Frank Beacham's Journal

Christopher Marlow, English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era, was born in 1564

Christopher Marlow, English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era, was baptized 459 years ago. He is likely to have been born a few days before in 1564.

Marlowe was the foremost Elizabethan tragedian of his day. He greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe's mysterious early death. Marlowe's plays are known for the use of blank verse and their overreaching protagonists.

A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on May 18, 1593. No reason was given for it, though it was thought to be connected to allegations of blasphemy — a manuscript believed to have been written by Marlowe was said to contain "vile heretical conceits."

On May 20, he was brought to the court to attend upon the Privy Council for questioning. There is no record of their having met that day, however, and he was commanded to attend upon them each day thereafter until "licensed to the contrary."

Ten days later, he was stabbed to death by Ingram Frizer. Whether the stabbing was connected to his arrest has never been resolved.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet, was born 131 years ago today

Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet, was born 131 years ago today in Rockland, Maine.

One of three daughters of a divorced nurse, Millay learned independence and self-reliance early, and transmitted those qualities to her poetry. She began publishing poetry in high school.

In 1912, the year she turned 20, her poem, “Renascence,” appeared in a literary review and drew the attention of a benefactor who made it possible for Millay to attend Vassar. The year she graduated, in 1917, her first volume of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems, appeared.

Millay moved to New York City, where she lived a hectic, glamorous life as a writer and actress in Greenwich Village. One of the first women to write openly and without shame about her lovers, Millay had numerous affairs.

Millay left her mark on Greenwich Village in the 1920s. She wrote about MacDougal Street, helped found the Cherry Lane Theater and lived at 75 ½ Bedford Street, potentially the narrowest house in New York at nine and a half feet wide.

The critic, Floyd Dell, wrote that the red-haired and beautiful Millay was "a frivolous young woman, with a brand-new pair of dancing slippers and a mouth like a valentine." Millay described her life in New York as "very, very poor and very, very merry."

While establishing her career as a poet, Millay initially worked with the Provincetown Players on MacDougal Street and the Theatre Guild.

In 1924, Millay and others founded the Cherry Lane Theater "to continue the staging of experimental drama." Magazine articles under a pseudonym also helped support her early days in the village.

Millay was openly bisexual. Counted among her close friends were the writers Witter Bynner, Arthur Davison Ficke and Susan Glaspell, as well as Floyd Dell and the critic Edmund Wilson, both of whom proposed marriage to her and were refused.

In 1920, her famous poem, “First Fig,” set the tone for the 1920s, with its resounding lines, “My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night.” Millay’s fast-paced life took a toll. Exhausted, she traveled to Europe for a long rest in 1921. There she met and married Dutch importer, Jan Boissevan, who gave up his business to devote himself to Millay.

In 1923, the couple moved to a farm in upstate New York, where Millay continued to write verse and plays. That year, she published The Harp Weaver and Other Poems, for which she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize.

A passionate proponent of civil liberty, she was arrested and jailed for supporting Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists condemned to death for robbery and murder.

In the 1930s, she wrote anti-totalitarian poetry for newspapers, as well as radio plays and speeches. She suffered a nervous breakdown in 1944 and endured two years of writer’s block afterward. She broke down again after her husband’s death in 1949, and died of a heart attack on Oct. 19, 1950 at the age of 58.

Thanks History.com and the New York Times

Bertolt Brecht was born 125 years ago today

Bertolt Brecht was born 125 years ago today.

A German poet, playwright and theatre director, Brecht was an influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century. He made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the huge impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble — the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife, long-time collaborator and actress, Helene Weigel.

Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria (about 50 miles north-west of Munich), to a devout Protestant mother and a Catholic father (who had been persuaded to have a Protestant wedding). The modest house where he was born is today preserved as a Brecht Museum.

Thanks to his mother's influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would impact on his writing throughout his life. From her, too, came the "dangerous image of the self-denying woman" that recurs in his drama.

Brecht's home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied.

At school in Augsburg, he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a lifelong creative partnership. Neher designed many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helped to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre.

When Brecht was 16, the First World War broke out. Initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates "swallowed by the army.”

On his father's recommendation, Brecht sought a loophole by registering for an additional medical course at Munich University, where he enrolled in 1917. There he studied drama with Arthur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret-star, Frank Wedekind.

From July, 1916, Brecht's newspaper articles began appearing under the new name "Bert Brecht" (his first theatre criticism for the Augsburger Volkswille appeared in October, 1919).

Brecht was drafted into military service in the autumn of 1918, only to be posted back to Augsburg as a medical orderly in a military VD clinic. The war ended a month later. Some time in either 1920 or 1921, Brecht took a small part in the political cabaret of the Munich comedian, Karl Valentin.

Brecht's diaries for the next few years record numerous visits to see Valentin perform. Brecht compared Valentin to Chaplin, for his "virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology.“

In 1922, while still living in Munich, Brecht came to the attention of an influential Berlin critic, Herbert Ihering. "At 24, the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany's literary complexion overnight" — Ihering enthused in his review of Brecht's first play to be produced, Drums in the Night.

“He has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision. [...] It is a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column," Ihering wrote.

In 1923, Brecht wrote a scenario for what was to become a short slapstick film, Mysteries of a Barbershop, directed by Erich Engel and starring Karl Valentin. Despite a lack of success at the time, its experimental inventiveness and the subsequent success of many of its contributors have meant that it is now considered one of the most important films in German film history.

In May of that year, Brecht's In the Jungle premiered in Munich, also directed by Engel. Opening night proved to be a "scandal" — a phenomenon that would characterize many of his later productions during the Weimar Republic — in which Nazis blew whistles and threw stink bombs at the actors on the stage.

In 1924, Brecht worked with the novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger (whom he had met in 1919) on an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II that proved to be a milestone in Brecht's early theatrical and dramaturgical development.

Brecht's Edward II constituted his first attempt at collaborative writing and was the first of many classic texts he was to adapt. As his first solo directorial début, he later credited it as the germ of his conception of "epic theatre.“

That September, a job as assistant dramaturg at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater — at the time one of the leading three or four theatres in the world — brought him to Berlin.

In 1925, Brecht also saw two films that had a significant influence on him: Chaplin's The Gold Rush and Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Brecht had compared Valentin to Chaplin, and the two of them provided models for Galy Gay in Man Equals Man.

Brecht later wrote that Chaplin "would in many ways come closer to the epic than to the dramatic theatre's requirements."

They met several times during Brecht's time in the United States, and discussed Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux project, which it is possible Brecht influenced.

Following the production of Man Equals Man in Darmstadt in 1926, Brecht began studying Marxism and socialism in earnest, under the supervision of Hauptmann. "When I read Marx's Capital," a note by Brecht reveals, "I understood my plays." Marx was, it continues, "the only spectator for my plays I'd ever come across."

In 1927, the first collaboration occurred between Brecht and the young composer, Kurt Weill. Together they began to develop Brecht's Mahagonny project, along thematic lines of the biblical Cities of the Plain but rendered in terms of the Neue Sachlichkeit's Amerikanismus, which had informed Brecht's previous work.

They produced The Little Mahagonny for a music festival in July, as what Weill called a "stylistic exercise" in preparation for the large-scale piece. From that point on Caspar Neher became an integral part of the collaborative effort, with words, music and visuals conceived in relation to one another from the start.

The model for their mutual articulation lay in Brecht's newly-formulated principle of the "separation of the elements," which he first outlined in "The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre" (1930).

The principle, a variety of montage, proposed by-passing the "great struggle for supremacy between words, music and production" as Brecht put it, by showing each as self-contained, independent works of art that adopt attitudes towards one another.

In 1930, this collective adapted John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, with Brecht's lyrics set to music by Kurt Weill. Retitled The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), it was the biggest hit in Berlin of the 1920s and a renewing influence on the musical worldwide.

Fearing persecution, Brecht left Germany in February, 1933, when Hitler took power. After brief spells in Prague, Zurich and Paris, he and Weigel accepted an invitation from journalist and author Karin Michaelis to move to Denmark, where they settled in a house in Svendborg on the island of Funen.

When war seemed imminent in April, 1939, he moved to Stockholm, Sweden, where he remained for a year. Then Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark, and Brecht was forced to leave Sweden for Helsinki in Finland, where he waited for his visa for the United States until May 3, 1941.

Brecht wrote the screenplay for the Fritz Lang-directed film, Hangmen Also Die!, which was loosely based on the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Reich Protector of German-occupied Prague, #2 man in the SS and a chief architect of the Holocaust, who was known as "The Hangman of Prague."

It was Brecht's only script for a Hollywood film. The money he earned from the project enabled him to write The Visions of Simone Machard, Schweik in the Second World War and an adaptation of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.

Hanns Eisler was nominated for an Academy Award for his musical score. The collaboration of three prominent refugees from Nazi Germany — Lang, Brecht and Eisler — is an example of the influence this generation of German exiles had on American culture.

In the years of the Cold War and "Red Scare," Brecht was blacklisted by movie studio bosses and interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Along with about 41 other Hollywood writers, directors, actors and producers, he was subpoenaed to appear before the HUAC in September, 1947.

Although he was one of 19 witnesses who declared that they would refuse to appear, Brecht eventually decided to testify. He later explained that he had followed the advice of attorneys and had not wanted to delay a planned trip to Europe.

Dressed in overalls and smoking an acrid cigar that made some of the committee members feel slightly ill, Brecht testified on Oct. 30, 1947 that he had never been a member of the Communist Party.

He made wry jokes throughout the proceedings, punctuating his inability to speak English well with continuous references to the translators present, who transformed his German statements into English ones unintelligible to himself. HUAC Vice Chairman Karl Mundt thanked Brecht for his co-operation.

Brecht died on August 14, 1956 of a heart attack at the age of 58.

In addition to the theatre, Brechtian theories and techniques have exerted considerable sway over certain strands of film theory and cinematic practice. Brecht's influence is detected in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Lindsay Anderson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Joseph Losey, Nagisa Oshima, Ritwik Ghatak, Lars von Trier, Jan Bucquoy and Hal Hartley.

Here, Brecht testifies before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947

William S. Burroughs was born 109 years ago today

William S. Burroughs in front of the Théâtre Odeon in Paris, 1959

Photo by Brion Gysin

William S. Burroughs was born 109 years ago today.

A novelist, short story writer, satirist, essayist, painter and spoken word performer, Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author who wrote in the paranoid fiction genre. He is considered to be one of the most culturally influential and innovative artists of the 20th century.

Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.

Born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, Burroughs was the grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager, Ivy Lee. He began writing essays and journals in early adolescence, but did not begin publicizing his writing until his thirties.

He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University. He studied English and anthropology as a postgraduate student and later attended medical school in Vienna.

In 1942, Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II, but was turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and Navy. After this, he picked up the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs.

In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of which grew into the Beat Generation, which was later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture.

Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris and Tangier in Morocco, as well as from his travels in the South American Amazon.

Burroughs accidentally killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City. One night while drinking with friends at a party above the American-owned Bounty Bar in Mexico City, a drunk Burroughs allegedly took his handgun from his travel bag and told his wife, "It's time for our William Tell act," even though they had never performed such an act previously.

Vollmer, who was also drinking heavily and undergoing amphetamine withdrawal, obliged him by putting a highball glass on her head. Burroughs shot low and the bullet struck her, killing her almost immediately.

Burroughs spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and bribed Mexican lawyers and officials to release Burroughs on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide. He immediately returned to the United States. Later, he was convicted in absentia of homicide and was given a two-year suspended sentence.

Although Burroughs was writing before the shooting of Vollmer, the event marked him and, biographers argue, his work for the rest of his life. Vollmer's death also resonated with Allen Ginsberg, who wrote of her in Dream Record: June 8, 1955, "Joan, what kind of knowledge have the dead? can you still love your mortal acquaintances? What do you remember of us?"

Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch (1959), a highly controversial work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws.

With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964).

In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.

Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift," a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism.

Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.

James Dickey, poet and novelist who wrote the novel, Deliverance, in 1972, was born 100 years ago today

James Dickey (left) with Burt Reynolds on the set of "Deliverance"

James Dickey, poet and novelist who wrote the novel, Deliverance, in 1972, was born 100 years ago today.

Dickey was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966. He also received the Order of the South award.

Born to lawyer Eugene Dickey and Maibelle Swift in Atlanta, Georgia, Dickey attended North Fulton High School in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood. In 1942, he enrolled at Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina and played on the football team as a tailback.

After one semester, he left school to enlist in the Army Air Corps. Dickey served with the U.S. Army Air Forces as a radar operator in a night fighter squadron during the Second World War, and in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War.

Between the wars, he attended Vanderbilt University, graduating with degrees in English and philosophy, as well as minoring in astronomy. He also taught at the University of Florida.

Dickey’s first book of poetry, Into the Stone and Other Poems, was published in 1960. Drowning with Others was published in 1962, which led to a Guggenheim Fellowship (Norton Anthology, The Literature of the American South). Buckdancer's Choice (1965) earned him a National Book Award for Poetry.

After being named a poetry consultant for the Library of Congress, he published his first volume of collected poems, Poems 1957-1967 in 1967. This publishing may represent Dickey's best work.

He subsequently accepted a position of Professor of English and writer-in-residence at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. His popularity exploded after the film version of his novel, Deliverance, was released in 1972. Dickey had a cameo in the film as a sheriff.

The poet was invited to read his poem, "The Strength of Fields," at President Jimmy Carter's inauguration in 1977.

Dickey died on January 19, 1997, six days after his last class at the University of South Carolina, where from 1968 he taught as poet-in-residence. He spent his last years in and out of hospitals, afflicted first with jaundice and later fibrosis of the lungs.

Here is James Dickey as the sheriff in a scene from Deliverance, 1972

James Dickey: A Personal Remembrance

James Dickey, while teaching at my alma mater, the University of South Carolina, had a reputation as quite a drinker.

My involvement with Dickey was one of the most bizarre jobs I ever had.

Since I was both a USC student at the time and working at WIS-TV, the local NBC affiliate, it was deemed appropriate for me to keep Dickey sober for a live television show scheduled at the station that afternoon.

The job seemed simple. I was to stay with Dickey all day and make sure he didn’t drink before he came to the television studio. It was probably known well in advance by all involved at the university and the television station — except me — that I would fail at the job.

In a biography of Dickey by Henry Hart, the author said the macho Dickey “drank oceanic-ally,” slept with too many women and was a serial exaggerator. “I am crazy about being drunk,” Dickey wrote. “I like it like Patton liked war.”

Of course I failed, but Dickey did just fine on the air, even though he was under the influence — as always.

We got along well and he was very entertaining. But he definitely ignored my gentle protestations as he proceeded to drink all day.

Now that I look back, I wonder whether my assigned task of keeping Dickey sober that day was a big joke on me, or just an impossible job placed upon a novice college kid who could be easily blamed if things went wrong.

I’ll never know for sure, but I remember James Dickey as a bigger than life character and one hell of a challenge!

Scottish poet Robert Burns was born on this day in 1759 — 264 years ago

Scottish poet Robert Burns was born on this day in 1759 — 264 years ago.

The day is still celebrated by Burns fans across the English-speaking world, with high-spirited "Robert Burns Night" feasts, featuring haggis and other Scottish delicacies, as well as enthusiastic drinking, toasting and speechmaking.

Burns, the son of a poor farmer, received little formal schooling but read extensively. A restless, dissatisfied spirit, he fell in love with a young woman, Jean Armour, in the mid-1780s. The pair endured a legal struggle and her parents resisted a marriage. Eventually, the couple had nine children, the last one born on the day of Burns' funeral.

Burns published his first poetry collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in 1786, and he quickly became the darling of elite Edinburgh intellectuals.

Perhaps more famous for his lively lyrics in the Scottish dialect than for his longer, more literary poems, Burns is still beloved and celebrated today as the author of the New Year's anthem, "For Auld Lang Syne."

Thanks History.com

August Strindberg, Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter, was born 174 years ago today

August Strindberg, Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter, was born 174 years ago today.

A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades. During that time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis and politics.

A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques.

From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his, The Red Room (1879), has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.

During the 1890s, he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 to 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become “the Zola of the Occult.”

In 1898, he returned to playwriting with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage.

His A Dream Play (1902) — with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging and multiplication of its characters — was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism.

Carl Sandburg, poet and an urban folk singer, was born 145 years ago

Photo by William A. Smith

Carl Sandburg, poet and an urban folk singer, was born 145 years ago.

Sandburg won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."

Born in the three-room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg, Illinois, to parents of Swedish ancestry, Sandberg left school at the age of 13 and began driving a milk wagon. From 14 until he was 18, he worked as a porter at the Union Hotel barbershop in Galesburg.

After that he was on the milk route again for eighteen months. He became a bricklayer and a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas.

After an interval spent at Lombard College in Galesburg, Sandberg became a hotel servant in Denver, then a coal-heaver in Omaha. He began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. Later he wrote poetry, history, biographies, novels, children's literature and film reviews.

Sandburg also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. He spent most of his life in the Midwest before moving to North Carolina.

Sandburg volunteered to go to the military and was stationed in Puerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry during the Spanish–American War, disembarking at Guánica, Puerto Rico on July 25, 1898. He was never actually called to battle.

Sandburg attended West Point for just two weeks, before failing a mathematics and grammar exam. He returned to Galesburg and entered Lombard College, but left without a degree in 1903. He moved to Milwaukee and joined the Social Democratic Party, the name by which the Socialist Party of America was known in the state.

Sandburg served as a secretary to Emil Seidel, socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912. He met Lilian Steichen at the Social Democratic Party office in 1907, and they married the next year. Lilian's brother was the photographer, Edward Steichen.

Sandburg with his wife, whom he called Paula, raised three daughters.

The Sandburgs moved to Harbert, Michigan and then to suburban Chicago. They lived in Evanston, Illinois, before settling at 331 S. York Street in Elmhurst, Illinois, from 1919 to 1930. He wrote three children's books in Elmhurst — Rootabaga Stories in 1922 followed by Rootabaga Pigeons (1923) and Potato Face (1930).

He also wrote Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, a two-volume biography in 1926, The American Songbag (1927) and a book of poems, Good Morning, America (1928), in Elmhurst. In 1919, Sandburg won a Pulitzer Prize "made possible by a special grant from The Poetry Society" for his collection, Corn Huskers.

He won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History for The War Years, the second volume of his Abraham Lincoln, and a second Poetry Pulitzer in 1951 for Complete Poems.

In 1945, he moved to Connemara, a 246-acre rural estate in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Here, he produced a little over a third of his total published work, and lived with his wife, daughters and two grandchildren.

On February 12, 1959, in commemorations of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, Congress met in joint session to hear actor Fredric March give a dramatic reading of the Gettysburg Address, followed by an address by Sandburg. To date, Sandburg remains the only American poet ever invited to address a joint session of Congress.

Sandburg supported the civil rights movement, and was the first white man to be honored by the NAACP with their Silver Plaque Award, proclaiming him to be a "major prophet of civil rights in our time."

Sandburg died of natural causes in 1967. His ashes were interred under "Remembrance Rock," a granite boulder located behind his birth house.

Sandburg's 1927 anthology, the American Songbag, enjoyed enormous popularity, going through many editions.

Sandburg himself was perhaps the first American urban folk singer, accompanying himself on solo guitar at lectures and poetry recitals, and in recordings, long before the first or the second folk revival movements (of the 1940s and 1960s, respectively).

According to musicologist Judith Tick: As a populist poet, Sandburg bestowed a powerful dignity on what the '20s called the "American scene" in a book he called a "ragbag of stripes and streaks of color from nearly all ends of the earth ... rich with the diversity of the United States."

Reviewed widely in journals ranging from the New Masses to Modern Music, the American Songbag influenced a number of musicians. Pete Seeger, who calls it a "landmark," saw it "almost as soon as it came out." The composer Elie Siegmeister took it to Paris with him in 1927, and he and his wife, Hannah, "were always singing these songs. That was home. That was where we belonged."

Sandburg's home of 22 years in Flat Rock, Henderson County, North Carolina, is preserved by the National Park Service as the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. Carl Sandburg College is located in Sandburg's birthplace of Galesburg, Illinois.

Here, Sandburg performs “I Ride An Old Paint”

Khalil Gibran, Lebanese-American artist, poet and writer of the New York Pen League, was born 140 years ago

Khalil Gibran, Lebanese-American artist, poet and writer of the New York Pen League, was born 140 years ago.

Born in the town of Bsharri in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Empire (north of modern-day Lebanon) to Khalil Gibran and Kamila Gibran (Rahmeh), Gibran immigrated with his family as a young man to the United States, where he studied art and began his literary career, writing in both English and Arabic.

In the Arab world, Gibran is regarded as a literary and political rebel. His romantic style was at the heart of a renaissance in modern Arabic literature, especially prose poetry, breaking away from the classical school. In Lebanon, he is still celebrated as a literary hero.

He is chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his 1923 book, The Prophet, an early example of inspirational fiction including a series of philosophical essays written in poetic English prose.

The book sold well despite a cool critical reception, gaining popularity in the 1930s and again especially in the 1960s counterculture.

Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Laozi.

Max Eastman, influential radical activist, was born 140 years ago today

Max Eastman meets Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood in 1919

Both were lovers of actress Florence Deshon

Max Eastman, influential radical activist, was born 140 years ago today.

A poet, a prose writer on literature, philosophy and society and a prominent political activist, Eastman moved to New York City for graduate school. There, he became involved with liberal and radical circles in Greenwich Village.

Eastman supported socialism and became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance, and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes. For several years, he edited The Masses. With his sister, Crystal Eastman, in 1917, he co-founded The Liberator, a radical magazine of politics and the arts.

In later life, however, Eastman changed his views, becoming highly critical of socialism and communism after his experiences during a nearly two-year stay in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, as well as later studies.

He was influenced by the deadly rivalry between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, by which Trotsky was assassinated, as well as the wholesale abuses of the 1930s show trials under Stalin, who conducted widespread terror against his citizens, repression and purges that resulted in the imprisonment and deaths of millions of people in the Soviet Union.

Eastman became an advocate of free-market economics and anti-communism, while remaining an atheist and independent thinker. In 1955, he published Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. He published more frequently in The National Review and other conservative journals in later life, but always remained independent in his thinking.

For instance, he publicly opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, earlier than most. He also wrote two volumes of memoirs, as well as two volumes of recollections of his friendships and personal encounters with many of the leading figures of his time.

These included Pablo Casals, Charlie Chaplin, Eugene Debs, John Dewey, Isadora Duncan, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, H. L. Mencken, John Reed, Paul Robeson, Bertrand Russell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George Santayana, E. W. Scripps, George Bernard Shaw, Carlo Tresca, Leon Trotsky, Mark Twain and H. G. Wells.

Eastman's last memoir was Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epic (1964). In 1969, he died at his summer home in Bridgetown, Barbados, at the age of 86.

Edward Herrmann portrayed Eastman in the film, Reds (1981), directed by and starring Warren Beatty, which was based on the life of John Reed.