August 26th
Cannot let this day go past without noting the death in Madrid in 1635 of Lope Felix de la Vega, one of the world's most famous and prolific playwrights.
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August 26th
Cannot let this day go past without noting the death in Madrid in 1635 of Lope Felix de la Vega, one of the world's most famous and prolific playwrights.
Hello I am new to the forum.
Coucou, Bleave ! :wave:Quote:
Originally Posted by Bleave
How about telling us more about yourself in the Introductions Forum ? We're looking forward to getting to know and seeing you posting around ! :nod:
On this day in 1885 D. H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, outside Nottingham, the fourth of five children. Lawrence's autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers (1913) made famous the tortured conditions of his upbringing: his uneducated father's pit-and-pub life, his mother's contempt for this and her self-sacrifice to escape, Lawrence's own conflicted feelings about all of it.
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On this day in 1954 William Golding's first novel, The Lord of the Flies, was published. It was rejected by twenty-one publishers and poorly-reviewed, but by the 60s it was a cult novel and a career-maker. If it confirms Golding's view that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey," it is not the whole story: "I am a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist," he said in his Nobel Acceptance Speech.
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On this day in 1592 Robert Greene's A Groats-Worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, in which appears the first printed reference to Shakespeare, was entered in the Stationers' Register. Greene's caution to his fellow playwrights that Shakespeare is "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers," is interpreted as jealousy of a rising star, even a charge of plagiarism.
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Sep 23
John Keats, Autumn
On this day in 1819, twenty-five-year-old John Keats wrote to his friend, Charles Brown, to say that he was giving up poetry for journalism. This is also the first day of autumn; four days earlier in 1819 Keats had written "To Autumn," now one of his most popular poems, and one which many critics regard as "flawless in structure, texture, tone, and rhythm."
On this day in 1991 Theodor Seuss Geisel died, at the age of eighty-seven. Geisel turned to children's books in his late twenties, when his job creating ads for "Flit" insect repellent -- his "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" became a household slogan across America -- left him well-off and bored. The next fifty years brought forty-eight books, three Oscars, two Emmys and a Pulitzer.
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October 7th
On this day in 1849 died Edgar Allan Poe.
On this day in 1930 Harold Pinter was born. The famous Pinter pause may have been learned as an only child in Hackney: at the age of eight or nine Pinter and a group of imaginary friends would gather in his back garden, where they "talked aloud and held conversations beyond the lilac tree." He also says he was deeply affected by being a child-evacuee during WWII: "'There was no fixed sense of being ... of being ... at all.'"
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Vonnegut? Brain dead. Vacuum-packed. Switched-off tube.The Reich reaped what it sowed.
On this day in 1896 Anton Chekhov's The Seagull opened in St. Petersburg. This is the first-written of Chekhov's four masterpieces -- Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard are the others -- and though now regarded as one of the most influential plays in modern drama, its opening night was an infamous flop. During the writing, Chekhov admitted that he was "flagrantly disregarding the basic tenets of the stage," not only for having so much talk and so little action, but for having "started it forte and ended it pianissimo." During rehearsal he had implored the actors and the director to give up the usual bombastic style and give his understatements a chance: "The point is, my friends, there's no use being theatrical. None whatever. The whole thing is very simple. The characters are simple, ordinary people." Convinced of disaster, he nearly withdrew his permission for the production, and then nearly did not attend the opening himself; by Act Two he was hiding backstage from the booing and jeering; at two a.m. he was still walking the streets alone. When he finally returned home, he declared to a friend, "Not if I live to be seven hundred will I write another play."
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On this day in 1940 Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls was published. It had been over a decade since A Farewell to Arms, and though there had been a handful of books during that time, the critics had not thought much of them. About this one, many agreed with Edmund Wilson: "Hemingway the artist is with us again; and it is like having an old friend back."
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And we can just forget about the wholesale salughter of innocent Germans and American POWs, can we?Quote:
Originally Posted by ennison
Fraid so unless you want to indulge in hand-wringing over spilt milk. Feel free.