A Look Back At James Dickey's Novel "Deliverance"

As Steve King at todayinliterature.com notes, it was on this day in 1970 that James Dickey's novel Deliverance was published.

Although primarily a poet -- thirty collections by the time of his death in 1997, a National Book Award in 1965 for Buckdancer's Choice -- Dickey's first novel was a best-seller when it appeared, and the movie two years later (Dickey wrote the script and played the Sheriff) was a box-office hit. The tale of four suburb-dwellers on a manly descent into camping nightmare -- the human-nature horrors include rape and murder -- is described as "an allegory of fear and survival" and "a Heart of Darkness for our time" by the critics.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/28/2014

 

Note: I enjoyed James Dickey's novel and I enjoyed John Boorman's film as well. It was Burt Reynold's finest film.  

Collins, Crime & Sergeant Cuff

As Steve King at todayinliterature.com notes, on this day in 1824, the Victorian mystery novelist Wilkie Collins was born.

Though many of Collins's twenty-five novels are now little-read, his "gaslight thrillers" were once very popular, and two -- The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) -- have not only stayed in print but grown in reputation. Critics and historians view Collins as a master of suspense and the first in English crime fiction to bring psychological depth and literary flair to tales so sensational and lurid that they would otherwise belong to the crime tabloids. Collins attributed his popularity to the old adage, 'make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait,' which he said he borrowed from the music hall, though it might just as easily have come from his good friend Charles Dickens. Whatever Collins's formula, Victorian England lined up at the publisher's to get his next installment -- and sang "The Woman in White Waltz," and wore 'Woman in White' perfume, and bought out the first printing of that book in a day. It has not been out of print since, and has been turned into a play and a handful of movies.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/8/2014

A Neglected Anniversary: H. L. Mencken's Tub & Hot Water

Steve King at todayinliterature.com notes that on this day in 1917, H. L. Mencken's "A Neglected Anniversary," his hoax article on the American invention of the bathtub, was published in the New York Evening Mail.

Mencken's lifelong campaign to deride and derail Main Street America -- the "booboisie" -- had a number of easy victories, but this joke succeeded beyond his wildest dreams and in Swiftian proportions.

In the omniscient tone of newspaper editorials, Mencken lamented and reprimanded that such an august cultural moment as the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bathtub should arrive and "Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day." This was worse than unhygienic; it was unpatriotic. A thankless, forgetful nation had forgotten that the first bathtubs -- these, of course, appeared in Cincinnati -- had been met with contempt by the social watchdogs, who thought them "an epicurean and obnoxious toy from England, designed to corrupt the democratic simplicity of the Republic," and by the medical profession, who thought them likely to induce "phthisic, rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs and the whole category of zymotic diseases."

... To Mencken's amazement and delight, this history of the triumphant American tub was swallowed and spread by newspapers and radio stations across the country. The "facts" were duly incorporated into reference books; the health and hygiene industry, not to mention the plumbers, touted the happy day; the White House calendar-makers, noting Mencken's claim that Millard Fillmore (chosen surely for his name) was the first President to install one, paid tribute to his tub.

Eight years after the original article Mencken attempted to pull the plug by publishing various confessions, but many regarded the confession as the hoax, and his bogus bathtub anniversary continued to be commemorated in many quarters. All of which more or less proved Mencken's point, one more political and personal than whimsical.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=12/28/2013

Mark Twain, Smiley, Frogs

As Steve King at todayinliterature.com notes, on this day in 1865 Mark Twain published "Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog" in the New York Saturday Press.

The story was immediately popular nationally and then internationally, giving Twain first fame and the centerpiece for his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. As a sometime-reporter, Twain had been publishing such tall tales and hoaxes for several years -- writing them as "Josh" until 1863 -- but his frog story was an old chestnut, first heard from fellow prospectors while sitting around the saloon stove in Angel's Mining Camp, outside San Francisco.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=11/18/2013

Buchan To 'Bond, James Bond'

As Steve King at www.todayinliterature.com notes, today is the birthday of the late writer John Buchan.

On this day in 1875, the lawyer-politician-writer John Buchan was born, in Perth, Scotland.

Buchan wrote prolifically and in almost all genres, but he is best known for his spy-adventure novels, particularly the first "Richard Hannay" book, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Some trace the spy genre back to The Spy (1821) by James Fenimore Cooper, and others regard Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1903) as the beginning, but most give Buchan credit for the kind of espionage thriller-he called them "shockers" -- that would eventually arrive at James Bond.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=8/26/2013

Hemingway's Debut: To Write One True Sentence

Steve King at www.todayinliterature.com notes that on this day in 1923 Ernest Hemingway published his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems.

This was an edition of 300 copies, put out by friend and fellow expatriate, the writer -- publisher Robert McAlmon. Both had arrived in Paris in 1921, Hemingway an unpublished twenty-two-year-old journalist with a recent bride, a handful of letters of introduction provided by Sherwood Anderson, and a clear imperative: "All you have to do is write one true sentence."

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=8/13/2013

A Look Back At Mark Twain's Life On The Mississippi

Steve King at the web site www.todayinliterature.com notes that on this day in 1883 Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi was published.

Much of the book had been printed as a series of articles in The Atlantic eight years earlier. These reminiscences had been popular -- they "made the ice-water in my pitcher turn muddy," said William Dean Howells -- and Twain decided to expand them, seeing an opportunity to bring another high-volume subscription book to market. Because he would need to gather research, he also saw an opportunity to revisit the world of his youth after twenty-one years away, "to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left."

In his autobiography Twain says that his career as a river-boat pilot began in the mid-1850s: "I made up my mind that I would go to the head-waters of the Amazon and collect coca and trade in it and make a fortune.... When I got to New Orleans I inquired about ships leaving for Para and discovered that there weren't any and learned that there probably wouldn't be any during that century." He signed on as an apprentice with Horace Bixby, the pilot who had brought him to New Orleans; on the nostalgia and research trip of 1882, Twain arranged to travel upriver with Bixby. The riverbank was so different that when given a chance to pilot his old route Twain couldn't find any of his remembered landmarks. As a boy he would see a dozen steamboats an hour; now there were maybe a half-dozen a day -- one day he saw only one, though it was called "The Mark Twain." The end of his trip was a three-day stay in hometown Hannibal, Missouri; here he reports bursting into tears because of the changes, because of the familiar look and smell of the mud, because he was no longer Sam Clemens but Mark Twain, the famous author who now traveled with a secretary hired to take down notes so that no profitable impression might be lost.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/12/2013

Happy Birthday To O. Henry

Steve King at the web site todayinliterature.com notes that today is the birthday of one of my favorite writers, O. Henry.

On this day in 1898 William S. Porter -- the drug store clerk, cowboy, fugitive, bank teller, cartoonist and future "O. Henry" -- began a five-year prison sentence for embezzlement. Porter had published several stories prior to his prison term, but the fourteen written behind bars represented a new style and quality, and began his rise to popularity. Porter hoped a pseudonym would keep the disgrace of his conviction from his young daughter, who was told that he was away on business. Why Porter settled on "O. Henry" is variously explained: as a drug store clerk in his teens, Porter would have known of the famous French pharmacist, Etienne-Ossian Henry, whose name appeared in the drug dispensary guide as O. Henry; he took the name from one of his prison guards, Orrin Henry; while courting a young lady he called a stray cat over with "Oh Henry!" and then later wrote about the incident, signing the unpublished piece, "O. Henry"; as ranch hand in his early twenties, he knew the cowboy song "Root, Hog, or Die," and found it apt: "... Along came my true lover about twelve o'clock / Saying Henry, O Henry, what sentence have you got?"

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=4/25/2013

You can also read about O. Henry in my Crime Beat column on Mahattan noir classic stories via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/07/on-crime-thrillers-manhattan-noir-2.html

America's Great Humorist And Author Mark Twain Died On This Day in 1910

Steve King at todayinliterature.com notes that Mark Twain died on this day in 1910 at the age of seventy-four.

Despite an undercurrent of disasters and dark thoughts, Twain swept along through his last years as the Mississippi to the sea: guests to his seventieth birthday banquet took home his foot-high bust, New York City pedestrians and English royalty lined up to meet him, thousands filed past his casket to see him in his last white suit.

The white suits began in 1906 -- a secretary's diary gives us the precise date of being told by "the King" to order five of them -- and they suggest more than a chuckle or another self-promotion. Twain liked to scrub his white hair every morning, and talk about dirt. His "Connecticut Yankee" hopes to bring social reform to King Arthur's England by introducing soap. His "Greeting from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth Century," published in the New York Herald at the end of 1900, urged the preach-and-plunder Age to come clean of "her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her the soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass."

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=4/21/2013

On This Day In Literature: Mencken, The Prostitute & The Police

Steve King at the web site Todayinliterature.com offers a piece on the late great journalist H. L. Mencken.

On this day in 1926, H. L. Mencken was arrested by the Boston vice squad, charged with the possession and sale of indecent literature. The literature in question was the April, 1926 issue of Mencken's American Mercury magazine, found offensive for a short story entitled "Hatrack," by Herbert Asbury. "Hatrack" is the nickname of a skinny but welcoming small-town prostitute, one whose attempts to reform have been rebuffed by the upright and churchgoing of her community. This causes Hatrack to fall back to her old and not insensitive ways: servicing her upstanding clients so that those Catholic are accommodated in the Protestant cemetery, and those Protestant in Catholic graveyards. The punch line of Asbury's story compounded hypocrisy with miserliness: when one gentleman tenders Hatrack a dollar, she responds, "You know damned well I haven't got any change."

Reverend Chase, secretary of the New England Watch and Ward Society and a type that Mencken loved to bait, was not amused. He managed to get all available copies of the Mercury pulled from newsstands in the Boston area and he promised trouble to those who attempted to sell any new ones. Editor Mencken conveyed his feelings clearly to publisher Alfred Knopf: "I am against any further parlay with these sons of bitches. Let us tackle them as soon as possible."

The showdown was an orchestrated affair. Chase and his seconds made themselves available at the appointed hour on Brimstone Corner of Boston Common; before police and press, Mencken offered the purchase of his magazine; Chase tendered his half-dollar, and Mencken was hauled off to the station -- though not before biting his coin for the crowd, as Hatrack might have done. The next day the court ruled in Mencken's favor, thus giving him victory, as much publicity as he had the year before with his reports from the Scopes trial, and yet another application of Mencken's Law: "Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of improving or saving X, A is a scoundrel."

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=4/5/2013

Punching Papa: Callaghan, Hemingway And Fitzgerald

Steve King at www.todayinliterature.com notes that today is Morley Callaghan's birthday and tells the story of his boxing match with fellow writer Ernest Hemingway, with F. Scott Fitzgerald as timekeeper.

On this day in 1903 the Canadian novelist and short story writer, Morley Callaghan was born. Though prolific and successful, Callaghan was so overlooked by the critics for much of his career that Edmund Wilson thought him "the most unjustly neglected writer in the English language." Much of the attention that Callaghan did receive was not for his twenty novels and story collections but for That Summer in Paris (1963), a memoir of his Lost Generation days among "a very small, backbiting, gossipy neighborhood" of Latin Quarter expatriates -- Ford Madox Ford, Robert McAlmon, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc. Callaghan's account of his boxing matches with Hemingway especially raised eyebrows --including those of Norman Mailer in a 1963 review entitled, "Punching Papa": "For the first time one has the confidence that an eyewitness has been able to cut a bonafide trail through the charm, the mystery, and the curious perversity of Hemingway's personality." 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/22/2013