Tag Archive for ‘Don’t Know Much About Literature’
A Year of Good Reading
My first post of this New Year is actually a Guest Post. 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 [...]
Twelve Christmas Myths (8): Why 12 Days?
One of the specific ways that Solstice celebrations from ancient times are still remembered is by the “Twelve Days of Christmas.”
Don’t Know Much About “a Lady”
“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 [...]
A Lady and a Penguin — Not a “Dirty Story”
Generally, we don’t associate the iconic Penguin Books with “dirty books.” And neither did a British jury. On November 2, 1960, Penguin won a landmark British publishing case when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was deemed “not obscene” by a jury of three women and nine men. Penguin had published the novel, written in 1928, to mark [...]
Today in Literature: Oscar Wilde and Eugene O’Neill
Born this day are two great and influential writers. 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 [...]
Don’t Know Much About Truman Capote
“Oh my, it’s fruitcake weather!” It’s not the first line many people associate with Truman Capote, born September 30, 1924 in New Orleans. But it is in one of my favorites, A Christmas Memory, a 1956 short story originally published in Mademoiselle. This Depression-era story of a young boy and his favorite aunt making holiday [...]
Don’t Know Much About Faulkner
Yesterday Fitzgerald. Today Faulkner. This American master was born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897. The past is never dead. It’s not even past. History haunts the present in William Faulkner’s novels, as this famous line from Requiem for a Nun (1951) suggests. Faulkner’s great novels focus on the decline of the southern [...]
Don’t Know Much About F. Scott Fitzgerald
Born September 24, 1896: F. Scott Fitzgerald in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was named Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald after the author of The Star-Spangled Banner, a distant relative of his mother’s. It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of [...]
Banned Books Week
Each year, the American Library Association and other groups mark Banned Books Week during the last week in September. This year it begins Saturday September 26 and continues through October 3. 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 [...]
TODAY IN HISTORY: The Fugitive Slave Act
Congress, in its infinite wisdom, often makes bad law. Today is a reminder of that fundamental truth. When: On September 18, 1890, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slave owners to reclaim slaves who had escaped to other states. Why: The Fugitive Slave Act was part of a larger “Compromise of 1850,” intended [...]
