Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts

Monday, May 30, 2022

May 30: Countee Cullen, American poet and writer

BORN MAY 30:

Countee Cullen (1903-1946) was a Black American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, and part of the Harlem Renaissance. Rare for a Black man in his time, he graduated with a master's degree in English from Harvard (after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from NYU). He was briefly married to the daughter of civil rights icon W.E.B. Du Bois; she filed for divorce when a few months after their wedding, he wrote her a letter confessing his love for men. Ten years later he married another woman and lived with her until his death some six years later. Overshadowed today by his colleague Langston Hughes, Cullen's work nevertheless expresses the experience of Black people in his day; one of his better-known poems, "Heritage," repeats its first line as a refrain: "What is Africa to me?" as he places his imagined homeland against his life as a "Christian" and an American. Also notable is his, "Yet Do I Marvel."

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Wednesday, May 25, 2022

May 25: Ralph Waldo Emerson, American writer and philosopher

BORN MAY 25:

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American writer and perhaps the young country's first original philosopher. He was an essayist, lecturer, abolitionist, and poet, and a leader of the mid-19th century transcendentalist movement. In true American mode, he championed individualism, disseminating his ideology through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Starting out as a pastor (like his father), he struck out on his own with the publication of his 1836 essay "Nature," which expressed the philosophy of transcendentalism. He would often lecture on a topic, then revise his notes to publish as essays. Some of the more important of these are "The American Scholar," "Self-Reliance," "The Over-Soul," "Experience," and others. He returned again and again to the ideas of individuality, freedom, the ability of humankind to achieve almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the outside world. He was also a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, another transcendentalist.

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Sunday, May 15, 2022

May 15: L. Frank Baum, American children's author

BORN MAY 15:

L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) was an American children's author best known for the Wizard of Oz and its 13 sequels. He also wrote 41 other novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems, and at least 42 scripts, but his place in history (and in my heart) depends on the 1939 film adaptation of WoO, a perfect "hook" on which to hang Joseph Campbell's teachings about "The Hero's Journey"--especially since this time he's a she. Born in New York state, and spending most of his career in the Midwest, he died in Los Angeles trying to establish a movie studio focused on producing films for children.

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Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Apr. 26: William Shakespeare, English playwright and poet

BAPTIZED APRIL 26:

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) pre-eminent English playwright and poet. He was baptized on this day, and may have been born three days earlier, according to some calculations. Modern scholarship suggests that, including collaborations, he is responsible for all or part of 39 plays, in addition to his 154 sonnets, four narrative poems, and a few other verses. Outstanding among his plays (there are so many!) are The Tempest; Hamlet; King Lear; Macbeth; Othello; Romeo and Juliet; A Midsummer Night's Dream; and more. The long poems are Venus and Adonis; The Rape of Lucrece; A Lover's Complaint; and--I'm not kidding--The Phoenix and the Turtle. Several of the Sonnets stand out, notably

  • #18 "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
  • #29 "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes"
  • #116 "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" and 
  • #130 "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"

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Saturday, March 26, 2022

Mar. 26: Joseph Campbell, American mythologist, writer and lecturer

BORN MARCH 26:

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer. Campbell was born in New York City and spent most of his life teaching there at Sarah Lawrence College. His first major work was also one of his most important and best-known: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he finds a common structure underlying the hero stories of virtually every culture. His work was consulted by George Lucas when he began writing his Star Wars mythos; Lucas later funded the library that holds Campbell's collection. Something of an amateur and a popularizer, Campbell's work has been criticized by professionals in the field, but they can't deny his influence. His philosophy is summed up in the usually-misunderstood saying, "Follow your bliss." He also wrote the four-volume Masks of God series; numerous other works have been published of his essays, interviews (most famously Bill Moyers's The Power of Myth), and even travel journals.

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Friday, March 25, 2022

Mar. 25: Flannery O'Connor, American writer

BORN MARCH 25:

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist who wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as other works. She often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on misfits in regional settings. A staunch Roman Catholic, she frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her novel Wise Blood is about a wounded returning WWII vet and how he copes with his loss of religious faith; the other one, The Violent Bear It Away, tells of a fourteen-year-old boy trying to escape his uncle's plans to make him a religious "prophet." Two of her short stories stand out: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (her best-known work) examines morality through the encounter of a family with an escaped convict. "Everything That Rises Must Converge" tells of the experience of a boy and his mother on a bus after the integration of their city's transportation system.

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Sunday, March 20, 2022

Mar. 20: Ovid, Roman poet

BORN MARCH 20:

Ovid (43 BCE-17 CE) in full Publius Ovidius Naso, was a Roman poet during the reign of Augustus. He is ranked with Virgil and Horace, his older contemporaries, and was enormously popular during his lifetime (even though the emperor banished him for the last decade of his life, perhaps on morals charges). He is best-known today for the Metamorphoses, a 15-book work of mythology, and one of the most important sources on the subject; and for collections of love poems like Love Affairs and The Art of Love.

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Saturday, March 19, 2022

Mar. 19: Richard Francis Burton, British explorer and writer

BORN MARCH 19:

Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was a British explorer and writer. Not so many men are cut from this cloth: a genuine adventurer who also wrote books of lasting interest. According to one count, he spoke twenty-nine European, Asian, and African languages (and tried to learn "monkey"); visited the Muslim holy city of Mecca when it was forbidden to Europeans on pain of death; translated The One Thousand and One Nights and The Kama Sutra; and traveled with the first Europeans to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile. He also produced a "pseudotranslation," The Kasidah, claiming to be a translation of an original Persian text on Sufism, but in fact a wholly original work written by Burton. All this in addition to careers in the British Army in India and the diplomatic service in Equatorial Guinea, Brazil, Syria, and Italy. He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1886.

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Thursday, March 17, 2022

Mar. 17: Kate Greenaway, English Victorian children's book artist and writer

BORN MARCH 17:

Catherine "Kate" Greenaway (1846-1901) was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her children's book illustrations. Starting out as a creator of the new-fangled greeting card, she received her first commission to illustrate a children's book in 1867. She published her breakout book, Under the Window, in 1879, and sold over 100,000 copies. It was one of only two books that she wrote (the other is Marigold Garden, 1885) though she illustrated over 150 as a result of something called the "Greenaway vogue," and she became widely imitated. She died of breast cancer at the age of 55. The Kate Greenaway Medal was established in her honor in 1955, awarded annually in the UK to an illustrator of children's books.

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Saturday, March 12, 2022

Mar. 12: Jack Kerouac, American novelist

BORN MARCH 12:

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was an American novelist, poet, and pioneer of the Beat Generation, along with the likes of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. He wrote over a dozen novels, most famously On the Road and The Dharma Bums, about ne'er-do-wells. His writing influenced '60s cultural icons like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Doors. He died at age 47 as the result of alcoholism. Growing up in a French-speaking household in Massachusetts (his family was French-Canadian--he was born Jean-Louis), he learned to speak English at age six and didn't lose his accent until his late teens.

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Friday, March 11, 2022

Mar. 11: Douglas Adams, British author

BORN MARCH 11:

Douglas Adams (1952-2001) was an English author, screenwriter, essayist, satirist, and playwright. Best known for his five book trilogy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (first heard as a BBC radio comedy, and later adapted to a TV series, several stage plays, comics books, a video game, and a feature film), he wrote in several media. He also wrote two books starring Dirk Gently, the "holistic detective," along with scripts for Dr. Who and sketches for Monty Python. Sadly, he died at age 49 after resting from his regular workout at a private gym. The irony would not have been lost on him.

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Thursday, March 10, 2022

Mar. 10: Ina Donna Coolbrith, American poet, writer, and mentor

BORN MARCH 10:

Ina Donna Coolbrith (1841-1928) was an American poet, writer, librarian, and a prominent figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary community. She was the first California Poet Laureate and the first poet laureate of any American state. Niece of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, she moved to Los Angeles and then San Francisco, writing for editor Bret Harte on the magazine Overland Monthly. Her poetry was praised by the likes of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Tennyson. As City Librarian of Oakland, she mentored young readers including Jack London and Isadora Duncan. You may never have heard of her, but she knew virtually every California writer of her day. She herself wrote the somewhat maudlin "The Mother's Grief" and "When the Grass Shall Cover Me"; and "Copa De Oro (California Poppy)," a paean to a wildflower, among many others.

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Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Mar. 1: Charles Fletcher Lummis, American character


BORN MARCH 1:

Charles Fletcher Lummis (1829-1928) American journalist, historian, ethnographer, archaeologist, poet, L.A. City Librarian, and Southwest Museum founder. It's not often I get to celebrate a personal hero, and this month I'll celebrate two (Joseph Campbell comes up on the 26th). I have been to El Alisal, the house Lummis built on the edge of Arroyo Seco in northeast L.A.; I have traipsed the places he traipsed in New Mexico; and own and have read hard copies of a half-dozen of his works (and countless books and articles online) plus three biographies. He edited a booster-ish SoCal mag called Land of Sunshine (later called Out West), which helped create an influx of easterners coming west. Books like Some Strange Corners of Our Country, The Land of Poco Tiempo, and Flowers Of Our Lost Romance helped romanticize the Spanish era; and A Tramp Across the Continent, an account of his walk from Ohio to L.A. and the hardships along the way, made both his legend and his career.

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Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Feb. 23: W. E. B. Du Bois, American scholar and activist

BORN FEBRUARY 23:

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. After becoming the first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard, he became a professor at Atlanta University. He was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. He worked for full civil rights and increased political representation for blacks, and fought for the independence of African colonies from European powers, making several trips to Europe, Africa and Asia. Dr. Du Bois was a prolific author. He opened his seminal work, the collection of essays titled The Souls of Black Folk, with this central thought: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line."

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Saturday, January 29, 2022

Jan. 29: Edward Abbey, American environmental writer

BORN JANUARY 29:

Edward Abbey (1927-1989) American novelist and essayist who became an icon of the environmental movement. Desert Solitaire, based on his experience as a ranger at Arches National Monument (now a national park) is a model of "nature autobiography"; his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang depicts the use of sabotage to protest environmentally damaging activities in the Southwest.

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Friday, January 28, 2022

Jan. 28: Colette, French novelist

BORN JANUARY 28:

Colette (1873-1954) French novelist who wrote Gigi, about a sixteen-year-old trained to catch a wealthy lover but who married him instead. With her first husband Henry Gauthier-Villars (known as "Willy"), she co-wrote the four novels known as the "Claudine stories," purporting to be the diary of a fifteen-year-old girl growing to adulthood. How much was written by Willy (under whose name the books first appeared) and how much by Collette (a model for the protagonist) has never been determined.

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Thursday, January 27, 2022

Jan. 27: Lewis Carroll, English writer and humorist

BORN JANUARY 27:

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) English writer and mathematician. He was a fun and funny guy--a dab hand at puzzles and riddles--who did much of his work to please the children of his friends, one of whom was named Alice. He wrote the novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass; and the poems The Hunting of the Snark and "Jabberwocky."

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Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Jan. 26: Philip José Farmer, American author of science fiction

BORN JANUARY 26:

Philip José Farmer (1918-2009) American author of science fiction, best known for sequences of novels such as the World of Tiers and Riverworld series. He often mixed real and classic fictional characters and worlds, and real and fake authors, and pioneered the use of sexual and religious themes in his work.

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Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Jan. 25: Robert Burns, Scottish poet

BORN JANUARY 25:

Robert Burns (1759-1796) Scottish poet without whom we'd have nothing to sing on New Year's Eve (he wrote "Auld Lang Syne"). Nothing penetrates the lessons of nature like "To a Mouse" ("the best-laid plans of mice and men..."). His use of the Scots language sometimes requires translation, but can usually be understood well enough by English speakers, and brings a color his work would lack otherwise.

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Monday, January 24, 2022

Jan. 24: Edith Wharton, American writer

BORN JANUARY 24:

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) American novelist and short story writer who portrayed the lives and morals of the upper classes of New York in the "Gilded Age." Major works include The House of Mirth; Ethan Frome; and The Age of Innocence (won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1920)

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