Notes For April 24th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 24th, 1891, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the classic novel by the legendary Irish writer Oscar Wilde, was published. Like most novels of the time, it previously appeared in a serialized format. It had been published in Lippincot's Monthly Magazine the previous year.

For its debut in book form, Wilde had tweaked the manuscript, revising some sections and adding new chapters. This was the only novel that Wilde, who was best known as a playwright, ever wrote.

A famous, anonymously published gay erotic novel called Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal (1893) would be credited to Wilde, but it was most likely a collaborative effort written by his friends, with Wilde serving as editor.

Unlike his famous satirical comic plays, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a horror novel and considered one of the all time classics of the genre. But it's really more than a horror novel - it's an intriguing philosophical and satiric study of human nature - specifically, the nature of sin.

The novel opens with sensitive artist Basil Hallward painting the portrait of a handsome young man named Dorian Gray. Hallward is awestruck by Dorian's beauty and obviously infatuated with him.

In Dorian, he has found his muse. He believes that the young man's beauty is responsible for boosting his stagnant creative juices to new heights. While Hallward paints his portrait of Dorian, his friend, Lord Henry "Harry" Wotton, observes them and lectures them in his hedonistic philosophy.

To Lord Wotton, the only things that matter in life are beauty and the fulfillment of the senses. The shallow, narcissistic Dorian Gray couldn't agree more. Realizing that his good looks will fade with age, Dorian proclaims that he'd sell his soul if only his portrait could age while he remains young and beautiful.

He decides to become Lord Wotton's protege and explore the pleasures of the senses. His first stop is the theater, where he becomes smitten with Shakespearean actress Sibyl Vane. Dorian courts Sibyl and proposes marriage. She accepts, deliriously happy at the idea of marrying the handsome young man she calls her Prince Charming.

Her protective brother James, suspicious of Dorian's character, vows to kill him if he harms her. Dorian invites Basil Hallward and Lord Wotton to see Sibyl perform in Romeo and Juliet. More interested in love than in acting, Sibyl gives a lackluster performance. Dorian dumps her.

He tells her that her only beauty was in her acting, and now that it's gone, he's no longer interested in her. He leaves her heartbroken and returns home to find that his portrait has adopted a subtle sneer and aged a little.

Dorian decides to reconcile with Sibyl, but it's too late - Lord Wotton informs him that she committed suicide. He dismisses the tragic act and decides to devote his life to the pleasures of the senses.

Over the next eighteen years, Dorian Gray explores every possible desire on his path of debauchery. He never ages, remaining young and handsome while his portrait becomes an aged, hideously ugly reminder of his sins and corrupted soul that torments him.

One night, Basil Hallward visits Dorian to see if the rumors of his decadence are true. He's shocked to find that Dorian hasn't aged in almost twenty years. Dorian shows him the hideous portrait.

Blaming the artist for what the portrait and he himself has become, Dorian murders Basil in a fit of rage. Then he blackmails a chemist friend into helping him dispose of the body and takes off to France.

At an opium den in Paris, Dorian crosses paths with Sibyl Vane's vengeful brother James, who tries to shoot him. Dorian talks James into believing that he's too young to be Dorian Gray. After Dorian flees, a woman tells James that the young man was Dorian - a man who never ages.

Dorian fears for his life until James is killed in a hunting accident. Later, Dorian tells Lord Wotton of his strange fate and vows to change his ways and become a good man. He begins by not breaking the heart of his latest paramour, Hetty Merton.

Wondering if his portrait has changed, Dorian finds that it has become uglier than ever. He realizes that his actual motivations for becoming a good man were selfishness and curiosity rather than genuine atonement for his sins.

He knows that he can only be absolved by making a full and honest confession to the murder of Basil Hallward, but fears the repercussions of doing so. Left with no other alternative, Dorian picks up the knife that he killed Basil with, and in a rage, plunges it into the heart of his portrait.

Aroused by the scream heard from within Dorian's locked room, his servants call the police. This is what they find:

When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.

The publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray caused a sensation and a furor in Victorian England. Although Wilde had toned down the homoeroticism prevalent in the original serialized version, it remained in the book. That wasn't the only objection.

One newspaper's literary critic denounced the novel for "its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophizing, its contaminating trail of garish vulgarity."

Oscar Wilde said of his novel, "I wrote this book entirely for my own pleasure... whether it becomes popular or not is a matter of absolute indifference to me."

Five years after its publication, Wilde (the married father of two children) was publicly outed as a homosexual by the Marquess of Queensberry, the brutal, hateful father of his boyfriend, Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas.

Convicted of "gross indecency" - the legal term for homosexual acts that were illegal under British law - Wilde would serve two years in prison for the crime of being gay in Victorian England. After his release, broke and broken, he settled at the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris.

There, it's been said, he lived the uninhibited gay life that had been denied him in England. He died of cerebral meningitis on November 30th, 1900, at the age of 46.

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Quote Of The Day

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"There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

- Oscar Wilde

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Oscar Wilde's classic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Enjoy!

Notes For April 23rd, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 23rd, 1564, the legendary English writer William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. No attendance records survived, but scholars believe that he began his formal education at the King's New School in Stratford.

In 1582, at the age of eighteen, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years his senior and pregnant with his daughter, Susanna.

Two years later, the couple would have twins - son Hamnet and daughter Juliet. Hamnet would die of unknown causes at the age of eleven, devastating Shakespeare and affecting his writing.

There are few if any historical traces of Shakespeare's life between 1585 (when the twins were born) and 1592, when he appeared on the scene (no pun intended) as an actor and playwright.

As a young actor, Shakespeare belonged to a company of players known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men. They would become the leading theatrical troupe in London. In 1603, when James I became king following the death of Queen Elizabeth, he awarded Shakespeare's company a royal patent.

The company changed its name to the King's Men. They had already built their own theater - the Globe - on the banks of the Thames. They later took over the Blackfriars indoor theater.

These theaters were built on the outskirts of London to avoid the city's strict censorship laws. Still, Shakespeare found his plays thoroughly scrutinized for subversive political content by the English government.

Shakespeare acted in his own plays as well as in the works of others, but he soon quit acting and devoted himself exclusively to play writing. When he acted in his own plays, he preferred to play kings. He made a tradition of playing the ghost of Hamlet's murdered father in his productions of Hamlet.

Beginning in 1594, Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions (magazine sized volumes) and became bestsellers. His first recorded plays were his histories Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI.

More than just chronicles of English (and other) historical events, Shakespeare's histories were also morality plays like his other works, depicting kings Richard III, Henry IV, and Henry V as having the same flaws as other men, though on a larger and more tragic scale.

He was also known for his classic comedies and tragedies. His comedies included such masterpieces as A Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Taming of the Shrew.

His tragedies - the plays he was most famous for - included such masterworks as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Julius Caesar.

Shakespeare was also famous as a poet. Of course, the lines in his plays were poetry - literally, as they were written in blank verse - but as a poet, he was most famous for his narrative poems and sonnets.

His narrative poems included epic works such as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. His sonnets were numbered, from 1 to 154. They addressed three different characters, which scholars have labeled The Fair Youth, The Dark Lady, and The Rival Poet.

In his Fair Youth sonnets, Shakespeare addresses the young man in loving and romantic language, which has led some scholars to speculate that the author may have been bisexual.

The Dark Lady sonnets were supposedly addressed to the author's mistress, and the Rival Poet was most likely one of his contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe or George Chapman.

Though Shakespeare's sonnets were first published in 1609 and have been republished ever since, evidence suggests that he never wanted them to be published. He intended to share them privately with his friends.

By 1607, Shakespeare wrote few plays. The last known work attributed to him appeared in 1613. He died on April 23rd, 1616 - his 52nd birthday. He achieved fame and fortune during his lifetime, but it wouldn't be until over a century after his death that he was recognized as the greatest dramatist of all time.

Scholarly works on Shakespeare and his writings published in the 18th century by such famous academics as Samuel Johnson and Edmond Malone brought attention to Shakespeare's genius. In the 19th century, Shakespeare was enshrined as England's national poet.

He was championed throughout Europe by legendary writers such as Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal, and Victor Hugo. As the Eastern world opened itself to the West, Shakespeare became an ambassador of Western culture. His works remain hugely popular throughout Asia today.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, a small minority of scholars started to question if William Shakespeare had actually written the plays that bear his name. Some have speculated that other authors of the time, such as Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe, may have written them.

Marlowe, a great playwright second only to the Bard, had been a secret agent for the English government. A popular theory suggests that he faked his death for reasons of safety, then used an actor named William Shakespeare as a front for his future plays.

A more mundane theory states that Shakespeare's plays were a collaborative effort, written by Shakespeare and the actors in his company. All these theories are just that - theories that currently cannot and may never be proven.

The timeless themes of Shakespeare's plays make them adaptable at any time and by any culture. In 1957, the legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa released his classic film Throne of Blood - an adaptation of Macbeth set in feudal Japan. A more recent adaptation of Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart, sets Shakespeare's classic tragedy in Soviet Russia during World War II.

William Shakespeare's writings had a lasting impact on the very language we speak. Scholars say that the evolution of Middle English (1066-1500) into Early Modern English (1500-1800) owes itself mostly to Shakespeare, whose writings added a thousand new words to the English language.

As Hamlet once said, the play's the thing.

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Quote Of The Day

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"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts..."

- William Shakespeare, from his play As You Like It.

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of William Shakespeare's sonnets. Enjoy!

Notes For April 19th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 19th, 1824, the legendary English poet Lord Byron died in Aetolia-Acarnania, Greece, at the age of 36. Born George Gordon Byron in January of 1788 in Dover, England, he established himself as one of the greatest English Romantic poets of all time.

He was also a master of dramatic verse, and his epic poems, such as The Corsair (1813), The Siege of Corinth (1816), and the unfinished Don Juan (1819-1824), are among his most memorable works.

In life, Byron proved to be as romantic and flamboyant as his poetry. He was brilliant, most likely bipolar, and a militant agnostic. Although a nobleman himself, he had little use for the British aristocracy and even less use for the monarchy.

He once gave a stirring speech before Parliament condemning the Church of England (the official clerical body of the British Empire) for its intolerance of other faiths.

An outspoken liberal and libertine, Byron's intellect, literary talent, charisma, flamboyance, excesses, and scandals made him a huge celebrity - a rock star of his time. Openly bisexual though he preferred women, Byron criticized the persecution of homosexuals by British law.

He also condemned the pro-Christian legal system's discrimination against atheists. His best friend, the legendary poet Percy Shelley, was denied custody of his children because he didn't believe in God.

Of his many female lovers, Lord Byron's most notorious relationship was with the married Lady Caroline Lamb, who had famously described him as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" - yet it was she who went mad after Byron ended their relationship.

Refusing to take no for an answer, she began stalking him, both privately and publicly, resulting in a huge scandal. It wouldn't be the only scandal to plague him.

He was also accused of homosexuality (considered both a disgrace and a crime in 19th century England) and having an incestuous affair with his older half-sister Augusta Leigh, resulting in her pregnancy.

While Byron was openly bisexual, the idea that he had an affair with his half-sister, to whom he was very close, is highly debatable. When he wasn't writing poetry, Lord Byron dedicated himself to political causes.

In 1809, he took a seat in Parliament's House of Lords, which he used to strongly advocate for social reform. He opposed capital punishment and laws that compromised one's civil liberties and / or encroached on the private lives of British subjects.

An animal lover, Byron kept many exotic pets, including a fox, an eagle, a crocodile, and an Egyptian crane. While studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, he kept a bear as a pet in response to the college's prohibition of keeping dogs as pets. He publicly suggested that the bear should apply for a fellowship at Trinity.

Byron's favorite pet was his dog - a Newfoundland called Boatswain. When the dog contracted rabies, Byron nursed him until he died, unafraid of contracting the disease himself. He eulogized Boatswain in a poem called Epitaph to a Dog (1808).

By 1816, embittered and plagued with scandal, (thanks to Lady Caroline Lamb's public smear campaign) Byron left England and lived throughout Europe, mostly in Italy and Greece, until his death in 1824.

A year earlier, he'd left his home in Genoa to join the famous Greek statesman Alexandros Mavrokordatos in his fight for Greece's independence from the Ottoman Empire. It would not be Byron's first voyage to Greece or his first conflict with the Ottoman Empire.

Byron had visited Athens several years earlier, interested in both Greek culture and the country's acceptance of homosexuality. While staying there, he met a handsome French boy named Nicolo Giraud who became his friend, traveling companion, and lover.

While living in Venice in 1816, Byron became acquainted with a Mechitarist (Armenian Catholic) priest who introduced him to Armenian culture. Fascinated, Byron attended lectures on Armenian history and learned the Armenian language.

He would help introduce Armenian culture to Western Europe and publicly support Armenia's struggle for independence against the Ottoman Empire. Since the Armenians were largely Christian, the Muslim Ottomans oppressed them ruthlessly.

So, in August of 1823, when Byron learned of Greece's struggle against the Ottomans, he set sail for Kefalonia in the Ionian Islands. His first mission was to help rebuild the Greek naval fleet, and he spent £4000 of his own money (the equivalent of nearly £400,000 in today's money) to prepare the fleet for war.

By December, he joined Alexandros Mavrokordatos, to whom the Greek military was loyal, in Messolonghi. After he and Mavrokordatos supervised the training of the troops, Byron was given command of a regiment. The plan was to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto, located at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth.

Before the fleet could set sail for Lepanto, Byron fell ill. Although the bloodletting treatment (it was thought that draining a patient of small quantities of blood would speed up the healing process) weakened him further, he began to recover. By April, he caught a nasty cold which was aggravated by more bloodletting.

Lord Byron lapsed into a violent fever and died on April 19th. He was 36 years old. It is believed that Byron contracted sepsis (blood poisoning) as the result of bloodletting treatments performed with unsterilized medical instruments.

After he died, Greece's national poet, Dionysios Solomos, wrote a poem in his honor called To the Death of Lord Byron. He was embalmed, his heart and lungs were removed, and the rest of his remains sent to England.

The fate of Byron's heart and lungs is unclear. An urn containing the ashes of both organs was supposedly lost when the Ottomans sacked Messolonghi in 1825. Some believe that the urn only contained the ashes of Byron's lungs, and that his heart is still in Messolonghi.

To this day, he is considered a national hero in Greece. It has been said that had he lived and led his men to victory against the Ottomans, he might have become the King of Greece, but that's highly unlikely.

When news of Lord Byron's death reached England, people were shocked and saddened despite the scandals that had plagued him in life. Huge crowds came to pay their respects as he lay in state in London. Byron was denied a Christian burial at Westminster Abbey for reason of "questionable morality."

He would later be buried at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham. At her request, Ada Lovelace, the love child he never knew, was buried next to him. She became famous in her own right for her collaboration with Charles Babbage on the analytical engine, a precursor to the computer.

After Byron's burial, his friends raised a thousand pounds for a statue of him to be made by legendary Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, an admirer of Byron's.

The statue would languish in storage for ten years, as most British institutions refused to host it on their premises. Finally, his alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge, agreed to place the statue in its library.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Those who will not reason are bigots, those who cannot are fools, and those who dare not are slaves."

- Lord Byron

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading of Lord Byron's classic poem, Darkness. Enjoy!

Notes For April 18th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 18th, 1958, a federal court ruled that the famous American poet Ezra Pound be released from a hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, DC. It would mark the third act in a life drama of genius tempered by insanity - and ignorance.

Pound had been committed to the psychiatric hospital in 1946 after doctors found him not competent to stand trial for treason. During the war, Pound, who had lived in Italy for twenty years, had recorded propaganda radio broadcasts for the Mussolini regime.

After his arrest, Pound was sent to a brutal military prison where he was put in one of its "death cells" - a 6x6 foot cage perpetually lit by floodlights.

There, he spent three weeks in isolation, denied a bed, reading material, physical exercise, and communication with everyone but the chaplain. To prevent him from killing himself, his belt and shoelaces were confiscated.

Pound lost what little sanity he had left. Diagnosed as a schizophrenic with narcissistic personality disorder, he was sent back to the United States and committed to the St. Elizabeth hospital for the criminally insane, where he would languish for over a decade.

Ezra Pound was born in Idaho in 1885, but grew up in Pennsylvania. He came from a fiercely conservative Protestant family whose religion was steeped deep in anti-Semitism. His grandfather was a powerful Republican congressman.

As a boy, Pound attended military school, where he learned the importance of discipline and submission to authority for the greater good, and the erratic, self-destructive pattern of behavior that ruled his life took root.

And yet, he was also an intelligent, conceited, and independent young man who believed that discipline and submission were tools with which to shape the unwashed, barely literate masses into a decent orderly society - not for superior people like him. He wanted to be a poet.

When it came to his own liberty, the young fascist in training took great pleasure in challenging authority. In 1907, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he taught Romance languages at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

Although fiercely conservative himself and teaching at a conservative college, Pound described the conservative town of Crawfordsville as "the sixth circle of Hell" - he loathed conservative small towns.

Pound's landladies caught him in flagrante delicto with a stranded chorus girl he'd invited to stay in his apartment and kicked him out. When word of this scandalous act got back to the college, he was fired.

Finding his own country hopelessly provincial, Pound went to Europe, which he loved. When he was thirteen, he'd gone on a European tour with his mother and aunt. On his return, he settled in London, where he struck up friendships with the great poets of the day.

Pound also burst onto the literary scene himself. Along with his old girlfriend, the famous poet Hilda Dolittle, he founded the Imagism movement, the opposite of Romantic poetry. He aimed for verse with clear imagery and devoid of unnecessary wordiness.

During the first world war, Pound championed the works of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and other authors whose works were considered too experimental for publication. He helped get Joyce's classic debut novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man published.

Pound also began writing his most famous work - an unfinished epic poem called The Cantos, the first volume of which was published in 1924. It's rightfully considered one of the most important works of 20th century modernist poetry - and one of the most controversial.

The horrors of the Great War led Pound, who was already an anti-Semite, to believe in the anti-Semitic mythology spawned by the conflict. He believed that the war had been engineered and manipulated - on both sides - by Jewish bankers for their own profit.

Regarding the English as the willing slaves of the Jews, he moved to Paris in 1921. There, he connected with the great writers of the Lost Generation, including Tristan Tzara and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway and Pound became good friends.

Like most of Ezra Pound's literary friends, Hemingway admired his talent and liked him as a friend, but had no use for his politics. Another of Pound's friends, the famous poet Marianne Moore - who was herself conservative - also deplored his fascism.

After living in Paris for three years, Pound's physical health was deteriorating, and he had suffered what Hemingway called "a small nervous breakdown." He moved to the warmer climate of Italy, where he became enamored with dictator Benito Mussolini.

In 1927, Pound launched his own literary magazine, which would feature the works of his friends, including Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and William Butler Yeats. Yet, the magazine ultimately flopped because of Pound's own writings.

As his mental state worsened, so did his writing. His editorials were often rambling, incoherent, and just plain bizarre. The man who championed fascism also praised Lenin and Confucius in his editorials!

When war came to Europe again, Ezra Pound, now totally demented and paranoid, believed that if the Allies won, the world would be enslaved by the Jews. So, he wrote and recorded propaganda radio broadcasts for which he was paid well.

These ten-minute broadcasts, filled with anti-Semitism and paranoid rants, aired on English language radio stations in Italy and Germany. After Mussolini was overthrown and executed, Pound and his mistress were seized by armed partisans, but later released.

Fearing for their lives, they turned themselves in at a nearby U.S. military post. While Pound awaited trial in a military prison, a reporter for the Philadelphia Record managed to get an interview with him.

He described Mussolini as an "imperfect character who lost his head" and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, who had just committed suicide following Germany's defeat, as a modern day male Joan of Arc - "a saint."

Ezra Pound would spend more than ten years in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. His release in 1958 came about mostly due to letter writing campaigns launched by his friends, including Ernest Hemingway, who used his clout as a Nobel Prize winner.

Pound's friends all agreed that he was just a poor, sick, nasty yet harmless old man who should be pitied. The psychiatrists agreed that he was no longer a danger to himself or others. After his release, he moved to Naples. When he arrived, he gave the press the fascist salute.

Prior to his release, Pound publicly claimed to have renounced his anti-Semitism, but privately, he had corresponded with John Kasper, a prominent Ku Klux Klan leader who was later jailed for bombing a school because it allowed a black girl to attend.

In his later years, Pound tried to finish his magnum opus, The Cantos, but found that his talent had dried up. He couldn't write anymore. One of the finest poets of his time, and his talent was gone, his legacy forever tarnished.

Ezra Pound finally found clarity of thought and genuine repentance in his old age. In 1967, at the age of 82, he met legendary poet Allen Ginsberg in Venice. During their talk, Pound summed up his personal and artistic failings:

My own work does not make sense. A mess... my writing, stupidity and ignorance all the way through... the intention was bad, anything I've done has been an accident, in spite of my spoiled intentions the preoccupation with stupid and irrelevant matters... but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban anti-Semitic prejudice, all along that spoiled everything... I found after 70 years that I was not a lunatic but a moron. I should have been able to do better... it’s all doubletalk... it’s all tags and patches... a mess.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."

- Ezra Pound

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a rare recording of Ezra Pound reading from his classic epic poem, The Cantos. Enjoy!

Notes For April 17th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 17th, 1981, the original, unexpurgated version of Sister Carrie, the classic, controversial novel by the famous American writer Theodore Dreiser, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Dreiser, then 28 years old, wrote the original manuscript of Sister Carrie in eight months, between 1899 and 1900. The first publisher he approached found his writing "[Not] sufficiently delicate to depict without offense to the reader the continued illicit relations of the heroine."

Fearing the novel would never be published in its original version, Dreiser began work on a major rewrite. With help from his wife and his friend and fellow writer Arthur Henry, he cut 40,000 words and made other changes, including an alternate ending.

When Dreiser approached publisher Doubleday, Page and Company with his new manuscript, junior partner Walter Page loved the novel and accepted it for publication, offering the author a verbal contract. Unfortunately, senior partner Frank Doubleday had a different reaction.

Doubleday found Sister Carrie extremely distasteful and unsuitable for publication, but Page's contract with Dreiser was binding, so he couldn't cancel it. So, he decided to sabotage the novel instead. He refused to promote the book in any way.

Not only that, Doubleday gave it a bland, red cover, with only the names of the novel and the author on it. Less than 500 copies were sold. When Doubleday's wife complained that the novel was too sordid, he withdrew it from circulation completely.

Theodore Dreiser earned only $68.40 from the ill-fated first publication of Sister Carrie. The ordeal drove the writer to a nervous breakdown and turned him off writing for ten years. Ironically, it also ended up saving his life.

In 1912, Dreiser had originally planned to book passage home from England on the Titanic. Unable to afford tickets for the ill-fated luxury ocean liner, he sailed home earlier on a less expensive passenger ship.

Sister Carrie was later republished when Frank Norris, a reader for Doubleday, sent a few copies to reviewers who raved about it. All future editions of the novel would come from the edited version of the manuscript.

Still controversial even in its edited version, the novel told the story of 18-year-old Caroline "Carrie" Meeber, a young girl living an unhappy life in rural Wisconsin. So, Carrie takes a train to Chicago, where she has made arrangements to move in with her older sister Minnie and her brother-in-law, Sven.

On the train, Carrie meets a traveling salesman named Charles Drouet. He is attracted to her and they exchange information. Carrie finds life at her sister's apartment not much happier than it was in Wisconsin. To earn her keep, Carrie takes a job at a shoe factory.

She finds her co-workers (both male and female) vulgar and the working conditions squalid, and the job takes a toll on her health. After getting sick, Carrie loses her job. She is reunited with Charles Drouet, who is still attracted to her.

He takes her to dinner, where he asks her to move in with him, lavishing her with money. Tired of living with her sister and brother-in-law, Carrie agrees to be Drouet's kept woman. Later, Drouet introduces Carrie to George Hurstwood, the manager of his favorite bar.

Hurstwood, an unhappily married man, falls in love with Carrie, and they have an affair. But she returns to Drouet because Hurstwood can't provide for her financially. So, Hurstwood embezzles a large sum of money from the bar and persuades Carrie to run away with him to Canada.

In Montreal, Hurstwood is trapped by both his guilty conscience and a private detective and returns most of the stolen money. He agrees to marry Carrie and the couple move to New York City, where they live under the assumed names George and Carrie Wheeler.

Carrie believes she may have finally found happiness, but then she and George grow apart. After George loses his source of income and gambles away the couple's savings, Carrie, who has been trying to build a career in the theater, leaves him.

She becomes a rich and famous actress, but finds that wealth and fame don't bring her happiness and that nothing will. Sister Carrie would be rightfully considered a classic American novel, and its author would finally be recognized as one of America's greatest novelists.

Dreiser would go on to write more classic novels, including his Trilogy of Desire - The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (1947) - and his masterpiece, An American Tragedy (1925).

For the rest of his life, Theodore Dreiser was haunted by the ordeal he suffered in getting Sister Carrie published. He felt that, just like his anti-heroine, he had prostituted himself to survive and thrive. He died in 1945 at the age of 74.

Though he wouldn't live to see it, his original manuscript for Sister Carrie would finally be published - over eighty years after the edited version was released. In 1930, during his Nobel Prize Lecture, legendary writer Sinclair Lewis said this about the novel and its author:

Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie, which he dared to publish thirty long years ago and which I read twenty-five years ago, came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes."

- Theodore Dreiser

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Theodore Dreiser's classic novel Sister Carrie. Enjoy!

Notes For April 16th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 16th, 1962, The Golden Notebook, the classic novel by the Nobel Prize winning English writer Doris Lessing, was published. The novel is rightfully considered a seminal early work of feminist literature.

That wasn't what the author intended, though the book does have feminist themes. The Oxford Companion to English Literature described it as "inner space fiction." A more accurate description would be experimental existentialist fiction.

The Golden Notebook uses a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness narrative to tell the story of Anna Wulf, a middle aged writer and single mother who has come apart - literally and metaphorically. She keeps four notebooks, each one representing a part of her personality.

In her black notebook, Anna records her experiences in Africa, where she helped fight the colonial oppression of black Africans. In her red notebook, she records her idealism, specifically her political idealism, as she first becomes a passionate young communist.

Over time, however, she changes into a sober realist, disillusioned by the crimes of the Stalin regime and the realization that communism can't create the better world she had hoped for.

Anna's yellow notebook contains her novel, which is a fictionalized version of her life. Her blue notebook is her personal diary, a record of her day to day life.

The narrative is comprised of alternating fragments from each of her four notebooks, which reflects her chaotic state of mind. Fearing that she might go insane, Anna tries to weave together the threads of her four notebooks and create one complete Golden Notebook.

In doing so, she embarks on a harrowing journey in search of her true self, confronting her anxieties and the painful truths at the heart of her personal crises.

The Golden Notebook is a classic existentialist novel written in a post-modernist style. In 2005, Time magazine listed it as among the 100 best English-language novels since 1923.

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Quote Of The Day

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"With a library, you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how."

- Doris Lessing

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a BBC documentary on Doris Lessing. Enjoy!

Notes For April 12th, 2024

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This Day In Literary History

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On April 12th, 1916, the legendary American children's book writer Beverly Cleary was born. She was born Beverly Atlee Bunn in McMinnville, Oregon. Her parents were farmers. She had no brothers or sisters. When she was six years old, her parents gave up farming and moved to Portland, Oregon.

As a little girl, Beverly loved books and reading, but when she entered first grade in Portland, she hated both her nasty teacher and the dreadful primers she was required to read in class.

After spending the first six years of her life on a farm, city living took a toll on her health, which also affected her reading skills and classwork.

In the second grade, Beverly's new teacher and the school librarian, both of whom she loved, helped her get her schoolwork up to par and rekindled her love of reading. The librarian encouraged her love of learning and natural curiosity, helping her to find good books on subjects that interested her.

At the age of eighteen, Beverly began her college education at Chaffey College in Ontario, California. She would later attend the University of California at Berkley and the University of Washington in Seattle, earning degrees in English and library science. While studying at Chaffey, she worked as a substitute librarian.

It wasn't easy paying for a college education during the Great Depression; while studying at the University of Washington, she worked through the university's cooperative education program. While doing so, she met her future husband, Clarence Cleary.

They had to elope because Clarence's Presbyterian parents were fiercely opposed to their son marrying a Catholic girl. They married anyway, and she bore him a twin son and daughter, Malcolm and Marrienne. Clarence's parents would always disapprove of his marriage to Beverly.

After graduating from the University of Washington, Beverly Cleary became a full time librarian in Yakima, Washington. Her favorite part of the job was interacting with the many children who came to borrow books.

The children often complained that there were few books written about modern children like them. Knowing that many children's books at that time were either old-fashioned, dated, or unrealistic, Beverly sympathized with the kids. She decided to try her own hand at writing children's books.

Beverly Cleary's first children's book, Henry Huggins, was published in 1950. The classic novella introduced the protagonist, Henry Huggins, and his friends, who live on Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon.

In his first book, Henry meets and adopts a skinny stray dog whom he calls Ribsy. Boy and dog become the best of friends and get involved in adventures and mischief. Henry's best human friend is (gasp) a girl.

Henry Huggins became a huge hit with children, and critics loved the book as well, calling Henry a "modern Tom Sawyer." Beverly Cleary would write a series of Henry Huggins books, which would introduce other popular characters.

In the second book, Henry and Beezus, we get to know Henry's best friend, Beatrice "Beezus" Quimby. She hates her nickname, Beezus, which was given to her by her little sister, who as a toddler couldn't say Beatrice.

Beezus's spunky, impish little sister Ramona, originally a minor but memorable character in the Henry Huggins series, would become Beverly Cleary's most popular character and the star of her own series of books.

The first book, Beezus and Ramona, was published in 1955. In this classic, the precocious, irrepressible 4-year-old Ramona Quimby displays her talent for mischief, annoying her sister, throwing a party for her friends without permission, and ruining two birthday cakes.

Other memorable Ramona books include Ramona the Pest (1968), Ramona the Brave (1975), Ramona and Her Father (1977), Ramona and Her Mother (1979), Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (1981), and Ramona Forever (1984).

Fifteen years later, in 1999, Beverly Cleary came out of retirement at the age of 83 and published her last entry in the series, Ramona's World. It would also be her last published book.

Ramona's World finds the now preteen Ramona awaiting her tenth birthday. Her older sister Beezus, now 15, has started high school and is becoming a mature young woman, which irks Ramona. Meanwhile, Ramona finds herself playing a more active role in looking after her baby sister, Roberta.

As the novella progresses, Ramona deals with her own increasing maturity, as her longtime feud with her nemesis, the snobbish Susan, comes to an end, and her relationship with her old pal Danny, whom she famously nicknamed Yard Ape, is off to a new beginning - they have an obvious crush on each other.

In 1988, the Ramona books were adapted as a ten-episode TV series for Canadian public television. The brief yet memorable series featured an outstanding performance by a then unknown child actress named Sarah Polley as Ramona. The series would be picked up by American public television and released on video.

Over twenty years later, in July of 2010, Disney's Walden Media division released Ramona and Beezus, a feature film adaptation of Beezus and Ramona, but it wasn't exactly a straightforward adaptation of that book. It included plot elements from all the Ramona books.

Some complained about the film's patchwork quilt of plot elements and criticized the casting of teen pop singer Selena Gomez as Beezus, but the movie received mostly good reviews from critics and fans. The script did capture the spirit of the Ramona books and the film featured a winning performance by young Joey King as Ramona.

In addition to her series novels, Beverly Cleary wrote many fine standalone children's novels, including Mitch and Amy (1967), Socks (1973), and Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983).

Mitch and Amy, inspired by the author's own twin children, told the story of 10-year-old twin brother and sister Mitch and Amy Huff. The Huff twins are polar opposites and bicker endlessly, each wishing to be an only child. But deep down, they really love each other - and stand up for each other when they're both victimized by the neighborhood bully.

Socks, part comedy and part drama, is the endearing tale of a spunky cat who is adopted by a young married couple. Then his loving, doting humans have a baby, and his whole world turns upside down. Socks doesn't like playing second fiddle to the annoying infant.

The Newbery Award winning Dear Mr. Henshaw told the heart wrenching story of second grader Leigh Botts, who struggles to deal with his parents' divorce, his strained relationship with his father, his loneliness, and the mysterious thief at school who keeps stealing his lunch.

As part of a class assignment, Leigh writes a letter to his favorite author, Boyd Henshaw. They become pen pals and close friends. Henshaw encourages Leigh to keep a diary of his thoughts and feelings. The narrative switches from letters to diary entries as Leigh chronicles his life.

Dear Mr. Henshaw was followed by a sequel, Strider (1991), in which Leigh and his friend Barry find a stray dog on the beach whom they name Strider. They decide to adopt Strider and share custody of him the way that most divorced couples share custody of their children.

Beverly Cleary died in March of 2021 at the age of 104. Her work continues to win new generations of fans and influence new generations of children's writers.

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Quote Of The Day

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“As a child, I very much objected to books that tried to teach me something. I just wanted to read for pleasure, and I did. But if a book tried to teach me, I returned it to the library.”

- Beverly Cleary

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features an Oregon Public Television documentary on Beverly Cleary. Enjoy!