Frank Beacham's Journal

Jean-Paul Sartre was born 116 years ago today

Jean-Paul Sartre was born 116 years ago today.

A French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer and literary critic, Sarte was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology and a leading figure in 20th century French philosophy and Marxism.

Sarte’s work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory and literary studies. He continues to influence these disciplines. Sartre has also been noted for his open relationship with the prominent feminist theorist, Simone de Beauvoir.

He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."

Sartre died in Paris in 1980 at age 74. He is pictured above in 1950.

Jean-Paul Sartre (middle) and Simone de Beauvoir (left) meeting with Che Guevara (right) in Cuba, 1960

Lillian Hellman, dramatist and playwright, was born 116 years ago today

Lillian Hellman, dramatist and playwright, was born 116 years ago today.

Hellman's career as a playwright saw many successes on Broadway, including Watch on the Rhine, The Autumn Garden, Toys in the Attic, Another Part of the Forest, The Children's Hour and The Little Foxes.

She adapted her semi-autobiographical play, The Little Foxes, into a screenplay which received an Academy Award nomination in 1942.

Hellman was blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–52. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a precipitous decline in her income during which time she had to work outside her chosen profession.

Hellman was praised for sacrificing her career by refusing to answer questions by HUAC. However, her denial that she had ever belonged to the Communist Party was doubted by many, including war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, former wife of Ernest Hemingway and literary critic, and Hellman rival, Mary McCarthy.

Hellman was romantically involved with fellow writer and political activist Dashiell Hammett, author of the classic detective novels, The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, who also was blacklisted for thirty years until his death in 1961. The couple never married because Hammett already had a wife.

Hellman's reputation suffered after her veracity was attacked by Mary McCarthy during a 1980 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. Hellman sued McCarthy for libel, and it eventually came out that not only were Hellman's popular memoirs such as, Pentimento, was rife with errors, but that the "Julia" section of Pentimento that was the basis for the Oscar-winning 1977 film likely was a fabrication based on the life of Muriel Gardiner.

Martha Gellhorn joined McCarthy in the attack on Hellman's veracity, showing that Hellman's remembrances of Gellhorn's ex-husband, Ernest Hemingway, and the Spanish Civil War were wrong.

Tagged with the onus of being an unrepentant Stalinist by the staunchly anti-Stalinist McCarthy and others, Hellman remains a divisive figure of American letters.

It’s Bloomsday, the celebration of James Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece “Ulysses”

It’s Bloomsday, the celebration of James Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece “Ulysses.”

Though few have actually read the 800 page novel, it follows a day — June 16, 1904 — in the life of Leopold Bloom, a Dubliner.

Commemorations in scores of cities worldwide include Irish breakfasts of liver and kidneys (as described in the book), marathon readings, Edwardian costumes and pub crawls.

Some critics and academics today rank “Ulysses” among the greatest books ever written — a far cry from its original reception. Virginia Woolf called it an “illiterate, underbred” book. Gertrude Stein labeled Joyce “incomprehensible.” And The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice called the work vulgar and indecent, leading it to be banned in the United States until 1933.

“By the standards of today’s dirty books, ‘Ulysses’ seems pretty tame,” one critic writes. Another writer notes that most of today’s Amazon.com reviews don’t even mention the sex.

Thanks New York Times!

Katharine Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, was born 104 years ago today

Katharine Graham — A Personal Remembrance

Katharine Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, was born 104 years ago today.

Publishers are normally not the creative people that I celebrate on these pages, but Graham was special and unique. In early 1974, I went to work as an investigative reporter for Post-Newsweek Television, which was owned by the Washington Post.

This was the period during the Watergate scandal, in which Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had an integral role in bringing about the resignation of President Richard Nixon that summer. Unlike newspapers and other news outlets today, Graham supported real, hard hitting reporting.

When Woodward and Bernstein brought the Watergate story to Post editor, Ben Bradlee, Graham supported their investigative reporting and Bradlee ran stories about Watergate when few other news outlets would touch the story. As a result, Graham was the subject of one of the best-known threats in American journalistic history.

It occurred in 1972, when Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, warned reporter Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published." As an act of intimidation, the Nixon administration also set its Federal Communications Commission onto the Post’s broadcast properties. Graham was under severe pressure in those years and she rose to that pressure.

On my first day at work at the Post’s WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, I was surprised to get a personal phone call from Katherine Graham. She welcomed me and acknowledged the pressure we were under at the time.

But her real message was clear. “If you receive pressure from anyone — anyone at all — not to do your job, I want you to call me directly,” she said. “That’s very important.” She made me promise to call and gave me her direct number.

I never did call, though the next year at Post-Newsweek I was threatened, sued and publicly called every name in the book. The station defended every lawsuit and we won them all. We worked hard and got it right. It was the era of good, tough journalism — long gone today.

It was always comforting to know in those days that I was backed by the real iron lady, Katherine Graham.

In the above photo, Katharine Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, managing editor Howard Simons and executive editor Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post in 1973.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born 120 years ago

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born 210 years ago today.

An American abolitionist and author, Stowe came from a famous religious family and is best known for her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). The novel depicts the harsh life for African-Americans under slavery.

It reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and Great Britain. It energized anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South.

Stowe wrote 30 books, including novels, three travel memoirs and collections of articles and letters. She was influential for both her writings and her public stands on social issues of the day.

Pierre Salinger was born 96 years ago

Pierre Salinger: A Personal Remembrance

Pierre Salinger was born 96 years ago today. He was White House Press Secretary to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Also, Salinger served as a U.S. Senator in 1964 and was campaign manager for the Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign.

He later became known for his work as an ABC News correspondent, and in particular for his coverage of the American hostage crisis in Iran and the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

It was at ABC News that I got to know and work with Salinger. In 1978, he was hired by the network as its Paris bureau chief. He became the network's chief European correspondent based in London in 1983. Under Salinger, I worked in Paris for about six weeks — doing a variety of stories.

Because Salinger was as much a French cultural ambassador as newsman, he was a lot of fun to be with. He was far more casual about news stories than his choice of food and drink, which he took very seriously. We ate at some amazing restaurants, where Salinger was always treated more like an important food critic than a VIP guest.

For a while in Paris, ABC booked me into the exclusive Hotel Saint Georges. After a period of working several days in a row with no time off, Salinger ordered a limo and put it at my disposal for an entire day to go anywhere I wanted. I was amazed by his generosity.

Such luxury is long gone from television news today, but in the era of Pierre Salinger it was still very much alive. He lived life to the fullest and made sure those around him enjoyed the fruits as well. Later, after leaving ABC, Salinger hosted a program in the early 1990s on the A&E cable network called Dining in France. No one was better qualified!

Salinger later made a permanent move to France, making good on his promise that, "If (George W.) Bush wins, I'm going to leave the country and spend the rest of my life in France."

Salinger died in October, 2004 of heart failure near his home, La Bastide Rose, in Le Thor, France at the age of 79.

William Butler Yeats was born 156 years ago today

William Butler Yeats was born 156 years ago today.

An Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature, Yeats was a pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms.

Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years.

In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honored for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."

Born in Sandymount, Ireland on this day in 1865, Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize. Such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was a close friend of Ezra Pound, the American expatriate poet and Bollingen Prize laureate.

Yeats wrote the introduction for Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, which was published by the India Society.

From 1900, Yeats's poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.

Here is Yeats in 1903

Photo by Alice Boughton

Anne Frank was born 92 years ago today

Anne Frank was born 92 years ago today.

Frank was a German-Dutch diarist. One of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.

It is one of the world's best known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Frank lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, having moved there with her family at the age of four and a half when the Nazis gained control over Germany. Born a German national, she lost her citizenship in 1941 and thus became stateless.

By May 1940, the Franks were trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the Franks went into hiding in some concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Anne's father, Otto Frank, worked.

From then until the family's arrest by the Gestapo in August 1944, she kept a diary she had received as a birthday present. Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps.

In late 1944, Anne and her sister, Margot, were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (probably of typhus) a few months later. Anne was 15 years old.

Otto, the only survivor of the Franks, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that her diary had been saved by his secretary, Miep Gies, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It has since been translated into over 70 languages.

In the above photo, Frank in 1940

Athol Fugard, South African playwright, novelist, actor and director who writes in English, is 89 years old today

Athol Fugard, South African playwright, novelist, actor and director who writes in English, is 89 years old today.

Fugard is best known for his political plays opposing the South African system of apartheid and for the 2005 Academy Award-winning film of his novel, Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood.

Among his plays are Master Harold...and the Boys (1982), Valley Song (1996), Victory (2007) and The Train Driver (2010).

For several years, Fugard was an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. For the academic year 2000–2001, he was the IU Class of 1963 Wells Scholar Professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

The recipient of many awards, honors and honorary degrees, including the 2005 Order of Ikhamanga in Silver "for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre" from the government of South Africa, he is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Fugard's plays are produced internationally, have won multiple awards and several have been made into films, including among their actors Fugard himself.

In 2012, Fugard moved to South Africa, where he now lives permanently.

William Styron, author of Sophie's Choice and other critically acclaimed novels, was born on this day in 1925

William Styron, author of Sophie's Choice and other critically acclaimed novels, was born on this day in 1925 — 96 years ago — in Newport News, Virginia.

Styron was troubled by growing up in the segregated south. His father's family had once owned slaves. An only child, he became a voracious reader and skipped ahead in school. He went to Davidson College in North Carolina, but nearly flunked out before he joined the Marines.

Styron was sent to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. When he returned, he finished his education at Duke University in North Carolina, where he studied writing. He moved to New York City, hoping to become a writer.

He finished his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, about a woman struggling against insanity and suicidal urges. However, he was called back to the Marines to serve in the Korean War before the book's publication in 1951.

His next book, The Long March (1956), about a brutal march forced on Marine recruits in training, became a critical and financial success. He won a major award, the Prix de Rome, that allowed him to travel abroad and write.

In Rome, he met his future wife, Rose Burgunder. While in Paris, he helped found the Paris Review. He made friends with Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin and other writers.

His novel, Set This House on Fire (1960), was attacked by U.S. critics but praised abroad. In 1967, he explored his interest in race issues with The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), written in the voice of Nat Turner, leader of a failed slave uprising.

Some black writers attacked Styron, claiming a white writer could not accurately portray the psychology of a black slave. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. His bestselling novel, Sophie's Choice, dealing with the devastating aftermath of the Holocaust, was made into an award-winning film in 1982.

Styron struggled with severe clinical depression and suicidal urges, which he described in his memoir Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990).

He died on November 21, 2006 at age 81.

Thanks History.com