Black Lamb

This Week in Literary History

July 1st, 2008

Canadian polymath and media expert Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964) is born in Edmonton, Alberta, 1911.

Marshall McLuhan, b. July 21, 1911, d. 1980

McLuhan seems not to have aged well: an example of the seer being lionized and then (almost) forgotten before the full implications of his ideas had time to sink in. A pity. To read this remarkable man’s books, especially Understanding Media (1964), is to encounter so many brilliant ideas they make your head swim. A man far ahead of his time.

Suggested Reading Books The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, 1951. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 1962. Understanding Media: Extensions of Man, 1964. Voices of Literature, 1964. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, 1967. War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968. The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, 1943-1962, 1969. From Cliché to Archetype, 1970.

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Last Week in Literary History

July 1st, 2008

In 1904, American Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (The Family Moskat, 1950) is born Yitskhek Bashyevis Zinger in Radzymin, Poland.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, b. July 14, 1904, d. 1991

Singer enjoyed a long career as the premier writer of his time in the dying Yiddish language, for which he was recognized in 1978 with a Nobel Prize. Whether in his novels, which include family chronicles written late in his career, or in his incomparable short stories, Singer is a born storyteller: vivid, earthy, sexy, magical. His frank memoirs make wonderful reading, as do his books for children.

Suggested Reading Novels The Family Moskat, 1950. In My Father’s Court, 1966. The Manor, 1967. The Estate, 1969. The Golem, 1983. Yentl the Yeshiva Boy, 1983. Short stories Gimpel the Fool, 1953. The Spinoza of Market Street, 1961. A Friend of Kafka, 1970. A Crown of Feathers, 1973. Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Collected Stories, 1982. Memoirs A Little Boy in Search of God: Mysticism in a Personal Light, 1976. A Young Man in Search of Love, 1978. Lost in America, 1981. Children’s books When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories, 1968. A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw, 1969. Why Noah Chose the Dove, 1974. Stories for Children, 1986.

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A Week in Literary History

December 21st, 2002

In 1892, English author Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 1942) is born Cicily Isabel Fairfield in Streathem.

Rebecca West, b. December 21, 1892, d. 1983

A vivacious, politically-committed woman, West began writing in radical periodicals while still a student at George Watson’s Ladies’ College in Edinburgh and took her pen name from one of Ibsen’s emancipated heroines. Her early novels and critical studies, excellent in themselves, nevertheless seem preludes to her masterwork Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, in which she shows a mastery of description and fluency of style that put her in very select company. Even more rare, she’s a writer’s writer but also a reader’s writer.

Suggested Reading Novels The Judge, 1922. Harriet Hume, 1929. The Thinking Reed, 1936. Critical Studies Henry James, 1916. D.H. Lawrence: An Elegy, 1930. Arnold Bennett Himself, 1931. Other Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 1941. The Meaning of Treason, 1947.

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A Week in Literary History

December 17th, 2002

English novelist Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier, 1915) is born in Merton, Surrey, 1873.

Ford Madox Ford, b. December 17, 1873, d. 1939

Ford was an immensely prolific writer of novels, travelogues, history tales, poems, and art criticism, and in each genre he excelled. Throughout his life he was constantly at work on one book or another; he represents a career devoted to his art. The Good Soldier is one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, and Ford’s World War I tetralogy Parade’s End is the best writing we have on that conflict and its aftermath in Britain. A master. The list below is very selective.

Suggested Reading Novels The Fifth Queen, 1906. An English Girl, 1907. Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, 1911. The Good Soldier, 1915. The Parade’s End novels Some Do Not, 1924. No More Parades, 1925. A Man Could Stand Up, 1926. The Last Post, 1928. Poetry Collected Poems, 1913. Collected Poems, 1936. Reminiscences Thus to Revisit, 1921. Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, 1924. No Enemy, 1929. Return to Yesterday, 1931. It Was the Nightingale, 1933. Criticism, Studies, & Travel Ford Madox Brown, 1896. The Cinque Ports, 1900. Rossetti, 1902. Hans Holbein, the Younger, 1905. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1907. Henry James, 1913. Between St. Denis and St. George, 1915. A Mirror to France, 1926. The English Novel, 1926. Provence: from Minstrels to the Machine, 1935.

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A Week in Literary History

December 11th, 2002

In 1922, American short story writer Grace Paley (Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 1974) is born in New York City.

Grace Paley, b. December 11, 1922

Grace Paley will perhaps not loom large in histories of late-twentieth-century American literature, because she wrote only in the short story genre, and wrote slowly. But what stories! Like Hemingway and Raymond Carver, she taught a generation how to make a piece of short fiction memorable, and her stories can be returned to time and again for the sheer delight they give in exuberant, witty, and wise writing.

Suggested Reading Short stories The Little Disturbances of Man, 1959. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 1974. Later the Same Day, 1985. Essays Just As I Thought, 1998.

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A Week in Literary History

December 3rd, 2002

In 1857, novelist Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim, 1900) is born Josef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski in Berdichev, Polish Ukraine.

Joseph Conrad, b. December 3, 1857, d. 1924

Conrad, born in Poland, has often been praised for his mastery of his second language, but in fact he wrote in a strange un-Engish. After a couple of notable books he published his so-called masterpiece, Lord Jim, in 1900, then needed help on three subsequent novels from Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), who later said, “Conrad spent a day finding the mot juste and then killed it.” We confess to a weakness for The Nigger of the Narcissus, but then we’re soft on sea stories, which is probably why we tolerate Lord Jim insofar as we do.

Suggested Reading Novels The Nigger of the Narcissus, 1897. Lord Jim, 1900. Nostromo, 1904. The Secret Agent, 1907. Short stories & tales Typhoon, 1902. Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories, 1902. The Complete Short Stories of Joseph Conrad, 1933.

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Last Week in Literary History

November 30th, 2002

In 1667, Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, 1726) is born in Dublin.

American novelist Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884) is born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Mo., 1835.

Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, b. November 30, 1667 and 1835, d. 1745 and 1910

It is our contention that Twain was the reincarnation of Swift, shorn of Swift’s neuroses and religious allegiances. If you doubt, read the last section of Gulliver’s Travels and then compare it to Twain’s later writings, especially Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Swift’s beautiful and moving, if ironic, evocation of the superiority of brute animals over human beings finds its fruition in young Huck’s repeated disillusionings in the face of mankind’s mendacity, in the cruel truths of the American slaveholding days, and in modern man’s dismantling of medieval England in the name of progress. And both Swift and Twain were great masters of clear, provocative English prose, the progenitors of the later wizards Bernard Shaw and H.L. Mencken.

SWIFT
Suggested Reading Fiction A Tale of a Tub, 1704. Gulliver’s Travels, 1726. The Battle of the Books, 1704. Essays An Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 1708. A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People of Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents, 1729. Poetry Cadenus and Vanessa, 1713. Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, Written by Himself, 1739.

TWAIN
Suggested Reading Novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876. The Prince and the Pauper, 1882. The Adventures of Huckeberry Finn, 1884. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1896. Stories The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, 1867. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, 1900. Memoirs Roughing It, 1872. Life on the Mississippi, 1883. Mark Twain’s Autobiography, 1924. Travel & Sketches The Innocents Abroad, 1869. A Tramp Abroad, 1880. Following the Equator, 1897.

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A Week in Literary History

November 11th, 2002

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment, 1886) is born in Moscow in 1821.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, b. November 11, 1821 d. 1881

Dostoevsky has his detractors, most notably Vladimir Nabokov, who had no taste for his countryman’s religious enthusiasms and thought his novels sentimental. But Dostoevsky wrote on a huge scale; his excesses are part of the deal and his preoccupation with psychology is unparalleled. His characters — quarreling, agonizing, rushing about, philosophizing, and always talking talking talking — are fascinating. Their craziness — even their author’s — is the stuff of humanity, presented by a giant of literature.

Suggested Reading Novels Notes from the House of the Dead, 1861-62. Notes from Underground, 1864. The Gambler, 1866. Crime and Punishment, 1866. The Idiot, 1868. The Possessed, 1871-72. The Brothers Karamazov, 1879-80.

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A Week in Literary History

November 9th, 2002

Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev (Fathers and Sons, 1862) is born in Orel in 1818.

Ivan Turgenev, b. November 9, 1818, d. 1883

Turgenev was the first of the great Russian novelists to be widely read in Europe. In Fathers and Sons he introduced the vexing question of nihilism, borrowed from the West, into the Russian consciousness. His elegant style became a model not so much for other Russian writers but for generations of foreigners. By the end of his life, he had become a famous figure in his homeland: his funeral was attended by delegations from 180 organizations and was an occasion of national mourning.

Suggested Reading Novels Fathers and Sons, 1862. Smoke, 1867. Spring Torrents, 1871. Virgin Soil, 1877. Stories A Sportsman’s Sketches, 1852.

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A Week in Literary History

October 29th, 2002

English novelist Henry Green (Loving, 1945) is born Henry Vincent Yorke near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.

Henry Green, b. October 29, 1905, d. 1973

No less a writer than Graham Greene called Henry Vincent Yorke, who published his novels as Henry Green, the finest English novelist of his generation. Green’s gentle but stylistically innovative books were issued to little fanfare during his lifetime, but they have found a new readership in recent years and are all again in print. Loving is the most famous, but equally fascinating and satisfying are Living, Party Going, and Concluding.

Suggested Reading Novels Blindness, 1926. Living, 1929. Party Going, 1939. Caught, 1943. Loving, 1945. Back, 1946. Concluding, 1948. Nothing, 1950. Doting, 1952. Memoir Pack My Bag, 1940.

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