Frank Beacham's Journal

Virginia Woolf was born 141 years ago today

Virginia Woolf was born 141 years ago today.

An English writer, Woolf is one of the foremost modernists of the 20th century. During the interwar period, she was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.

Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay, A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been the result of what is now called bipolar disorder.

She committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.

W. Somerset Maugham, British playwright, novelist and short story writer, was born 149 years ago today

Maugham, 1934

Photo by Carl Van Vechten

W. Somerset Maugham, British playwright, novelist and short story writer, was born 149 years ago today.

Maugham was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s.

After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a doctor.

The first run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time.

During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

During and after the war, he traveled in India and Southeast Asia. All of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels.

Maugham died in 1965 at age 91 in France.

Ernie Kovacs was born 104 years ago today

Ernie Kovacs was born 104 years ago today.

A comedian, actor and writer, Kovacs' uninhibited, often ad-libbed, and visually experimental comedic style came to influence numerous television comedy programs for years after his death in an automobile accident.

Many iconic and diverse shows have been influenced by Kovacs, such as Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, The Uncle Floyd Show, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and TV hosts such as David Letterman, Conan O'Brien and Craig Ferguson.

Chevy Chase acknowledged Kovacs' influence and thanked him during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live. Chase appeared in the 1982 documentary, Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, speaking again of the impact Kovacs had on his work.

On or off screen, Kovacs could be counted on for the unexpected, from having marmosets as pets to wrestling a jaguar on his live Philadelphia television show.

When working at WABC (AM) as a morning-drive radio personality and doing a mid-morning television show for NBC, Kovacs disliked eating breakfast alone while his wife was sleeping in after her Broadway performances. His solution was to hire a taxi driver to come into their apartment with his own key and whose job was to make breakfast for them both, then take him to the WABC studios.

While Kovacs and his wife, Edie Adams, received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series in 1957, his talent was not formally recognized until after his death.

The 1962 Emmy for outstanding electronic camera work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame.

Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist. He was its first surrealist — its most daring and imaginative writer. And he was television's first and possibly only auteur. He caused his audience to look at the world in a new way.

Kovacs died in an auto accident on January 13, 1962 at age 42 in Los Angeles.

Here, Kovacs joins Bobby Lauher to do “Whom Dunnit,” a satire about 50s-era panel quiz shows

Derek Walcott, writer, was born 93 years ago today

On this day — 93 years ago — poet and playwright Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia, the Caribbean.

Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 — the first Caribbean writer to do so.

Walcott's family descended from slaves in the West Indies, and the legacy of slavery is a common theme in his work. Both his parents were schoolteachers and encouraged a love of reading in their three children. When Walcott's father died, his mother raised the family on her own. Walcott knew early on he wanted to be a writer.

His first book of poems was published when he was only 18. He continued writing and began teaching as well. Deeply interested in theater as well as poetry, he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1957, which allowed him to study with a prominent director in New York for two years. In New York, Walcott founded the Trinidad Theater Workshop.

A prolific poet, Walcott published In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 in 1962, Selected Poems in 1964, The Castaway in 1965 and The Gulf in 1969. His lush style explores multicultural tensions and questions of identity.

Meanwhile, he continued his work in the theater, with plays like Ti-Jean and His Brothers (produced in 1958), Dream on Monkey Mountain (produced 1967) and Pantomime (produced 1978).

He wrote more than 30 plays, while continuing to publish poetry collections regularly. His book-length poem, Omeros, published in 1990, evokes Homer's Odyssey in the environment of the Caribbean.

Thanks History.com

It's National Handwriting Day...put your "John Hancock" right here

“Now we just need your John Hancock”

That phrase you often hear when you have to sign a document is a celebration of one of history’s most famous signatures.

And today, National Handwriting Day, commemorates the birthday of John Hancock (1737), the first signer of the Declaration of Independence. (As president of the Continental Congress, he got first dibs.)

With a blank space, he made sure to make his name large, legible and ornate. It stands out among the 56 signatures.

Hancock apparently did it as a defiant message to the British king, and so that British ministers could read his name “without spectacles.”

Alexander Woollcott was born 136 years ago today

Alexander Woollcott was born 136 years ago today.

A critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine and a member of the Algonquin Round Table, Woollcott was the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside, the main character in the play, The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939), by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and for the far less likable character, Waldo Lydecker, in the film, Laura (1944).

Woollcott was convinced he was the inspiration for Rex Stout's brilliant detective, Nero Wolfe, but Stout, although he was friendly to Woollcott, said there was nothing to that idea.

Born in an 85-room house, a vast ramshackle building in Colts Neck Township, New Jersey known as "the North American Phalanx," Woollcott’s birthplace had once been a commune where many social experiments were carried on in the mid-19th century — some more successful than others.

When the Phalanx fell apart after a fire in 1854, it was taken over by the Bucklin family, Woollcott's maternal grandparents. Woollcott spent large portions of his childhood there among his extended family. His father was a ne'er-do-well Cockney who drifted through various jobs, sometimes spending long periods away from his wife and children. Poverty was always close at hand.

Woollcott joined the staff of The New York Times as a cub reporter in 1909. In 1914, he was named drama critic and held the post until 1922, with a break for service during World War I. In April, 1917, the day after war was declared, Woollcott volunteered as a private in the medical corps.

Posted overseas, Woollcott was a sergeant when the intelligence section of the American Expeditionary Forces selected him and a half-dozen other newspaper men to create the Stars and Stripes, an official newspaper to bolster troop morale.

As chief reporter for the Stars and Stripes, Woollcott was a member of the amazingly talented team that formed its editorial board. These included Harold Ross, founding genius of The New Yorker Magazine, Cyrus Baldridge, multifaceted illustrator, author and writer, and the future columnist and radio personality, Franklin P. Adams.

Going beyond simple propaganda, Woollcott and his colleagues reported the horrors of the Great War from the point of view of the common soldier. After the war, he returned to The New York Times. He then transferred to the New York Herald in 1922 and to The World in 1923. He remained there until 1928.

One of New York's most prolific drama critics, he was banned for a time from reviewing certain Broadway theater shows due to his florid and often vitriolic prose. He sued the Shubert theater organization for violation of the New York Civil Rights Act, but lost in the state's highest court in 1916 on the grounds that only discrimination on the basis of race, creed or color was unlawful.

From 1929 to 1934, he wrote a column called "Shouts and Murmurs" for The New Yorker. His book, While Rome Burns, published by Grosset & Dunlap in 1934, was named twenty years later by critic Vincent Starrett as one of the 52 "Best Loved Books of the Twentieth Century."

Woollcott's review of the Marx Brothers' Broadway debut, I'll Say She Is, helped the group's career from mere success to superstardom and started a life-long friendship with Harpo Marx. Harpo's two adopted sons, Alexander Marx and William (Bill) Woollcott Marx, were named after Woollcott and his brother, Billy Woollcott.

Billed as The Early Bookworm, Woollcott was first heard on CBS Radio in October 1929, reviewing books in various timeslots until 1933. His CBS show, The Town Crier, which began July 21, 1933, opened with the ringing of a bell and the cry, "Hear ye, hear ye!," followed by Woollcott's literary observations punctuated with acidic anecdotes.

Woollcott was one of the most quoted men of his generation. Among Woollcott's classics is his description of the Los Angeles area as "Seven suburbs in search of a city" – a quip often attributed to his friend, Dorothy Parker.

Describing The New Yorker editor, Harold Ross, he said: "He looks like a dishonest Abe Lincoln." He claimed the Brandy Alexander cocktail was named for him.

Woollcott was renowned for his savage tongue. He dismissed the notable wit and pianist, Oscar Levant. "There is absolutely nothing wrong with Oscar Levant that a miracle can't fix." He greeted friends: "Hello, Repulsive." When a waiter asked him to repeat his order, he demanded, "muffins filled with pus."

His judgments were frequently eccentric. Dorothy Parker once said: "I remember hearing Woollcott say reading Proust is like lying in someone else's dirty bath water. And then he'd go into ecstasy about something called, Valiant Is the Word for Carrie, and I knew I had enough of the Round Table."

After being kicked out of the apartment he shared with The New Yorker founders, Harold Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, Woollcott moved first into the Hotel des Artistes on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He then moved to an apartment at the far end of East 52nd Street.

The members of the Algonquin Round Table had a debate as to what to call his new home. Franklin P. Adams suggested that he name it after the Indian word "Ocowoica," meaning "The-Little-Apartment-On-The-East-River-That-It-Is-Difficult-To-Find-A-Taxicab-Near." But Dorothy Parker came up with the definitive name, Wit's End.

Woollcott’s last broadcast was on January 23, 1943 as a participant in a Writers' War Board panel discussion on the CBS Radio program, The People's Platform. Marking the tenth anniversary of Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the topic was "Is Germany Incurable?" Panelists included Woollcott, Hunter College president, George Shuster, Brooklyn College president, Henry Gideonse, and novelists Rex Stout and Marcia Davenport.

The program's format began as a dinner party in the studio's private dining room, with the microphones in place. Table talk would lead into a live network radio broadcast, and each panelist would begin with a provocative response to the topic. "The German people are just as responsible for Hitler as the people of Chicago are for the Chicago Tribune," Woollcott stated emphatically, and the panelists noted Woollcott's physical distress.

Ten minutes into the broadcast, Woollcott commented that he was feeling ill, but continued his remarks. "It's a fallacy to think that Hitler was the cause of the world's present woes," he said. Woollcott continued, adding "Germany was the cause of Hitler." He said nothing further.

The radio audience was unaware that Woollcott had suffered a heart attack. He died at New York's Roosevelt Hospital a few hours later at age 56 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Algonquin Round Table surrounded by Dorothy Parker (lower left), Robert Benchley, Alfred Lunt and Lyn Fontanne, Frank Crowninshield, Alexander Woolcott, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Frank Case, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman and Robert E. Sherwood.

Drawing by Al Hirschfield

On this day in 1809 — 214 years ago — poet, author and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston

Poe and the Raven by PakstraX

On this day in 1809 — 214 years ago — poet, author and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston.

By the time he was three years old, both of Poe's parents had died, leaving him in the care of his godfather, John Allan, a wealthy tobacco merchant.

After attending school in England, Poe entered the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1826. Fighting with Allan over his heavy gambling debts, he was forced to leave UVA after only eight months. Poe then served two years in the U.S. Army and won an appointment to West Point.

After another falling-out, Allan cut him off completely and he got himself dismissed from the academy for rules infractions.

Dark, handsome and brooding, Poe had published three works of poetry by that time, none of which had received much attention. In 1836, while working as an editor at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia, Poe married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. He also completed his first full-length work of fiction, Arthur Gordon Pym, published in 1838.

Poe lost his job at the Messenger due to his heavy drinking, and the couple moved to Philadelphia, where Poe worked as an editor at Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine. He became known for his direct and incisive criticism, as well as for dark horror stories like "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Tell-Tale Heart."

Also around this time, Poe began writing mystery stories, including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" — works that would earn him a reputation as the father of the modern detective story.  
 
In 1844, the Poes moved to New York City. He scored a spectacular success the following year with his poem, "The Raven."

While Poe was working to launch The Broadway Journal — which soon failed — his wife Virginia fell ill and died of tuberculosis in early 1847. His wife's death drove Poe even deeper into alcoholism and drug abuse.

After becoming involved with several women, Poe returned to Richmond in 1849 and got engaged to an old flame. Before the wedding, however, Poe died suddenly. Though circumstances are somewhat unclear, it appeared he began drinking at a party in Baltimore and disappeared, only to be found incoherent in a gutter three days later.

Taken to the hospital, he died on October 7, 1849 at age 40.

Thanks History.com

The Grateful Dead pays tribute to Edgar Allan Poe in “Raven Space”

Benjamin Franklin was born 317 years ago today

In this painting by Jason Heuser, Franklin battles Zeus for lightning

Benjamin Franklin was born 317 years ago today.

One of the founding fathers of the United States and in many ways was "the First American," Franklin was a renowned polymath. He was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman and diplomat.

As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity.

As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals and the Franklin stove, among other inventions.

Franklin facilitated many civic organizations, including Philadelphia's fire department and a university. He earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity. He was an author and spokesman in London for several colonies and the first United States Ambassador to France.

Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment.

In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, "In Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat."

To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."

Franklin, always proud of his working class roots, became a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, the leading city in the colonies. With two partners, he published the Pennsylvania Chronicle, a newspaper that was known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the British policies.

He became wealthy publishing Poor Richard's Almanack and The Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin was also the printer of books for the Moravians of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1742 on).

Franklin's printed Moravian books (printed in German) are preserved, and can be viewed, at the Moravian Archives located in Bethlehem. Franklin visited Bethlehem many times and stayed at the Moravian Sun Inn. He played a major role in establishing the University of Pennsylvania and was elected the first president of the American Philosophical Society.

Franklin became a national hero in America when as agent for several colonies he spearheaded the effort to have Parliament in London repeal the unpopular Stamp Act.

An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco-American relations. His efforts to secure support for the American Revolution by shipments of crucial munitions proved vital for the American war effort.

For many years, he was the British postmaster for the colonies, which enabled him to set up the first national communications network. From 1785 to 1788, he served as governor of Pennsylvania. Toward the end of his life, he freed his own slaves and became one of the most prominent abolitionists.

His colorful life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and status as one of America's most influential founding fathers, have seen Franklin honored on coinage and the $100 bill; warships; the names of many towns; counties; educational institutions; corporations and countless cultural references.

Susan Sontag, writer, filmmaker, professor, literary icon and political activist, was born 90 years ago today

Susan Sontag, writer, filmmaker, professor, literary icon and political activist, was born 90 years ago today.

Beginning with the publication of her 1964 essay, "Notes on 'Camp'," Sontag became an international cultural and intellectual celebrity. Her best known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America.

Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, and traveling to areas of conflict including during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, communism and leftist ideology.

Her often provocative essays and speeches sometimes drew criticism. The New York Review of Books called her "one of the most influential critics of her generation."

Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004 at the age of 71 from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome which had evolved into acute myelogenous leukemia. She is buried in Paris at Cimetière du Montparnasse.

Jack London, author, journalist and social activist, was born 147 years ago today

Jack London, author, journalist and social activist, was born 147 years ago today.

A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.

Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire," "An Odyssey of the North" and "Love of Life."

He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen," and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.

London was part of the radical literary group, "The Crowd," in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel, The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé, The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.