson earned most of his living by scouring thrift stores for rare items priced well below their value, which he would resell to collectors at a huge profit.
When he realized that instead of working, he could receive generous financial aid from the government by going to college, he enrolled at the University of British Columbia, (UBC) from which he graduated in 1977 with a degree in English.
Gibson considered entering a Master's degree program with the topic of his thesis being hard science fiction novels as a form of fascist literature, but he changed his mind and worked at various jobs including teaching assistant in a film history course at UBC.
He also indulged in his passion for punk rock. In 1980, he attended a science fiction convention in Vancouver, which turned him off the genre, even though he had already written several early works of science fiction.
Around this time, Gibson met John Shirley, who would become his lifelong friend. Shirley was a punk rock musician turned sci-fi / horror writer. He encouraged Gibson to submit his stories for publication and introduced him to fellow sci-fi writers Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner.
When they read Gibson's stories, they proclaimed them to be "breakthrough material." So, Gibson began submitting his work, and soon, his short stories were appearing regularly in magazines such as Omni and Universe 11.
His stories were indeed breakthrough material, far outside the mainstream of science fiction. They were in the cyberpunk tradition, akin to the legendary early 1960s "cut-up" novels of his idol, William S. Burroughs.
Gibson's stories dealt with concepts like cyberspace - a term he coined which refers to a computer-simulated reality - and were written in the style of the pulp novels and noir films of the 1940s and 50s.
In 1984, Gibson's first novel was published. Neuromancer wasn't a commercial success, but word of mouth spread quickly and made the novel an overnight underground hit - a cult classic that sold over 6,500,000 copies worldwide.
It became the first novel to win all three major science fiction awards - the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award.
Neuromancer was the first novel in Gibson's classic Sprawl trilogy. It eerily predicts the development of the Internet and its World Wide Web. Set in a futuristic, dystopic Chiba, Japan, the novel tells the story of Henry Dorsett Case, a small time hustler who was once a talented computer hacker.
Then his employer caught him stealing, and as punishment, damaged his central nervous system with a mycotoxin, leaving him unable to access the global computer network with his brain-computer interface. Now, Case is an unemployable, suicidal drug addict.
While searching for a cure for his damaged nervous system in Chiba's "black clinics," Case is saved by Molly Millions, a "street samurai" and mercenary who works for Armitage, a shadowy ex-Green Beret officer.
Armitage offers to cure Case in exchange for his services as a hacker. Armitage fixes Case's nervous system but installs in his body sacs of mycotoxin that will burst if he fails to complete his work in time.
So, Case and Molly work together and form a close relationship. They don't know what Armitage really has planned, but they investigate and eventually discover the truth - he plans to merge two AI (Artificial Intelligence) entities, Wintermute and Neuromancer, into one all-powerful, godlike being.
William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy would include the novels Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). The trilogy brought the author out of obscurity and made his name as one of the all time great science fiction writers.
He would write more great novels, including the Bridge trilogy, Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999) as well as other novels and short stories.
In 1993, he wrote his first major nonfiction work, an article for Wired magazine called Disneyland with the Death Penalty, a stinging critique of life in modern Singapore.
Gibson describes Singapore as having a mega-corporation like government fixated on constraint and conformity, with a marked lack of creativity and humor. Life in Singapore is a "relentlessly G-rated experience."
It's a conservative Republican wet dream of meticulously clean streets, practically nonexistent crime, (thanks to a harsh capital punishment system where one can be executed for offenses such as drug smuggling) and a culture of mindless, vapid materialism where shopping becomes a nearly religious experience.
And yet, there are also no slums in Singapore, and instead of a visible sex trade, there are government sanctioned "health centers" which are really massage parlors where one can get far more than a massage.
The government enforces morality with strict censorship of movies, music, and the media. It places great value on marriage and procreation, and both organizes and enforces mandatory dating policies.
In his 1993 essay, Gibson predicted the explosion of online pornography and cast doubt on the resilience of Singapore's controlled, conservative society in the face of the mass exposure of its citizenry to the coming "wilds of X-rated cyberspace."
He speculated that "Singapore's destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable weirdness." Creative Review hailed Gibson's essay as "fabulously damning."
Singapore reacted to it with outrage, banning the sale of Wired magazine there. "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" became a famous catch phrase used to describe Singapore - especially by Singaporeans opposed to their country's authoritarian conservative government.
Two of Gibson's short stories were adapted as feature films. Johnny Mnemonic (1995), featuring a screenplay by William Gibson, starred Keanu Reeves in the title role. New Rose Hotel (1998), directed by Abel Ferrara, starred Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe.
Gibson also wrote for television. He penned the teleplays for two classic episodes of The X-Files (1993-2002) - Kill Switch and First Person Shooter.
William Gibson's latest novel, Agency, was published in January of 2020.
Quote of the Day
"To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing."
- William Gibson
Vanguard Video
Today's video features William Gibson discussing his most recent novel, Agency, at the Politics and Prose bookstore and coffeehouse. Enjoy!
Friday, March 13, 2026
Notes For March 13th, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 13th, 1891, Ghosts, the classic play by the legendary Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, opened in London. Like Ibsen's previous classic play, A Doll's House, it dealt with women suffering at the hands of self-centered, hypocritical, weak men.
However, Ghosts proved to be even more of a shocker to Victorian English audiences and critics because it also dealt with adultery, venereal disease, incest, and euthanasia.
The play opens with the widowed Helene Alving about to open an orphanage she built in dedication to her late husband, the respected Captain Alving. She also built the orphanage to prevent her son Oswald, a degenerate painter, from inheriting his father's wealth.
It turns out that the late, respected Captain Alving was far from respectable. He was a compulsive philanderer who died of syphilis. His wife Helene's clergyman, Pastor Manders, advised her not to leave her husband, believing that Helene's love would ultimately reform him. It didn't.
Still, Helene remained with her husband, but not because she still loved him. Her top priority was to protect the family's reputation from scandal. So, she projected a phony air of respectability and superiority. But now, she's paying the price for her moral smugness.
Her son, Oswald, has inherited Captain Alving's depraved character. He's having an affair with Regina Engstrand, his family's serving maid. His mother soon learns that he also inherited his father's syphilis, condemning him to the same fate: progressive, incurable insanity and death.
Helene's wall of denial finally crumbles when it's revealed that Regina's real father wasn't Jacob Engstrand, the carpenter who raised her - it was Captain Alving. Oswald has committed incest with his own half-sister.
At the end of the play, knowing that he will suffer the same fate as his father, Oswald asks his mother to euthanize him. Helene is left to contemplate her decision, and the audience never knows what that is.
Ghosts was perhaps the most controversial play of its time, shunned by most European theaters. Even copies of the play script were banned, but that didn't stop young libertines from gathering for secret readings and impromptu performances.
How then, you might ask, did the play's London producers get around the Lord Chamberlain - England's ferociously strict theater censor - and stage an uncensored production of Ghosts?
The same way they got around the censor to put on other controversial plays like George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession. They formed a private club called the Theatre Society and staged plays behind closed doors at their own private theater for members only.
Speaking of Shaw, he attended the premiere of Ghosts, which was a one-night-only performance, due to its extremely controversial nature. He described the audience as being "awe-struck" throughout the play.
Critics, who were either Theatre Society members themselves or guests of members, also attended. They reacted with absolute horror. Ghosts was described as:
An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly... gross, almost putrid indecorum... Nastiness and malodorousness laid on thickly as with a trowel... As foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace the boards of an English theatre... Maunderings of nook-shotten Norwegians... If any repetition of this outrage be attempted, the authorities will doubtless wake from their lethargy.
The author, Henrik Ibsen, was described as "a gloomy sort of ghoul, bent on groping for horrors by night," and his London audience was comprised of "lovers of prurience and dabblers in impropriety."
The critics were outraged that the Lord Chamberlain would allow such plays to be staged even behind closed doors for the members of a private club. Fortunately, he didn't move to censor private theatrical clubs.
Years later, Ibsen's Ghosts would be staged again in London, and the legendary Irish writer James Joyce saw the play. He loved it. Remembering how he had been denounced by moralists over his classic epic novel, Ulysses, Joyce was inspired to write a poem called Epilogue to Ibsen's Ghosts:
... Since scuttling ship Vikings like me
Reck not to whom the blame is laid,
Y.M.C.A., V.D., T.B.,
Or Harbourmaster of Port-Said.
Blame all and none and take to task
The harlot's lure, the swain's desire.
Heal by all means but hardly ask
Did this man sin or did his sire.
The shack's ablaze. That canting scamp,
The carpenter, has dished the parson.
Now had they kept their powder damp
Like me there would have been no arson.
Nay, more, were I not all I was,
Weak, wanton, waster out and out,
There would have been no world's applause
And damn all to write home about.
Quote Of The Day
"People want only special revolutions, in externals, in politics, and so on. But that's just tinkering. What is really is called for is a revolution of the human mind."
- Henrik Ibsen
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete performance of Henrik Ibsen's classic play, Ghosts, starring Dame Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh, which aired as an episode of the BBC TV series, Theatre Night. Enjoy!
Thursday, March 12, 2026
Notes For March 12th, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 12th, 1922, the legendary American writer Jack Kerouac was born. He was born Jean-Louis Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents who had emigrated from Quebec. They called him "Ti Jean," which meant "little Jean."
Kerouac's parents were both devout Catholics and ferocious anti-Semites. In an interview with the Paris Review, Kerouac recalled a time when his father assaulted a rabbi for allegedly disrespecting him.
When Jack Kerouac was four years old, his older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine, which he would write about in his 1963 novel, Visions of Gerard.
The loss of his brother would have a profound effect on him. He didn't speak English until he was six years old and began formal schooling. He continued to speak French at home.
As a teenager, Jack's athletic talents led him to become a hurdler on the high school track team and a running back on the football team. His football skills earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Columbia University, and Notre Dame.
He went to Columbia. During his freshman year, he cracked a tibia playing football and argued constantly with his coach, Lou Little, who kept him on the bench. So, he dropped out of university.
Kerouac moved to New York City, where he would meet his friends and fellow Beat writers William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and Herbert Huncke. He began a relationship with Edie Parker, whose friend and roommate, Joan Vollmer, would later marry Burroughs.
Kerouac joined the Merchant Marine in 1942. A year later, he joined the Navy and was honorably discharged - for psychiatric reasons. They diagnosed him as having a schizoid personality. By 1944, he was back in New York, where he found himself caught up in a murder.
His friend, Lucien Carr, called him for help after killing another friend, David Kammerer. When Carr, who was not gay, spurned Kammerer's sexual advances and declarations of love, the obsessed Kammerer refused to take no for an answer and stalked him relentlessly.
Carr stabbed him to death, allegedly in self-defense, but was afraid to call the police. So, Kerouac helped him dispose of the evidence and dump Kammerer's body in the Hudson River. Later, on the advice of William Burroughs, Kerouac and Carr turned themselves in.
Jack's father refused to pay his bail and disowned him. His girlfriend Edie's parents bailed him out on the condition that he marry her, so he did. Since Kammerer was seen as a disturbed, predatory homosexual, Carr served just a brief sentence for covering up the killing.
Kerouac, who had been charged as a material witness and possible accessory, was cleared of wrongdoing. Free of legal trouble, Jack began his literary career. He collaborated on a novel with William Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.
A fictionalized account of the killing of David Kammerer, it wouldn't be published in its entirety until 2008 - a raw early work featuring the burgeoning talents of Burroughs and Kerouac, whose parents moved to Queens. Jack lived with them after his marriage ended in an annulment.
Kerouac kept writing, and soon completed his first solo novel, The Town and the City, which was published in 1950 under the name John Kerouac. The epic autobiographical novel of life in rural Massachusetts, like his future works, employed a stream-of-consciousness narrative, but was not nearly as experimental.
The epic novel was cut by 400 pages prior to publication during the editing process. The reviews were good, but the novel sold poorly. Lack of commercial success failed to discourage Kerouac. On the contrary; he vowed to never again compromise his artistic vision for commercial success. He wrote constantly, both at home and while traveling the country in search of himself.
By 1951, Kerouac was living in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty. He completed the first draft of his second novel, which would go through many changes and become his greatest work. Early titles included The Beat Generation and Gone On The Road.
To write this novel, Kerouac used a new technique, one that he would continue to employ. He typed the manuscript on one long roll of paper instead of separate sheets. He did this because he found that pausing to load new sheets into his typewriter interfered with the flow of his writing, a style he called spontaneous prose.
He defined that vision in his classic essay, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose (1950), likening it to his favorite music, bebop jazz, which possessed a remarkably expressive fluidity despite its experimental, improvised nature. Not everybody got it; Truman Capote famously said of it, "That's not writing, that's typing."
It took a long time for Kerouac to get the novel published; its style was experimental and it painted a sympathetic portrait of minorities suffering from racist persecution. Editors were also uncomfortable with its graphic sexual content (which included both straight and gay sex scenes) and depictions of drug use.
Meanwhile, Kerouac's pregnant wife left him. She gave birth to his only child, a daughter named Jan, but he refused to accept that she was his daughter until she was nine years old and a blood test proved his paternity.
Not long after his daughter was born, Kerouac took off and spent several years traveling extensively throughout the U.S. and Mexico. During this time, he wrote extensively and fell into periods of depression accompanied by heavy drug and alcohol abuse.
In 1954, Kerouac came across Dwight Goddard's book, A Buddhist Bible, in a public library. It began his nearly lifelong interest in Buddhism. A year later, he wrote a biography of the Buddha, Wake Up, which would be published posthumously, in a serialized version, by Tricycle: The Buddhist Review from 1993-95.
In 1957, after being rejected numerous times over the last several years, Kerouac's second novel, the classic On The Road, was bought by Viking Press. They demanded major revisions, which included removing most of the sexual content.
Based on Kerouac's travels throughout America and Mexico with his best friend, Beat icon and future Merry Prankster Neal Cassady, the novel told the story of two disillusioned young men in postwar America embarking on an existentialist journey in search of themselves.
Along the way, they make friends, enjoy the pleasures of wine, women, grass, and jazz, and earn a few bucks to keep the trip going. In the end, the narrator finds himself and settles down with his true love, but his self-absorbed best friend hits the road again for more kicks.
Since Kerouac had used the real names of his relatives and friends, his publisher, fearing lawsuits, demanded that he use pseudonyms. So, Kerouac became Sal Paradise and Neal Cassady became Dean Moriarty. Allen Ginsberg was named Carlo Marx, and William Burroughs became Old Bull Lee.
The publication of On The Road brought Kerouac rave reviews, good money, and nearly overnight fame. He was dubbed "the king of the Beat generation." He soon developed a distaste for celebrity, as not everyone appreciated his novel.
Conservatives believed that On The Road was the bible of immorality and despised its popularity with young people. Once, Kerouac was attacked outside a bar in New York by three conservative men who accused him of corrupting the youth of America. They beat him savagely.
Nonetheless, his celebrity continued to grow. In 1959, he made a memorable appearance on The Steve Allen Show, reading from On The Road and an early novel, Visions Of Cody. Allen accompanied him on the piano.
During the years Kerouac traveled before the publication of On The Road, he had written the first drafts of what would become his next ten novels. He continued to work on them. His classic novel The Dharma Bums was published in 1958.
Also autobiographical, the novel follows Ray Smith (Kerouac) as he goes on a journey in search of enlightenment, which he finds while communing with the outdoors, (hiking, bicycling, and mountain climbing) traveling aimlessly, and discovering jazz clubs, poetry readings, drunken parties, and of course, Buddhism.
The existentialist novel is most famous for Kerouac's depiction of the legendary 1955 Six Gallery Reading in San Francisco, where the East and West coast factions of Beat literati met to read their works.
The co-promoter of the event was Kerouac's friend, legendary poet Allen Ginsberg, who performed his first public reading of his celebrated classic poem, Howl, which appears in the novel as Wail.
The Dharma Bums became a huge hit with literary critics and readers, who rightfully declared it Kerouac's second masterpiece. Unfortunately, the novel was rejected by the leaders of the American Buddhist community.
Disillusioned and depressed, Kerouac abandoned Buddhism and returned to Catholicism. To care for his elderly mother and escape his celebrity, he moved to Northport, New York. He continued to write and published a succession of memorable novels.
These included Visions Of Cody, Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Lonesome Traveler, and Big Sur. He also wrote collections of poetry.
As a poet, Kerouac was famous for making the Japanese haiku popular in America. His haiku did not follow the traditional three line, seventeen syllable structure, as he knew that more words could be formed in seventeen English syllables than in seventeen Japanese syllables.
He wrote his haiku shorter to make them more authentic. His 1959 spoken word album, Blues and Haikus, featured a lengthy reading of haiku, accompanied by the jazz riffs of legendary saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims.
In the 1960s - the last years of his life - Kerouac's drinking problem grew worse. A symbol of the rebellious, free spirited, and disaffected youth whose writings defined one generation (the Beats) and set the stage for the next, (the Hippies) Kerouac changed dramatically.
Too old to hit the road again, not knowing what to do with his life, bitter, and suffering from depression and the ravages of his increasingly severe alcoholism, he crashed, burned, and plunged into a quagmire.
In recent years, scholars have speculated that Jack Kerouac's downfall was the end product of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) resulting from multiple head injuries. When he played football in college, he suffered a concussion so severe that he was knocked unconscious. When he woke up, he didn't know who or where he was, or what he was doing on the field.
It wasn't until after he'd taken that horrific beating outside the bar in New York, which included having his head slammed repeatedly into the pavement by the conservative thugs who attacked him, that his friends began to notice startling changes in his behavior.
The formerly shy, quiet, fun loving and sweet-natured writer began suffering severe mood swings which ranged from sudden outbursts of rage to crippling depression with unexplained crying jags that could last all night. He was coming apart at the seams and it only got worse. His alcohol and drug use escalated alarmingly.
In a letter to a friend, Kerouac himself wrote, "I think I got brain damage."
He had become as fanatically devout a Catholic as his mother and politically conservative. He denounced the hippies, supported the Vietnam War, and befriended conservative icon William F. Buckley. Though he never inherited his parents' racial prejudices, he did inherit their hatred of communists.
After his mother died, a devastated Kerouac drank harder than ever, consuming a large quantity of alcohol every day. On October 21st, 1969, he was rushed to the hospital after he began hemorrhaging from cirrhosis - veins in his esophagus had burst.
Jack Kerouac died the classic drunkard's death, drowning in his own blood at the age of 47. He had said, "I'm Catholic and I can't commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death." Which is exactly what he did.
In 2007, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kerouac's classic novel, Viking Press finally published the original, unexpurgated version of On The Road. The novel would finally be adapted as a feature film in 2012.
Quote Of The Day
"I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures."
- Jack Kerouac
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 50-minute documentary on Jack Kerouac. Enjoy!
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Notes For March 11th, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 11th, 1916, the famous American children's book writer and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was born Jacob Ezra Katz; his poor Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Benjamin and Augusta Katz, called him Jack.
As a little boy, it became evident that he was artistically gifted. In 1924, when he was eight years old, he painted a sign for a local storekeeper and was paid twenty-five cents for it.
Jack soon developed a passion for fine arts, and his dream was to become an artist. His mother was delighted, but his father was strongly opposed to him becoming an artist and constantly discouraged him, telling him that he would never make it as an artist.
He excelled in art in elementary school and won a medal for it in junior high. While he attended Thomas Jefferson High School, one of Jack Katz's oil paintings, which depicted unemployed men warming themselves by a fire, was selected by the Scholastic Publishing Company as the winner of its national contest.
The medal he was awarded meant a lot to Jack, and was a major source of encouragement for him. Nevertheless, his father kept discouraging him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional artist. The country was in the grip of the Great Depression, and Benjamin Katz didn't believe his son could earn a living as an artist.
He wanted him to aim for something practical and become a professional sign painter. Once, he brought Jack some tubes of paint and told him:
If you don’t think artists starve, well, let me tell you: one man came in the other day and swapped me a tube of paint for a bowl of soup.
At school, Jack Katz continued to excel in art. When he graduated high school, he was awarded the senior class medal for excellence in art. Not long afterward, his father collapsed on the street and died of a heart attack.
The police called Jack in to identify the body. He did, and was stunned to discover that in his wallet, his father, who had derided his dream so relentlessly, kept a collection of newspaper clippings that reported on his son's artistic achievements.
Jack later told his friend, poet Lee Bennett Hopkins:
I found myself staring deep into [my father’s] secret feelings. There in his wallet were worn and tattered newspaper clippings of the notices of the awards I had won. My silent admirer and supplier, he had been torn between his dread of my leading a life of hardship and his real pride in my work.
After his father's death, Jack won three scholarships to art school, but he couldn't go because he had to work to help support his family. So, during the day, he worked for the WPA (Works Progress Administration) and at night, he took art classes when he could.
He would leave the WPA three years later to work as a comic book illustrator. By 1942, he was drawing the backgrounds for the popular Captain America comic strip. In April of 1943, He enlisted in the Army, which took advantage of his artistic talent and trained him to design camouflage patterns.
After the war ended, Jack returned home to New York, then left again to spend a year studying art in Paris. When he came back, he resumed his career as a professional artist.
He painted covers for Reader's Digest and drew illustrations for The New York Times Book Review and magazines such as Playboy and Colliers. His oil paintings were sold via Fifth Avenue shop window displays.
Jack made good money, but was haunted by the specter of anti-Semitism that ran rampant in America during the late 1940s and early 1950s. So, Jacob Ezra "Jack" Katz legally changed his name to Ezra Jack Keats.
In 1954, he embarked on a new phase of his art career when he was hired to illustrate a children's book called Jubilant For Sure, written by Elisabeth Hubbard Lansing. "I didn't even ask to get into children's books," he later observed. He fell into it through a contract job.
Jack's memorable illustrations were a hit, and he would be hired to illustrate many more children's books. By 1960, he had decided to write and illustrate his own.
His first book, My Dog is Lost (1960), set the stage for his future works. It told the poignant story of Juanito, a little Puerto Rican boy who just arrived in New York City. He doesn't speak English, and he has lost his dog.
Two years later, Keats completed his next book, which established him as one of the greatest children's book writers of all time. The Snowy Day (1963) featured a 4-year-old black boy named Peter as its hero, as he explores his neighborhood one winter day.
The progressive children's book, with its beautiful illustrations (using Keats's trademark technique that blended gouache with collage) won that year's prestigious Caldecott Award for the most distinguished picture book for children.
Keats described the genesis of The Snowy Day as follows:
Then began an experience that turned my life around—working on a book with a black kid as hero. None of the manuscripts I’d been illustrating featured any black kids—except for token blacks in the background. My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along. Years before, I had cut from a magazine a strip of photos of a little black boy. I often put them on my studio walls before I’d begun to illustrate children’s books. I just loved looking at him. This was the child who would be the hero of my book.
Keats' hero, Peter, would return for six more books. The last one, A Letter To Amy (1968) finds the now preteen Peter nervous about inviting a girl - his friend Amy, whom he has a crush on - to his birthday party.
So, he writes her a special invitation letter and rushes out to mail it, braving a thunderstorm. On the way, he runs into Amy - literally - and accidentally knocks her down. Will she come to his party now? If so, how will the other boys react when they find out that Peter invited a girl?
Keats would write and illustrate many more classic children's books, including Whistle for Willie (1964), Jennie's Hat (1966), Apt. 3 (1971), Dreams (1974), and The Trip (1978).
All together, he would write and /or illustrate over 85 children's books. The books he wrote would be translated into nineteen languages, including Japanese. Hugely popular in Japan, the city of Tokyo honored Keats with a parade. An ice skating rink in Japan was named after him to commemorate the publication of his book Skates!
Ezra Jack Keats died of a heart attack in 1983 at the age of 67. Though he loved children and they loved him just as much, he never married and had any of his own.
Quote Of The Day
"I wanted to show an ordinary human situation, about a boy who has a crush on a girl, and the magic of what it's like in the city when it rains... I wanted to reflect the quality of magic which transforms the city in so many ways."
- Ezra Jack Keats on his children's book, A Letter To Amy (1968).
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a rare 1970 interview with Ezra Jack Keats on Temple University's Profiles in Literature series. Enjoy!