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On this date in 1927 Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse was published. Many of the earliest reviews were lukewarm, compared to the modern view that the novel is one of the century's best, or to Woolf's own evaluation while working on it: "Never never have I written so easily, imagined so profusely.... Soft & pliable, & I think deep, & never a word wrong for a page at a time."
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On this day in 1956 John Osborne's first play, Look Back in Anger, opened at London's Royal Court Theatre. The press release for the play called the twenty-six-year-old Osborne "an angry young man"; when the play became a hit, the phrase stuck as a label for an under-thirty, post-war generation which felt disillusioned and disenfranchised. The Daily Express said that the play was "intense, angry, feverish, undisciplined. It is even crazy. But it is young, young, young." Critic Clive Barnes later called Osborne "the veritable beginning of the beginning," and cited the opening night of Look Back in Anger as the "actual birthday...of modern British theatre."
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On this day in 2001 Douglas Adams died of a heart attack, aged forty-nine. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels have sold fifteen million copies, and the Dirk Gently books have also done well, but Adams said that he was proudest of Last Chance to See, a documentary of his expeditions to observe a handful of near-extinct animal species.
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May 12th
On this day in 1883 Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi was published. Much of the book had been printed as a series of articles in The Atlantic eight years earlier. These reminiscences had been popular -- they "made the ice-water in my pitcher turn muddy," said William Dean Howells -- and Twain decided to expand them, seeing an opportunity to bring another high-volume subscription book to market. Because he would need to gather research, he also saw an opportunity to revisit the world of his youth after twenty-one years away, "to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left."
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May 13th 1907 - Daphne du Maurier was born
On this day in 1855 Walt Whitman registered the title Leaves of Grass with the clerk of the United States District Court, New York; the first edition was published seven weeks later. Over the next thirty-six years Whitman would add many more poems and publish seven more editions, all in an effort to "Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"
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May 16
On this day in 1939 Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust was published. Although now ranked as one of the best novels about Hollywood, and on the Modern Library's Top 100 of the Century list, The Day of the Locust was a commercial flop, compelling West to continue working as a screenwriter, and living in the place that his novel so darkly satirized.
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May 17
On this day in 1873 Dorothy Richardson was born. Pilgrimage, Richardson's twenty-year experimental novel, began appearing in 1915 -- at about the time Joyce, Proust and Woolf were engaged in similar experiments. While Richardson may or may not be "the genius they forgot" (the subtitle of one biography), her writing was the first to be described as "stream of consciousness," and her life is every bit as remarkable as those more famous and remembered.
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May 18
On this day in 1593 a warrant was issued for the arrest of twenty-nine-year-old Christopher Marlowe on charges of spreading "blasphemous and damnable opinions"; the day before his court appearance he was killed in a drunken brawl in Deptford, a dagger through his eye. Kit Marlowe's life and high times continue to fascinate, if a handful of recent books and movies and Angelina Jolie's sub-navel tattoo are any measure.
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On this day in 1688 Alexander Pope was born in London, the only child of middle-aged, Catholic parents. This was the year of the Glorious Revolution, and the broom that swept out Catholic James II and swept in Constitutional reform also brought new restrictions and suspicions upon English Catholics. Barred from politics, and from attending university in pursuit of such careers as law and medicine -- barred even from living within ten miles of London -- Pope began as an outsider and seemed destined to remain so. In his early teens he contracted a tubercular bone disease which caused him to be hunchbacked, no more than 4' 6" tall, and plagued by various secondary ailments.
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May 22
On this day in 1967 Langston Hughes died, aged sixty-five. Hughes was one of the most influential and respected of Black American voices in the middle decades of the century, writing prolifically in many genres, and almost exclusively on racial themes. He lived on East 127th Street in Harlem; today his block is "Langston Hughes Place."
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I really found this poem of Haughes very touching. What a wonderful and touching piece of poetry.
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America.
On this day in 1859 Arthur Conan Doyle was born. Check out Google - click on the Holmes graphic for lots of links.
May 28
The Death of Anne Brontë
On this day in 1849 Anne Brontë died of tuberculosis, the third death in eight months among the Brontë siblings. The standard view of Anne is that she had less talent than her sisters, and was cut from a plainer cloth: Charlotte was dominant and ambitious, Emily was odd and reclusive, Anne was meek and churchy. This evaluation has recently been challenged.
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On this day in 1898 George Bernard Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townsend. Both were in their early forties and both professed a distaste for matrimony; how they came to tie a knot that would last for forty-five years -- albeit celibate ones, apparently -- is a story that has intrigued all Shaw's biographers, as it seems to have intrigued Shaw himself.
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On this day in 1870 Charles Dickens died at the age of fifty-eight. Family and friends report that Dickens was beset by increasing debility and depression throughout his last months, appearing suddenly much older than his years when he had for so long looked so much younger. George Eliot found him "looking dreadfully shattered" at dinner; another friend described how a foot problem now had the legendary walker -- sometimes all night, at four mph -- always "dragging one leg rather wearily behind him." Dickens himself was alarmed to find that he couldn't read the right-hand half of signs above shop doors. His financial responsibilities, his separation from his wife, and the stir created by his love life continued to trouble him. To daughter Kate, on one of his last nights, he regretted that he had not been "a better father, a better man."
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I used to be a computer repair guy for Shakespeare & Co., when they operated out of the third floor of the Edith Wharton Mansion, in Lenox, Massachusetts. It is supposedly haunted, though no ghosts ever bothered to rattle around me, anywhere, ever. The fan in my computer makes an intermittent low pitch moan, I tell visitors it's my dead father snoring. Sounds just like him, you can hear it through the ceiling! That's all the ghost stories I know.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
On this day in 1865 W. B. Yeats was born in the Sandymount area of Dublin. Until his mid-teens, Yeats's youth was mostly spent not in Dublin but divided between London, where his father attempted to establish himself as a painter, and his mother's hometown of Sligo, on Ireland's Atlantic coast. In Reveries over Childhood and Youth -- #39 on the Modern Library's list of the best hundred non-fiction books of the 20th century -- Yeats describes his time in Sligo as a portal to the story-spirit world that would be of such importance to his life and poetry.
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June 14th.
Jerzy Kosinski: Being and Not Being There
On this day in 1933 Jerzy Kosinski was born, as Jerzy Lewinkopf, in Lodz, Poland. Kosinski's father changed the family name at the beginning of WWII in an effort to escape persecution as a Jew. As described later in Kosinski's international best-seller, The Painted Bird, this plan went horribly wrong -- and then decades later stories began to surface that it and other aspects of Kosinski's life didn't happen at all.