You can read more about Bridget, the goddess and the saint, in Don’t Know Much About Mythology.

You probably remember him for his tales of dogs in the Alaskan wilderness, including The Call of the Wild and White Fang. He wrote his most famous works after spending time in Alaska during the Gold Rush.

But London was much more than a writer of wilderness adventures. As a young man, he was briefly caught up in Kelly’s Army, part of a larger protest movement called “Coxey’s Army.” It was the “Occupy Wall Street” of the 1890s.

Following an economic depression in 1893 –the largest economic downturn in American history to that time– a group of unemployed Americans began a march on Washington. They were led by Jacob Coxey and were eventually called “Coxey’s Army.” In 1894, they began a protest march, hoping to force the federal government to do more to help out-of-work Americans with road building and other public works projects. It was one part of the growing populist and labor movements of the day and was met with predictable disdain by politicians. This is a report from the New York Times from March 1894.

Out West, the movement spawned “Kelly’s Army” and a young Jack London joined up. He later wrote about the experience in a piece called “Two Thousand Stiffs” published in his book The Road  (1907).

In the evenings our camps were invaded by whole populations. Every company had its campfire, and around each fire something was doing. The cooks in my company, Company L, were song-and-dance artists and contributed most of our entertainment. In another part of the encampment the glee club would be singing  . . . All these things ran neck and neck; it was a full-blown Midway. A lot of talent can be dug out of two thousand hoboes. I remember we had a picked baseball nine, and on Sundays we made a practice of putting it all over the local nines. Sometimes we did it twice on Sundays. (Source: The Jack London Online Collection, Sonoma State University)

London later became a Socialist and was a passionate unionist and advocate of workers’ rights. They probably didn’t tell you that part when they assigned White Fang in junior high.

There is a great collection of London material, including writings, biographical essays, photographs and critical material at Sonoma State University’s Jean and Charles Schultz Information Center-Jack London Online Collection.

London died on November 22, 1916. This is his New York Times obituary. His home is now a California State Park.

So why Twelve days? Just a lucky accident of the calendar?

Of course, twelve is a significant number, in biblical terms. Twelve tribes of Israel. Twelve disciples. There are lots of other important twelves.

It all goes back to the solstice , which occurred on December 22 in 2011. On the “shortest day,” the Sun “stands still” (the literal meaning of “solstice”) at its lowest point in the northern sky and then begin its trek back towards the Northern world, bringing light and life with it as the days lengthen.

So while many of us call it the First Day of Winter, it is really the beginning of a “new year” and that’s how the ancients saw it. As I’ve discussed in other posts on Christmas myths, the Solstice was crucial in many cultures and is the source of a great many holiday traditions celebrating light, hope, renewal — and the reason for the season’s general merriment.

Again we have ancient pagan ritual to thank for this Christmas tradition. The Romans, who knew how to celebrate, eventually extended their weeklong solstice party –Saturnalia– into the new year, creating a 12-day period of merrymaking. The early Christians, being in Rome, did as the Romans did. In northern traditions, the Norse also celebrated their solstice festival, known as Yule, for twelve days.

One of the specific ways that Solstice celebrations from ancient times are still remembered is by the “Twelve Days of Christmas.” Largely misunderstood, the Twelve Days of Christmas traditionally begin with Christmas Day and lead up to the Epiphany –January 6– which is also celebrated as “Three Kings Day.” It is believed to be the day on which the Magi visited the Christ Child, or the day of Jesus’s baptism in other traditions. To many Christians, Epiphany (some also call it “Little Christmas”) is the more important and the appropriate date on which to exchange gifts –as the Magi did.

The ancient idea that the world was “turned upside down” until around the Solstice was the source of a Roman tradition of masters and slaves trading places. There was also a Celtic tradition of a period of chaos until the Solstice. This led to the Christian-era “Feast of Fools” presided over by the Lord of Misrule. This idea is immortalized in literature by Mr. Bill Shakespeare, who wrote a play called Twelfth Night. Set on “twelfth night,” or January 5 (the night before Epiphany), it is filled with role reversals –of both class and gender–and general disorder and merriment led by Sir Toby Belch, one of Shakespeare’s greatest comic characters.

The other cultural vestige of the twelve days is the Christmas carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas.
I have always found it a tedious carol. But a fairly modern “urban legend” making the Internet rounds is that the song was devised to teach a series of Catholic virtues and ideas –the catechism– to children, during England’s long wars between Protestants and Catholics. Each of the days, this theory holds, represents a fundamental Church idea: the partridge in a pear tree is Jesus; “four colly birds” (not “calling birds”) are the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; the five golden rings are the first five books of the Bible, or Torah, and so on. This notion is widely disputed by scholars and an in-depth dismissal can be found here:
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/music/12days.asp

And the final part of this tradition says leave the decorations up until Twelfth Night.

When winter comes to New England, it is easy to bring to mind the name of Robert Frost. There is no more iconic winter New England poem that the one that begins,

Whose woods these are, I think I know.

And one of my favorite spots in Vermont is the Frost gravesite in the cemetery of the First Church in Old Bennington -just down the street from the Bennington Monument.

Apples, birches, hayfields and stone walls; simple features like these make up the landscape of four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost’s poetry. Known as a poet of New England, Frost (1874-1963) spent much of his life working and wandering the woods and farmland of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. As a young man, he dropped out of Dartmouth and then Harvard, then drifted from job to job: teacher, newspaper editor, cobbler. His poetry career took off during a three-year trip to England with his wife Elinor where Ezra Pound aided the young poet. Frost’s language is plain and straightforward, his lines inspired by the laconic speech of his Yankee neighbors.

But while poems like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are accessible enough to make Frost a grammar-school favorite, his poetry is contemplative and sometimes dark—concerned with themes like growing old and facing death. Robert Frost –New England’s poet of snowy woods, stone wall and apple trees.

I hope this “touch of Frost” will inspire you to read some of his work.

Here’s a link to Robert Frost’s page at Poets.org
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/192

It includes an account of Frost and JFK
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20540

The first poet invited to speak at a Presidential inaugural, Frost told the new President:

“Be more Irish than Harvard. Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan Age. Don’t be afraid of power.”

 

Hear Robert Frost for yourself at Poets Out Loud:
http://robertfrostoutloud.com

This link is to Middlebury College’s online Frost exhibit
http://midddigital.middlebury.edu/local_files/robert_frost/index.html

This is the website of Frost House and Museum in Franconia, N.H. http://www.frostplace.org/html/museum.html

Robert Frost died on January 29, 1963. He had written his own epitaph, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” etched on his headstone in a church cemetery in Bennington, VT.

Here is the NYTimes obituary published after his death.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0129.html#article

This material is adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature written in collaboration with Jenny Davis.

The Top Ten list for 2010 is out. And there are some familiar names on it-  The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Nickel and Dimed  by Barbara Ehrenreich. But these aren’t a critics Top Ten Recommendations. They are among the list of books most challenged by people who object to the presence of these books in school and public libraries.

Yes, it is time to think about the “Book Wars” again.

Each year, the American Library Association and other groups mark Banned Books Week during the last week in September. In 2011,  it begins today, September 24, and continues through October 1. (This video was made two years ago, but the issues remain the same.)

In a time when some American parents don’t want their children to hear the President of the United States give a speech on education values, or a planned Koran-burning wins with wide popular approval, the importance of this reminder of the right to free expression and the value of THINKING is more urgent than ever.

Where are they pulling books out of libraries? See a map of local “challenges” to books from 2007-2009.

Here are some important links to three groups involved in combating censorship: the American Library Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and Teaching Tolerance:

American Library Association Banned Books Week site

The National Coalition Against Censorship

Teaching Tolerance (A project of the Southern Poverty Law Center)

But that moment also opens Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s fabulous 1981 novel and one of the great books of our times –a tale of a boy born at the moment of partition, mixing a Dickensian life with magical realism, set against the story of modern India.

When I was starting out as a freelancer 30 years ago, I  was a book reviewer for the trade journal Publishers Weekly. Most of the reviews ran about seven sentences long and bits of them sometimes turned up as blurbs in book ads. But then I reviewed Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. My unsigned review was printed in full on the back jacket of the first American edition. I always felt a secret glory in that anonymous connection to one of the great books of the 20th century.
In naming the novel one of the “Best 100 Books,’ Time describes Rushdie’s masterpiece:

Two [children} are switched at birth, the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman and the offspring of wealthy Muslims. Rushdie follows them through 30 years of partition, violence and Indira Gandhi’s iron-fisted rule

Of course, Salman Rushdie went on to make international headlines for another of his books.
Lots of books are considered controversial, but few lead to death threats. When Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses hit bookstores in 1989, the author was forced to go into hiding—for nine years. Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, deemed the book an insult to Islam and declared a fatwa, or religious edict, calling Muslims to execute Rushdie (b. 1947). Only in 1998 did the Iranian Foreign Minister finally drop the official death threat against Rushdie.

What else do you know about this modern master of magical realism? Here are a couple of questions drawn from Don’t Know Much About Literature

1. What happens on midnight of August 15 1947 in Midnight’s Children?

2. While he was in hiding, what children’s book did Rushdie write for his son Zafar?

3. What honor did Rushdie achieve in 2008?

Here is the Time magazine list of Best 100 Novels

Note: This is a revised version of a post originally written published on August 15, 2009.

Answers

1. 1,001 children are born with supernatural powers.
2. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).

3. In 2008, Midnight’s Children was selected as winner of the “Best of the Booker” awards. Readers around the world voted the 1981 novel as the best of the prestigious prize winners.

With those words, James Joyce (February 2, 1882-January 13, 1941) opened Ulysses, chosen in 1999 as the greatest novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library. The novel follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus on their wanderings through Dublin on a single day –June 16 1904.

That makes today “Bloomsday” and complete readings of the book take place all over the world. The date was significant to Joyce because it was the day on which James Joyce first had an outing with his future wife,  Nora Barnacle, model for the character Molly Bloom.

First serialized in a literary magazine between 1918 and 1920, the novel was published in its entirety in February 1922 in Paris. Considered obscene, the book was kept out of the United States, leading to a court battle in which Ulysses was cleared for U.S. publication in a landmark obscenity ruling in 1933.

When I was about 14, I was given a copy of The Dubliners, Joyce’s collection of short stories about the city –and people– he loved and hated. I must admit I struggled with it at first. But that collection, and Joyce’s autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are two books I count among the most influential in my life.

Think you know your Joyce? Try this quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature, my first collaboration with my daughter, Jenny Davis.

Don’t Know Much About James Joyce

“When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.”  It may be hard to believe that the man who wrote that sentence (from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916) also wrote Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), two of the most infamously “difficult” works in the English language.  James Joyce (d. 1941) was born in Dublin in 1882, where his middle-class, Catholic community would inspire fiction like Dubliners (1912), the short story collection that he called “a chapter of the moral history of my country.” From the concise realism of Dubliners, Joyce’s fiction moved towards experimental uses of language and stream-of-consciousness narration.  Joyce’s dense wordplay reaches a peak in Finnegans Wake, a work intended to be read aloud.  If you’re up for “a rhubarbarous maundarin yellagreen funkleblue windigut diodying” James Joyce quiz, read on!

1.    What Christian term did James Joyce borrow to describe a “sudden spiritual moment” when “the soul of the commonest object” leaps out?
2.    What is the name of Joyce’s main character in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and the posthumously published fragment, Stephen Hero?
3.    What genre of writing made up Joyce’s first published work, Chamber Music (1907)?
4.    What famed psychiatrist wrote Joyce, “Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters”?
5.    In the Irish ballad that inspired the title of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, what brings Finnegan, the dead Irishman of the title, back to life?

In 2004, NPR did this story about the 100th anniversary of “Bloomsday.”

Here is a link to the James Joyce Centre in Dublin

Answers
1.    Epiphany
2.    Stephen Dedalus, inspired by the labyrinth builder of Greek myth.
3.    Poetry.  In fact, Joyce’s collection of poems drew the attention of Imagists Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
4.    Carl Jung. Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, was treated by Jung.
5.    The smell of whiskey.

“BEAM ME IN, SCOTTY!”

Apologies to Captain Kirk and Star Trek.  I know it’s really, “Beam me UP, Scotty.”

For more than 20 years, I have been traveling the country to visit libraries, bookstores, museums, schools and librarian conferences to share my love  for history, geography and all the subjects I have covered in the Don’t Know Much About series of books for children and adults. It’s always great fun for me to talk about America’s past, telling real stories of real people,  exploring the “hidden history” I’ve uncovered, connecting history to the headlines –and sharing my love for writing and books.  Our teachers and librarians are dedicated professionals. And the readers I have met over those years have proven that Americans don’t hate history. They just hate the dull version they got in school. And this writer has learned a lot from them along the way.

Now, with the power of computers, I want to visit your library virtually. Will you invite me?

Before I tell you my plan, I want you know that libraries have a great personal value to me. When I was a boy growing up in Mount Vernon, New York, a trip to the library every few days was part of my life. I remember the day I got my “adult” library card which allowed me to climb the ornate marble stairs up to the second floor main stacks. For me, the library was a central part of my education — and my love of writing. Since then, I have always believed that libraries are an essential part of our democracy. It would be nice if every government office functioned as well as the library does!

Now, on to  my plan.

As we are marking the 150th anniversary of the  Civil War, which began on April 12, 1861, I will make a limited number of FREE library Skype visits to discuss Civil War history, the life of Abraham  Lincoln, and other aspects of this momentous tragedy in our past and  how it continues to haunt us. These visits are planned to last 30-40 minutes. They will include a brief introduction by me of my work and career and a discussion of some of the  major aspects of the Civil War, and time for audience questions –always my favorite part of the visit. While the Civil War is certainly the key subject, the discussion need not be limited to that piece of American History. As a newly revised and updated edition of my New York Times Bestseller Don’t Know Much About History is being published this month in an Anniversary Edition hardcover by HarperCollins, the floor will be wide open for all questions about American History, the headlines, or books and writing in general.

If you would like to organize a library event on your end and  “Beam me IN, Scotty,” via Skype, a video link to your library computers, please use the Contact page on my website.  We will get back to you in an effort to set up a convenient time and date.

I look forward to beaming into your library!

Best wishes,

Kenneth C. Davis



Born April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama –Nelle Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

If you only publish one book, may as well make it a good one. For Harper Lee it was To Kill A Mockingbird (1960),  the story of Scout Finch, a girl growing up in a small Southern town.  Scout and her brother Jem wake up to the intolerance and racial hatred around them when their father, Atticus, takes on the legal case of a black man accused of raping a white woman. To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, and in the last few years, it has been far and away the most popular selection for “One Book, One Community” reading programs—for example, every Vermont resident was encouraged to read the novel in 2011. However, it is also among the most “challenged” books, according to the American Library Association. Do you know why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird?  Take this quick quiz on the beloved coming-of-age novel (adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature, a collection of literary quizzes.)

1.    In what fictional town is To Kill A Mockingbird set?

2.    In which real Alabama town were nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931?

3.    Which character in To Kill a Mockingbird did Lee base on her childhood friend Truman Capote?

4.    What is the name of Scout’s reclusive neighbor, whom she begins to understand better at the end of the novel?

5.    Who won an Oscar for his role as Atticus Finch in the 1962 film version of the novel?

Answers

1.    Maycomb, Alabama.

2.    Scottsboro.  The case of the “Scottsboro Boys” provided real-life inspiration for Lee’s novel.

3.    Dill Harris, Scout Finch’s friend and neighbor.  Lee was the prototype for one of Capote’s characters: Idabel Tompkins in Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948).

4.    Boo Radley.

5.    Gregory Peck.  Another of Peck’s great roles from literature was in the 1956 film Moby Dick; he played Captain Ahab.

And by the way, it is a sin to kill a mockingbird because all they do is “make music for us to enjoy.”

“Nevermore!” It might be difficult to end a poem on a more dramatic note than Edgar Allen Poe did in “The Raven.”  Can you name the poets who created these ending lines?  Bonus points for the name of the poem.

1.    Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

2.    My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

3.    and so cold

4.    And eternity in an hour

5.    Petals on a wet, black bough.

6.    Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature, a collection of literary quizzes I wrote in collaboration with Jenny Davis.

Answers

1.    T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

2.    Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

3.    William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just To Say”

4.    William Blake, “To see a world in a grain of sand”

5.    Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”

6.    Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”

(If you’ve been following my Poem of the Day posts all month on my Facebook page or on Twitter, you should recognize several of these. All are worth reading. Or rereading!)

“Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,” wrote Robert Herrick, the 17^th Century English poet, to open a poem encouraging ladies to marry while they were young and beautiful (“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”).  This line of Herrick’s poem, which gained popularity as a song, is now an iconic admonition to enjoy our lives on Earth.  Now gather ye wits, and see how many of these famous first lines you can identify.

1.    Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

2.    I, too, dislike it, there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle

3.    Bent double, like old beggars under sacks

4.    By the rude bridge that arched the flood

5.    Come live with me and be my love

6.    God moves in a mysterious way,

7.    Hog Butcher for the World

8.    Little Lamb, who made thee?

9.    The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

The answers are below. This quiz was adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature, written in collaboration with Jenny Davis.

Answers

1.    Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

2.    Marianne Moore, “Poetry”

3.    Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”

4.    Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”

5.    Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”

6.    William Cowper, “Light Shining Out of Darkness”

7.    Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”

8.    William Blake, “The Lamb”

9.    Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”

“April,” as T.S. Eliot told us, “is the cruellest month.”

It is also National Poetry Month. That idea was inaugurated in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. So to test your poetic wits, a quick Pop Quiz on some famous first poetic lines… Then go read the whole poems.

“Let us go then, you and I.”  With this opening line, T.S. Eliot invites his reader into the mind of his uninspired, indecisive narrator in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” A poem’s first line can set a scene, as Walt Whitman’s “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed” does.  Or it might intrigue the reader, as when Emily Dickinson writes, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” (Poem 465).

Who opened their poems with the famous lines below?  See how many poets you can identify.

1.    How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

2.    anyone lived in a pretty how town

3.    Take up the White Man’s burden–

4.    ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

5.    In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn

6.    It so happens I am sick of being a man.

7.    I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

This quiz is adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature

Answers

1.    Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Sonnet 43.”

2.    e.e. cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”

3.    Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden.”  This 1899 poem encouraged Americans to colonize the Philippines and other former Spanish colonies.

4.    Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

5.    Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Kahn.”

6.    Pablo Neruda, “Walking Around” (trans. Robert Bly).

7.    Allen Ginsberg, “Howl.”

Hard to believe, but the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland had a reputation for being dull and uninspiring at his day job: Mathematics Lecturer at Oxford University. But when Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born on January 27, 1832, mathematician, took on the pen name “Lewis Carroll,” he dreamed up fantastical stories that charmed children and adults alike.  Preferring the company of little girls throughout his adult life—a fact that has perplexed and concerned his critics—Dodgson wrote playful nonsense to delight young readers.  Among his best-loved works are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1871).  Are you growing “curiouser and curiouser” about the Wonderland Carroll created? Then follow Alice down the rabbit hole and take this quick quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature.

1.    Was Alice based on a real person?

2.    Who says the famous line, “Off with her head!”?

3.    Which Wonderland character can vanish as he pleases, leaving his grin to disappear last?

4.    Which poem, included in Through the Looking Glass, introduced invented words like brillig, slithy, wabe, and mimsy?

5.    In Through the Looking Glass, what nonsensical poem do Tweedledum and Tweedledee sing?

6.    What Woodstock-era rock song used characters and symbols from Carroll’s Alice books to describe the psychedelic effects of drugs like LSD?

The non-profit Lewis Carroll Society offers online links to FAQs, research and events.

Answers

1.    Though the stories were clearly works of imagination, their heroine was inspired by Alice Liddell, the daughter of one of Dodgson’s Oxford colleagues.

2.    The Queen of Hearts—a playing card come to life in Alice’s Adventures.

3.    The Cheshire Cat.

4.    “Jabberwocky.”  Humpty Dumpty explains these foreign words to Alice.

5.    “The Walrus and the Carpenter.”

6.    White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane.  The line “Go ask Alice” later became the title of an 1971 book, allegedly the diary of an anonymous teenage drug addict.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) wrote some of the darkest, strangest poems and stories in the English language.  His narrators, who generally speak in the first person, have led many readers to confuse Poe with his deeply disturbed characters: opium users, sufferers of paranoia and delusions, sinister murderers. Aspects of the author’s strange life and death add to that confusion. In October, 1849, Dr. J.E. Snodgrass, a friend of Poe’s, was summoned to a Baltimore tavern where he found Poe half-conscious and dressed in someone else’s clothes. Speculation on the cause of his death has ranged from delirium tremens to injuries sustained during a beating to rabies. Think you know Poe?  Take this quiz, and you shouldn’t need to “ponder weak and weary.”

1.    How old was Edgar Allen Poe’s cousin, Virginia Clemm, when the author married her in 1836?

2.    In which of Poe’s stories does the narrator hear “a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”?

3.    In which story does Montresor kill Fortunado by immurement—walling him in and leaving him to die?

4.    What is the name of Poe’s brilliant and extremely rational detective, who appears in “The Purloined Letter,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”?

5.    The first Halloween special of the cartoon The Simpsons featured a segment based on Poe’s famous poem, “The Raven.”  Instead of “Nevermore,” what phrase did the raven (a Bart Simpson look-alike) repeat incessantly?

Here are links to the Edgar Allen Poe house and the Poe Museum

Quiz excerpted from

Coming in July 2009!

Answers

1.    Thirteen. He was twenty-seven.  After her death eleven years later, he addressed the poem “Annabel Lee” to her.

2.    “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

3.    “The Cask of Amontillado.”

4.    C. Auguste Dupin.

5.    “Eat My Shorts.”  Although Poe died in 1849, he was credited as a writer for this 1990 television show.

A work that aspires, however, humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

The great novelist Joseph Conrad wrote those words in a literary manifesto called “A Preface to the Nigger of the ‘Narcissus.’ ”

Oops, I mean “Slave of the Narcissus.” Or should it be “The Children of the Sea,” the title used by Conrad’s first American publisher in 1897? Or perhaps I should call it the nearly unspeakable “N-word of the Narcissus,” the title chosen by WordBridge, publisher of a 2009 bowdlerized version of Conrad’s novel?

This question arises over the decision to publish a “sanitized” version of the great American classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in an edition which purges the use of the word “nigger” (as well as “injun”). The edition, forthcoming from NewSouth Books, replaces more than 200 uses of the word “nigger” with “slave”  in Mark Twain’s original text and substitutes “Indian” for “injun.”.

This, I believe, is the real N-word: Nonsense.

NewSouth Books asserts that these epithets are “hurtful” and prevent some teachers from assigning the book.

It’s true –some readers, along with educators and parents, have been offended by the use of a word that makes people uncomfortable — with good reason.

News flash: Art is supposed to make us uncomfortable.

The controversy behind the decision to –in my opinion– deface  a signature piece of American culture has been well-covered in the media and addressed by many, including New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani as well as the Times editorial page.

As someone who cares deeply about American History and Literature, I would like to add my voice to all those who find this expurgated version of Huck Finn an act of cultural destruction in the guise of political correctness. While it falls far short of the Taliban blowing up ancient Buddhas, it is a lot worse than draping the bare breasts of two female “Liberty” statues at the Justice Dept. during John Ashcroft’s days as Attorney General.

We are not talking about painting lawn jockeys white, but altering the intent and meaning of one of America’s cultural touchstones. And in so doing, missing Mark Twain’s central point. It’s a bit like complaining that Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is cruel to Irish babies.

This should be what I and others like to call a “teachable moment.”

Teachers should assign Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, read it together with their students, and talk about what the book means. And most important, what Mark Twain meant. Acknowledge that this word is hateful and hurtful. But get students to Think For Themselves. That, after all, is a teacher’s most important job.

And maybe, while they are at it, teachers might get them to read Randall Kennedy’s excellent book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. (Pantheon, 2002). In it, Kennedy writes of Huck Finn:

Twain is not willfully buttressing racism here; he is seeking ruthlessly to unveil and ridicule it. By putting nigger in white characters’ mouths, the author is not branding blacks, but rather branding the whites. . . . Huckleberry Finn is the best fictive example  of Twain’s triumph over his upbringing. In it, he creates a loving relationship between Huck and Jim, the runaway slave, all the while sardonically impugning the pretensions of white racial superiority.

Joseph Conrad, whose work was also sanitized for an American audience, also wrote in that memorable essay (a must read for writers, by the way):

And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. . .  If I succeed, you shall find there according to your desserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm-all you demand-and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”

Providing that glimpse of truth is what Huck, Jim and Mark Twain were able to do. The justification is found not only in every line, but in every word. Even the “hurtful” ones.

Where: Watts was a rundown district of shabby houses built near the highway approaching Los Angeles International Airport. Ninety-eight percent black, Watts was stewing in a California heat wave. In the stewpot were all the ingredients of black anger. Poverty. Overcrowding. High unemployment. Crime everywhere. Drugs widely available. The nearly all-white police force was seen as an occupation army.

When: On August 11, a policeman pulled over a young black man to check him for drunken driving. When the young man was arrested, a crowd gathered. Within a few hours the crowd had grown to a mob, and the frustration was no longer simmering in the August heat. It exploded.

What By nightfall of the next day, small, roving bands of young people throwing rocks and bottles had grown to a mob of thousands. Rocks and bottles were replaced by Molotov cocktails as the riot erupted into a full-blown street rebellion with widespread looting. Among the most popular looted items were weapons, and when police and firefighters responded to the violence and fires, they were met with a hail of bullets and gasoline bombs. When Dick Gregory, the well-known African American comedian and civil rights activist, tried to calm the crowds, he was shot in the leg.

The battle raged on for days as thousands of national guardsmen poured in to restore order. There was open fighting in the streets as guardsmen set up machine-gun emplacements. By the sixth day of rioting, Watts was rubble and ashes. The toll from six days of mayhem was thirty-four killed, including rioters and guardsmen; more than 1,000 injured; 4,000 arrested; and total property damage of more than $35 million.

Why: The aftermath of Watts was more than just a body count and insurance estimates. Watts signaled a sea change in the civil-rights movement. When Martin Luther King toured the neighborhood, he was heckled. Saddened by the death and destruction, he admonished a local man, who responded,

“We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us.”

The Watts summer of 1965 was the first in a string of long, hot summers that left the cities of the North and Midwest smoldering. The worst came in 1967, particularly when Newark and Detroit were engulfed in rioting. In the wake of these rebellions, presidential commissions were appointed, studies made, and findings released. They all agreed that the problem was economic at its roots. As Martin Luther King had put it, “I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I’ve got to do something to help them get the money to buy them.”

One of these studies, conducted by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was known as the Kerner Commission. In 1968, it warned that America was

“moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

How much has really changed?
Here is a link to excerpts from the Kerner Commission Report:
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6545/
On the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report in 2008, Bill Moyers of PBS produced a show on the Commission and what has –or hasn’t — changed in four decades.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03282008/watch.html

Here is the original New York Times report on the “Negro” riots:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0811.html#article
You can read more about Watts and the civil rights era in Don’t Know Much About History

Observing a Choctaw tribe—the old, the sick, the wounded, and newborns among them—forced to cross an ice-choked Mississippi River during the harsh winter, Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote,

“In the whole scene, there was an air of destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn’t watch without feeling one’s heart wrung.” The Indians, he added, “have no longer a country, and soon will not be a people.”

Who was Tocqueville and why did he write all those interesting things about America?

The author of those words was an aristocratic, young French magistrate studying America’s penal system, named Alexis Charles Henri Clerel de Tocqueville, who arrived in America in May 1831 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. As young men who had grown up in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic empire, they came to examine American democracy with an eye to understanding how the American experience could help form the developing democratic spirit in France and the rest of Europe. The two spent nine months traveling the nation, gathering facts and opinions, interviewing Americans from President Jackson to frontiersmen and Indians. On their return to France, Tocqueville reported on the U.S. prison system, and Beaumont wrote a novel exploring the race problem in America.

But it is for an inspired work combining reportage, personal observation, and philosophical explorations, and titled Democracy in America, that Tocqueville’s name became a permanent part of the American vocabulary. The book appeared in two volumes, the first of which appeared in 1835, the second in 1840. More than 150 years after its appearance, Democracy in America remains a basic text in American history and political theory.
Although many of his commentaries and observations were remarkably astute, and seem to apply as neatly to modern America as they did to the United States he found in 1831, Tocqueville did not always bat a thousand. Perhaps one of his greatest oversights was his assessment of the presidency as a weak office. In fact, he wrote at a time when Andrew Jackson was shaping the office as preeminent among the three branches, establishing the mold of a strong presidency that would be repeated in such chief executives as Lincoln and the two Roosevelts.

In many more matters, he was right on target. Critical of slavery –as well as the treatment of Native Americas– the Frenchman could see civil strife ahead. And he remains astonishingly correct about the American addiction to practical rather than philosophical matters and the relentless and practically single-minded pursuit of wealth. As he observed,

“I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men….”

You can read more about de Tocqueville and this period in Don’t Know Much About History. and A Nation Rising

In 1997, CSPAN retraced the Frenchman’s route through America. Here’s a link to the CSPAN site: http://www.tocqueville.org/

They called him “Papa.” One of America’s most successful and admired novelists, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) once compared his bare-bones style to an iceberg:

“There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.”

Beneath Hemingway’s famously understated prose, which often celebrated such traditionally masculine pursuits as combat, hunting and boxing, his heroes encountered doubt, isolation, and failure. Wounded as an ambulance driver during World War I, and shaken by his experience of the Great War, Hemingway moved to Paris in 1921 and joined a circle of similarly disenchanted young writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos.

Hemingway’s breakthrough novel, The Sun Also Rises, popularized a phrase borrowed from author Gertrude Stein: the “Lost Generation.”
See if you can find answers to these quick questions about the great Lost Generation author who took his own life with a shotgun blast on July 2, 1961.

1. Before Hemingway turned to fiction, what job helped develop his spare writing style?
2. What recurring, semi-autobiographical Hemingway hero was first featured in the 1924 story collection, In Our Time?
3. In A Farewell to Arms, how does main character Frederic Henry serve during World War I?
4. What is the subject of Hemingway’s 1932 nonfiction book, Death in the Afternoon? (Hint: It’s also prominently featured in his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises.)
5. Which Hemingway work contains the famous line, “Man is not made for defeat.  A man can be destroyed but not defeated”?
6. What was Hemingway’s oft-cited definition of “guts?”

A year after his death, one critic wrote that Hemingway was, “a writer who gets smaller as you grow older.”

Do you agree?

Teachers. Is Hemingway still on your reading lists?

There is an extensive archive of Hemingway material at the New York Times which includes many of his dispatches for the Times from Spain during the Spanish Civil War.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/ernest_hemingway/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=ernest%20hemingway&st=cse

The quiz is adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature

Answers

1. Newspaperman.  Fresh out of high school, Hemingway (at age seventeen) took a job as a junior reporter for the Kansas City Star.  He later worked as a foreign correspondent covering wars in Europe.
2. Nick Adams. Often read as an alter ego for Hemingway, he is a prototype for many later Hemingway characters, as well as the protagonist of the posthumously published collection, The Nick Adams Stories (1972).
3. Just as Hemingway himself served—as an ambulance driver on the Italian front.
4. Spanish bullfighting.
5. The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
6. “Grace under pressure.”

With those words, James Joyce (February 2, 1882-January 13, 1941) opened Ulysses, chosen in 1999 as the greatest novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library. The novel follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus on their wanderings through Dublin on a single day –June 16 1904.

That makes today is “Bloomsday” and complete readings of the book take place all over the world. The date was significant to Joyce because it was the day on which James Joyce first had an outing with his future wife,  Nora Barnacle, model for the character Molly Bloom.

First serialized in a literary magazine between 1918 and 1920, the novel was published in its entirety in February 1922 in Paris. Considered obscene, the book was kept out of the United States, leading to a court battle in which Ulysses was cleared for U.S. publication in a landmark obscenity ruling in 1933.

When I was about 14, I was given a copy of The Dubliners, Joyce’s collection of short stories about the city –and people– he loved and hated. I must admit I struggled with it at first. But that collection, and Joyce’s autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are two books I count among the most influential in my life.

Think you know your Joyce? Try this quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature, my first collaboration with my daughter, Jenny Davis.

Don’t Know Much About James Joyce

“When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.”  It may be hard to believe that the man who wrote that sentence (from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916) also wrote Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), two of the most infamously “difficult” works in the English language.  James Joyce (d. 1941) was born in Dublin in 1882, where his middle-class, Catholic community would inspire fiction like Dubliners (1912), the short story collection that he called “a chapter of the moral history of my country.” From the concise realism of Dubliners, Joyce’s fiction moved towards experimental uses of language and stream-of-consciousness narration.  Joyce’s dense wordplay reaches a peak in Finnegans Wake, a work intended to be read aloud.  If you’re up for “a rhubarbarous maundarin yellagreen funkleblue windigut diodying” James Joyce quiz, read on!

1.    What Christian term did James Joyce borrow to describe a “sudden spiritual moment” when “the soul of the commonest object” leaps out?
2.    What is the name of Joyce’s main character in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and the posthumously published fragment, Stephen Hero?
3.    What genre of writing made up Joyce’s first published work, Chamber Music (1907)?
4.    What famed psychiatrist wrote Joyce, “Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters”?
5.    In the Irish ballad that inspired the title of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, what brings Finnegan, the dead Irishman of the title, back to life?

In 2004, NPR did this story about the 100th anniversary of “Bloomsday.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1959559

Here is a link to the James Joyce Centre in Dublin

http://www.jamesjoyce.ie/
Answers
1.    Epiphany
2.    Stephen Dedalus, inspired by the labyrinth builder of Greek myth.
3.    Poetry.  In fact, Joyce’s collection of poems drew the attention of Imagists Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
4.    Carl Jung. Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, was treated by Jung.
5.    The smell of whiskey.

“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

How about a national holiday today, celebrating poetry, in honor of Robert Frost –born March 26, 1874.

Apples, birches, hayfields and stone walls; simple features like these make up the landscape of four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost’s poetry. Known as a poet of New England, Frost (1874-1963) spent much of his life working and wandering the woods and farmland of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. As a young man, he dropped out of Dartmouth and then Harvard, then drifted from job to job: teacher, newspaper editor, cobbler. His poetry career took off during a three-year trip to England with his wife Elinor where Ezra Pound aided the young poet. Frost’s language is plain and straightforward, his lines inspired by the laconic speech of his Yankee neighbors. But while poems like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are accessible enough to make Frost a grammar-school favorite, his poetry is contemplative and sometimes dark—concerned with themes like growing old and facing death.

Robert Frost died on January 29, 1963. He had written his own epitaph, the words above, etched on his headstone in a church cemetery in Bennington, VT.

Stop here a moment and take this Frost quiz.

1. In what city was Robert Frost born?
2. What Yankee saying does Frost’s neighbor repeat in the poem, “Mending Wall”?
3. Which President chose Frost to read a poem at his inauguration?
4. At that inauguration, why did Frost recite “The Gift Outright”?

Quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature

Here is the NYTimes obituary published after his death.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0129.html#article

And this is a videoblog I made at Frost’s gravesite last August:
http://www.dontknowmuch.com/2009/08/touch-of-frost-a-videoblog/

This is the website of Frost House adn Museum in Franconia, N.H. http://www.frostplace.org/html/museum.html
Answers
1. San Francisco, California.
2. “Good fences make good neighbors.”
3. John F. Kennedy, in 1961.
4. He had written a new poem called “Dedication,” but couldn’t read it in the January glare; instead, he recited the 1942 poem, which he knew by heart.

Slate published this collection of personal recollections of the author on the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road in 2007.
http://www.slate.com/id/2173279/nav/tap1
Think you know your Kerouac? Try this quick quiz (adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature)

TRUE or FALSE (Answers Below)

1. Kerouac was a star football player in high school.
2. Jack Kerouac typed his On the Road manuscript on a single, 120-foot-long scroll of paper.
3. Kerouac spent seven years trying to find a publisher for On the Road.
4. English was not Kerouac’s first language.
5. The Dharma Bums is based on Kerouac’s travels with fellow beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
6. Kerouac was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War.

Answers
1. TRUE. He attended Columbia University on a football scholarship.
2. TRUE. He created the scroll so that his flow would not be interrupted by having to change typewriter paper.
3. TRUE. Publishers repeatedly told him again and again that the book was unpublishable.
4. TRUE. Kerouac first learned joual, a dialect of French spoken in Quebec.
5. FALSE. It’s about a mountain-climbing trip Kerouac took with Gary Snyder, the Zen poet known best for his nature poems.
6. FALSE. Kerouac was politically conservative, and he supported the war in Vietnam.

If you were Theodor S. Geisel, get a friend to publish the book. Thus was born Dr. Seuss. Actually born on this date, March 2, 1904, Theodore Seuss Geisel first turned his knack for words and pictures to advertising and editorial cartoons. But Dr. Seuss influenced entire generations of children with his nonsensical poems that put “See Spot run” on the endangered species list.

So what do you know about Seuss? Heaven Save Us/Try this quick quiz.

1. Inspired by the rhythmic sound of an ocean liner’s engine, what was Seuss’s first book?
2. Which Seuss classic used just 225 words?
3. Boris Karloff once made his voice rather scary/But in a remake, he was played by Jim Carey. Who is he?
4. Here’s a clue that may surprise you/What did Seuss do/during the War known as Two?

Dr. Seuss died in 1991.

Here is a link to the informative and whimsical Dr. Seuss Memorial Sculpture Garden in his birthplace, Springfield, Mass.
http://www.catinthehat.org/history.htm

Answers
1. And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. The idea came to Seuss on an ocean cruise.
2. The Cat in the Hat, written in response to the 1954 reports of poor reading in America.
3. The Grinch.
4. He drew anti-Nazi and anti-Japanese propaganda cartoons, images sharply at odds with his whimsical drawings for children.

John Steinbeck built his reputation writing about the struggles of down-and-out people: Dust Bowl farmers and pearl divers, prostitutes, jobless migrants, and Depression-era hobos. Before his death in 1968, Steinbeck became one of America’s most popular storytellers and among his many works are the epic classic The Grapes of Wrath and the brief but memorable Of Mice and Men.

In later years, he signed all his letters with a “pigasus” logo: a funny stamp of a little round pig with wings.Around the pig, Steinbeck added the words, Ad Astra Per Alia Porci, or “To the stars on the wings of a pig”—an apt motto for an author who portrayed the goodness, even holiness, of the common man. What do you know about the man who won a Nobel Prize in 1962? Try this quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature

1. What did Steinbeck study at Stanford? (Hint: he returned to this subject in his non-fiction book, Sea of Cortez, 1941, with Edward F. Ricketts.)
2. Who wrote and performed the song, “The Ballad of Tom Joad,” inspired by the main character in The Grapes of Wrath?
3. What Biblical story inspired the family drama in East of Eden?
4. Which of John Steinbeck’s novels have been adapted into Oscar-winning films?
5. Steinbeck wrote the screenplay for what biopic (for which Anthony Quinn won an Oscar)?

Here’s a link to the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, CA. with a brief biography and other information
http://www.steinbeck.org/Bio.html

Answers
1. Marine Biology.
2. Woody Guthrie. Bruce Springsteen also wrote a song inspired by The Grapes of Wrath: “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” released on an album of the same name.
3. The story of Cain and Abel.
4. The Grapes of Wrath (1940) won two Oscars (Best Actress and Best Director) out of five nominations. East of Eden (1955) won Best Actress. Of Mice and Men (1939), Tortilla Flat (1942), Lifeboat (1944) (based on a Steinbeck short story), and A Medal for Benny (1945) (another short story) all received Academy Award nominations.
5. Viva Zapata!

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
–Notice at the opening of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

America doesn’t have a national holiday to honor a writer. But if we did, maybe it should be one devoted to Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in Missouri on November 30, 1835. And maybe we could make it today, February 18, in honor of Huck Finn.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared in America on this date in 1885. (It had been published first in London a few months before.) An excellent website devoted to “Huck” and Twain can be found at the University of Virginia’s site:
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/huckfinn.html

http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/huckfinn.html

(Writers take note of some of the reviews. They were not gentle.)

Best known by his pen name, and often viewed as the creator of such young adult classics as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain was much more. In a distinctly American style, Twain wrote biting satire that poked fun at America’s manners and corrupt politics. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), his master work, is now a controversial classic.

But Twain would surely remind people that he once said that a classic is, “A book which people praise and don’t read.” Although he famously told a newspaper in 1897, “The report of my death was an exaggeration,” Twain in fact died in 1910. What else do you know about one of America’s greatest writers? Take this quick quiz (adapted from Don’t Know Much About Anything Else.)

1. Where did he get his pen name “Mark Twain”?
2. How did Twain serve during the Civil War?
3. What short story gave Twain his national fame?
4. Which famous general’s autobiography did Twain publish?

There are two biographies of Mark Twain I would highly recommend:
Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography by Justin Kaplan

Answers
1. As a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, he knew this phrase meant that the water is two fathoms (12 feet) deep.
2. In 1861, Clemens joined a group of irregular Confederate cavalry from Missouri, deserting after a few weeks time. The experience served as the source of a short memoir, “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed.”
3. “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), based on a tale Twain heard while working in the California gold fields, was a national sensation.
4. His firm, Charles L. Webster, published Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs, a critical and commercial success.

Romance, scandal and ruin among New York socialites—long before this was the stuff of People, and “Gossip Girl,” it was the subject matter for Edith Wharton’s most famous works. In such novels as The Age of Innocence (1920) and The House of Mirth (1905), Wharton painted detailed, acid portraits of high society life. In doing so, she created heartbreaking conflicts beneath the façade of wealth and manners. Again and again, characters like Newland Archer and Lily Bart were forced to choose between conforming to social expectations and pursuing true love and happiness. Her most famous work set outside the realm of high-tone New York was Ethan Frome (1911), set in wintry, rural Massachusetts. Know your Wharton? Try this quick quiz–

TRUE or FALSE (Quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature. Answers below)

1. Edith Wharton wrote about wealthy New Yorkers to escape the poverty of her own upbringing.
2. Though Edith Wharton was unhappily married, she could not get divorced because it was socially unacceptable.
3. In addition to her fiction, Wharton published several books on interior decorating and landscaping.

Here is a link to The Mount, Wharton’s restored home in the Berkshires in Massachusetts:
http://www.edithwharton.org/

Edith Wharton died in France in 1937. Here is her obituary from theNew York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0124.html

Answers
1. FALSE. Wharton was born to wealthy New Yorkers, and summered in Newport, Rhode Island. She grew up traveling through Europe, and was educated by private tutors. After an official debut into society, she married a rich banker twelve years her senior.
2. FALSE. She divorced Teddy Wharton in 1913.
3. TRUE. Her first book was The Decoration of Houses. She also wrote about Italian landscaping and architecture in Italian Villas and Their Gardens, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish.

In fact, in the early 20th century, many American readers went wild for a pair of books by Jack London (1876-1916). First, The Call of the Wild (1903) told the story of Buck, a dog who returns to the ways of his wolf ancestors. Then, London published the mirror image of that tale with White Fang (1906), about a half-wolf, half-dog’s journey to a loving human family. If you’ve heard the call of Jack London, howl at this quiz. (Adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature)

TRUE or FALSE (Answers below)

1. London based Buck, the canine hero of The Call of the Wild, on a dog named “Jack” that he’d met in the Klondike.
2. The epigraph London uses to begin in The Call of the Wild is a fragment of Yukon writer Robert Service’s poem, “The Call of the Wild.”
3. London developed a personal philosophy that combined individualism and socialism while serving time in jail for vagrancy.
4. London spent the last twenty years of his life writing in Alaska after making a small fortune as a gold prospector.
5. London’s “To Build a Fire” was a popular how-to book about wilderness survival.

Sonoma State University maintains an extensive online collection about London and his work:
http://london.sonoma.edu/

Answers
1. TRUE. Other “characters” were based on dogs London had read about in Reverend Egerton Young’s My Dogs in the Northland.
2. FALSE. These four lines—“Old longings nomadic leap,/ Chafing at custom’s chain;/ Again from its brumal sleep/ Wakens the ferine strain”—come from John M. O’Hara’s poem “Atavism.” As a biological term, “atavism” refers to the reappearance of an ancestral trait that had disappeared from a line of organisms.
3. TRUE. In 1894, London spent a month mulling over the writings of Marx and Nietzsche in New York’s Erie County Penitentiary. He was arrested after he abandoned a protest march of unemployed men, called “Coxey’s Army.”
4. FALSE. London went north in search of gold in the Klondike (in the Yukon Territory) in 1897, but stayed for one year. Like most, he never struck it rich.
5. FALSE. “To Build a Fire” (1908) is one of London’s most famous short stories, about a man and a dog traveling on the Yukon Trail in extreme cold.

The very illustrious Bookclubgirl recently asked me to produce a year’s worth of recommended Reading for Book Clubs. She posted my guest post on her blog today and you can find it here. I don’t belong to any book club, but I am going to try and reread all of my own suggestions as well!

Have a great 2010!

http://www.bookclubgirl.com/book_club_girl/2010/01/kenneth-c-davis-offers-up-a-year-of-book-club-recommendations.html

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

So says Henry Tilney, the charming young clergyman in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, defending a genre that was taken about as seriously in Austen’s time as drugstore romances and “beach reads” are today. Novels, to high-minded nineteenth-century readers, were trashy and sentimental, and only filled women’s heads with nonsense. Born on Deceember 16, 1775, Austen (d.1817) herself came from a family of voracious readers; she said they were “not ashamed” to read novels. Austen’s works, including favorites like Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility, are marked by a focus on young women in situations similar to her own: educated and imaginative daughters of the middling-rich. Unlike her heroines, who depended on marriage to secure their social standing, Austen (as well as her only sister, Cassandra) never married.

Test your Austen “Sense & Sensibility” with this quick quiz (Answers below and pretty easy at that!):

1. Under what name were Austen’s novels published during her lifetime?
2. What is the name of Austen’s last, never-completed novel?
3. What was the profession of George Austen, Jane’s father.
4. Which of Austen’s novels became a movie starring Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson, and Hugh Grant?
5. What film transformed Pride and Prejudice into a Bollywood-style musical?
6. Who called Austen “the most perfect artist among women”?

The largest website devoted to all things Austen is “The Republic of Pemberley:
http://www.pemberley.com/

Answers
1. None—they were published anonymously, “By a Lady.”
2. Sanditon. Several contemporary writers have “completed” the novel and there are versions of these “finished” books.
3. Rector. The Rectory at Seventon, Hampshire, where Jane Austen wrote three of her novels, was destroyed by fire in 1823.
4. Sense and Sensibility.
5. Bride and Prejudice.
6. Virginia Woolf.

Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?

The famed story of a love affair between an aristocratic lady and her groundskeeper had been cleared for sale a year earlier in the United States.

In defining “obscenity,” Associate Justice Potter Stewart wrote in a famous 1964 Supreme Court decision,

I know it when I see it.

People have been arguing over obscenity and pornography (which in the original Greek meant “to write about prostitutes”), almost since there was writing. For publishers, the label has been a mixed blessing. Books have been burned, banned from the mails, and yanked from library shelves. But the phrase, “Banned in Boston,” eventually became a favorite selling slogan. And many books once deemed “dirty” are now bona fide classics.
Do you think you know obscenity when you see it? Unwrap the plain brown paper around this quiz about some notorious “obscene” books.

1. Which hefty novel depicts a character reading “Titbits” magazine on the toilet, allowing “his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read”?
2. Which memoir did poet Ezra Pound once call “a dirty book worth reading”?
3. What Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, among the most frequently challenged books in American schools, was once banned in a Minnesota town for including the words “damn” and “whore lady”?
4. Which 1881 poetry collection, now considered an American classic, was withdrawn from circulation by its publisher under a District Attorney’s threat of obscenity charges?
Adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature

Answers
1. Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce. The character described is Leopold Bloom.
2. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller. The novel was published in France in 1934, but banned in the U.S. until 1961.
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee.
4. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1881 edition). In 1865, Whitman had been dismissed from his day job as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs after James Harlan, Secretary of the interior, found and read a working copy of Leaves of Grass and considered it obscene.

Here is a link to a brief D.H. Lawrence biography at Poets.org
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/37

Irish-American Eugene O’Neill, born in 1888 in a New York City Broadway hotel. Son of a famous actor, he became arguably America’s greatest playwright. Four Pulitzer Prizes went to his work, including one posthumously for Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Read more about O’Neill at the PBS “American Masters” site
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/oneill_e.html

It is also the birthdate of Dublin-born (1854) Oscar Wilde, one of the most extraordinarily quotable of writers: poet, playwright, novelist and convicted homosexual.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Oscar Wilde noted that in his play, Lady Windemere’s Fan (1892). Wilde (1854-1900) believed in aestheticism—“art for art’s sake”—and wrote in order to please, charm and delight readers and audiences. While novels like The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and plays like The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were critical successes, Wilde drew more attention for the sensational 1895 trial in which he was accused, and found guilty, of “committing indecent acts”—a 19th century euphemism for homosexuality. He was sentenced to two years of hard labor, a prison term that left Wilde physically and emotionally devastated, and he died a few years after his release. What do you know about this stargazing author? Take this quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature.

1. Where does the phrase, “the Love that dare not speak its name,” come from?
2. Why did Wilde publish his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol under the name “C.3.3”?
(Answers below)
There is an “official” Oscar Wilde site operated by the agency CMG at http://www.cmgww.com/historic/wilde/index.php

Answers
1. The poem “Two Loves,” by Lord Alfred Douglas, who was Wilde’s close friend and lover. During questioning by the prosecution in his trial, Wilde clarified the meaning of the phrase as “a great affection of an elder for a younger man.”
2. It was his cell number in prison.

“Nonfiction novel”—it may sound like an oxymoron, but that’s what Truman Capote called In Cold Blood (1966).
This book about a pair of killers and a grisly quadruple murder in Kansas. Applying the techniques of good fiction writing to a story that he claimed was “immaculately factual,” Capote (1924-1984) changed the face of journalism. In addition, the fame-loving author became one of the first literary celebrities of the television era. With his high-pitched, Southern-accented speech and his delight in scandal, Capote was like no writer American viewers had seen before.
He died in August 1984. Here Is Capote’s 1984 New York Times obituary.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0930.html

See if you can ice this quiz about the author of In Cold Blood, which is adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature