Frank Beacham's Journal

John Howard Lawson — one of the "Hollywood Ten" writers who went to jail — was born 127 years ago today

The Hollywood Ten

John Howard Lawson — one of the "Hollywood Ten" writers who went to jail — was born 127 years ago today.

A writer, Lawson was head of the Hollywood division of the Communist Party USA. He was also the organization's cultural manager, and answered directly to V.J. Jerome, the Party's New York-based cultural chief.

He was the first president in the Writers Guild of America, West after they changed from their name from Screen Writers Guild.

In 1928, Lawson moved to Hollywood where he wrote scripts for films such as The Ship for Shanghai, Bachelor Apartment and Goodbye Love. In the winter of 1930-1931, it was at this time during the Great Depression that Lawson wrote Success Story.

The Theatre Guild rejected the script, but Harold Clurman, a reader for them, had recently just formed the Group Theatre (New York) and needed new scripts. Clurman and Lawson reworked the play during the summer of 1932, and Success Story opened on September 26, 1932 for 121 performances.

During the 1930s, leftists accused Lawson of having a lack of ideological and political commitment. New Playwrights Theatre associate Mike Gold attacked him in The New Masses on April 10, 1934, calling him a "A Bourgeois Hamlet of Our Time" who wrote adolescent works that lacked moral fiber or clear ideas.

Lawson responded a week later in The New Masses in the article "'Inner Conflict' and Proletarian Art." He cited his middle-class childhood as the reason why he could fully understand the working people. He also recognized that his prosperity and Hollywood connections were suspect in the fight for workers' rights.

Due to the criticism, Lawson joined the Communist Party and began a program of educating himself about the proletarian cause. He would soon travel throughout the poverty-stricken South to study bloody labor conflicts in Alabama and Georgia.

While in the South, he would submit articles to the Daily Worker which got him arrested numerous times. These experiences would inspire his next play, Marching Song. It was put on by the radical Theatre Union and it opened on February 17, 1937 and ran for sixty-one performances.

Lawson, who joined the American Communist Party in 1934, made several films that were political, including Blockade (1938), which starred Henry Fonda. It was a film on the Spanish Civil War for which he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Story.

Lawson also wrote Counter-Attack (1945), a tribute to the Soviet-USA alliance during the Second World War. He also wrote more innocuous films, such as the critically acclaimed, Algiers (1938), and the Humphrey Bogart vehicles, Sahara and Action in the North Atlantic, in 1943.

After the World War II, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry. In September 1947, the HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood.

These people attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses.” During their interviews they named several individuals whom they accused of holding left-wing views.

Lawson appeared before the HUAC on October 29, 1947, but like Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Samuel Ornitz and Ring Lardner Jr, he refused to answer any questions.

Known as the Hollywood Ten, they claimed that the First Amendment of the United States Constitution gave them the right to do this. The HUAC and U.S. appeals courts, however, disagreed and all were found guilty of contempt of Congress and Lawson was sentenced to twelve months in Ashland Prison and fined $1,000.

Blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, Lawson moved to Mexico where he began writing Marxist interpretations of drama and film-making such as The Hidden Heritage (1950), Film in the Battle of Ideas (1953) and Film: The Creative Process (1964). He also wrote one of the first anti-apartheid movies, Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) under a pseudonym.

After he was blacklisted, he taught at several universities including Stanford University, Loyola Marymount University and Los Angeles University of Judaism.
In his book, Film in the Battle of Ideas, Lawson asserted that "the rulers of the United States take the film very seriously as an instrument of propaganda" and that the influence of Hollywood movies is utilized to "poison the minds of U.S. working-class people" and that inaccurately describes the reality of U.S. working-class life.

Lawson’s writing on techniques in play and screenwriting are highly respected today.

Robert McKee used Lawson’s work in courses I took from him over the years and later borrowed and credited Lawson for many key ideas in his book, Story.

Shel Silverstein, poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books, was born 91 years ago today

Shel Silverstein, circa 1968

Photo by Alice Ochs

Shel Silverstein, poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books, was born 91 years ago today.

Silverstein grew up in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago and attended Roosevelt High School. Later, he went the University of Illinois before he was expelled. He then attended Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and Roosevelt University for three years, until 1953 when he was drafted into the Army. He served in Japan and Korea.

Silverstein began drawing at age seven by tracing the works of Al Capp. "When I was a kid — 12 to 14, around there — I would much rather have been a good baseball player or a hit with the girls, but I couldn't play ball. I couldn't dance. Luckily, the girls didn't want me. Not much I could do about that. So I started to draw and to write. I was also lucky that I didn't have anybody to copy, be impressed by,” he told Publisher’s Weekly.

“I had developed my own style. I was creating before I knew there was a Thurber, a Benchley, a Price and a Steinberg. I never saw their work till I was around 30. By the time I got to where I was attracting girls, I was already into work, and it was more important to me. Not that I wouldn't rather make love, but the work has become a habit."

After returning to Chicago, Silverstein began submitting cartoons to magazines while also selling hot dogs at Chicago ballparks. His cartoons began appearing in Look, Sports Illustrated and This Week.

In 1957, Silverstein became one of the leading cartoonists in Playboy, which sent him around the world to create an illustrated travel journal with reports from far-flung locales. During the 1950s and 1960s, he produced 23 installments called "Shel Silverstein Visits..." as a feature for Playboy.

Employing a sketchbook format with typewriter-styled captions, he documented his own experiences at such locations as a New Jersey nudist colony, the Chicago White Sox training camp, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Fire Island, Mexico, London, Paris, Spain and Africa.

Silverstein's passion for music was clear early on as he studied briefly at Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. His musical output included a large catalog of songs — a number of which were hits for other artists, most notably the rock group, Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show.

He wrote Tompall Glaser's highest-charting solo single "Put Another Log on the Fire," "One's on the Way" (a hit for Loretta Lynn) and "25 Minutes to Go," sung by Johnny Cash, about a man on Death Row with each line counting down one minute closer.

Silverstein also wrote one of Johnny Cash's best known hits, "A Boy Named Sue." Other songs co-written by Silverstein include "the Taker" by Waylon Jennings and "On Susan’s Floor” by Gordon Lightfoot and a sequel to "A Boy Named Sue" called: "Father of a Boy Named Sue" which is less known, but he performed the song on television on The Johnny Cash Show.

He also penned a song entitled "F*** 'em" which is lesser known and contained a reference to "f*** children."

Silverstein styled himself as Uncle Shelby in some works. Translated into more than 30 languages, his books have sold over 20 million copies.

On May 10, 1999, Silverstein died at age 68 of a massive heart attack in Key West, Florida.

William Faulkner was born 124 years ago today

William Faulkner was born 124 years ago today.

A writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career.

He is primarily known and acclaimed for his novels and short stories, many of which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner created based on Lafayette County, where he spent most of his life, and Holly Springs in Marshall County.

Faulkner is one of the most important writers of the Southern literature of the United States, along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams.

Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Two of his works, A Fable (1954), and his last novel, The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, as sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th Century. Also on the list were, As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932).

Faulkner was known for his experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence. In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his contemporary Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner made frequent use of "stream of consciousness" in his writing. He wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of characters.

His characters included former slaves or descendants of slaves, poor white, agrarian or working-class Southerners and Southern aristocrats.

Faulkner suffered serious injuries in a horse-riding accident in 1959, and died from a myocardial infarction, at age 64, on July 6, 1962.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born 125 years ago today

F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born 125 years ago today.

An author of novels and short stories, Fitzgerald’s works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, and his most famous, The Great Gatsby. A fifth unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously.

Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.

The Great Gatsby has been the basis for numerous films of the same name, spanning nearly 90 years; 1926, 1949, 1974, 2000 and 2013. In 1958, his life from 1937–1940 was dramatized in Beloved Infidel.

While at a country club, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre (1900–1948), the "golden girl," in Fitzgerald's terms, of Montgomery, Alabama youth society. Fitzgerald attempted to lay a foundation for his life with Zelda. Despite working at an advertising firm and writing short stories, he was unable to convince Zelda that he would be able to support her, leading her to break off the engagement.

Scott returned to his parents' house at 599 Summit Avenue, on Cathedral Hill, in St. Paul, to revise The Romantic Egoist. Recast as This Side of Paradise, about the post-WWI flapper generation, it was accepted by Scribner's in the fall of 1919 and Zelda and Scott resumed their engagement. The novel was published on March 26, 1920, and became one of the most popular books of the year.

Scott and Zelda were married in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. Their only child, Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald, was born on October 26, 1921 and died on June 16, 1986.

Paris in the 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. The Great Gatsby, considered his masterpiece, was published in 1925.

Fitzgerald made several excursions to Europe, mostly Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald’s friendship with Hemingway was quite vigorous, as many of Fitzgerald’s relationships would prove to be.

Hemingway, however, did not get on well with Zelda. In addition to describing her as "insane," he claimed that she “encouraged her husband to drink so as to distract Scott from his work on his novel."

As did most professional authors at the time, Fitzgerald supplemented his income by writing short stories for such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly and Esquire.

Fitzgerald also sold his stories and novels to Hollywood studios. This “whoring,” as Fitzgerald and, subsequently, Hemingway called these sales, was a sore point in the authors’ friendship. Fitzgerald claimed that he would first write his stories in an authentic manner but then put in “twists that made them into salable magazine stories.”

Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. He suffered two heart attacks in late 1930. After the first, in Schwab's Drug Store, he was ordered by his doctor to avoid strenuous exertion.

He moved in with Sheilah Graham, who lived in Hollywood on North Hayworth Ave., one block east of Fitzgerald's apartment on North Laurel Ave. Fitzgerald had two flights of stairs to climb to his apartment. Graham's was on the ground floor.

On the night of December 20, 1940, Fitzgerald and Graham attended the premiere of This Thing Called Love starring Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas. As the two were leaving the Pantages Theater, Fitzgerald experienced a dizzy spell and had trouble leaving the theater. He said to Graham: "They think I am drunk, don't they?"

The following day, as Fitzgerald ate a candy bar and made notes in his newly arrived Princeton Alumni Weekly, Graham saw him jump from his armchair, grab the mantelpiece, gasp and fall to the floor.

She ran to the manager of the building, Harry Culver, founder of Culver City. Upon entering the apartment to assist Fitzgerald, Culver said, "I'm afraid he's dead."

Fitzgerald had died of a massive heart attack. He was 44.

Melvin Van Peebles, the father of black cinema, dies at 89

Melvin Van Peebles performs at the Triad Theater, New York City, 2009

Photo by Frank Beacham

We lost a giant in American filmmaking today. Melvin Van Peebles, 89, broke all the rules and lived his life as a true artist in everything he did. He never gave up. It is a terrible loss.

I knew and got to work with Melvin. I learned a lot just watching him and hearing his many tales. Here is what I wrote after an all-nighter working with him in a film. RIP, Melvin!!!

———

It was April 2, 2006, when I answered the call from Melvin Van Peebles to be in his movie, Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha.

Yes, that's the title and the spaces are as they are meant to be.

To say I didn't know what I was getting into is a gross understatement. I was to play a redneck truck driver who gets shot. Melvin did not give me an advance script. He said the lines would be easy to learn on location.

We shot the film during the night at a private wooded estate in Rye, New York. The only thing that would end it was the rising sun many hours later. A makeup artist reddened my beard and I was handed a script. The lines were much more extensive than I had anticipated.

I'm no actor, so it was a big challenge, especially when I learned that Melvin wanted me to say the words with a poetic beat. I struggled to get it right. I guess he either gave up or found my performance acceptable. I'm still not sure.

But the really hard part was ahead. The getting shot part, I mean. The red dot on my head and shirt in the photo are where the guns were aimed. That was a T-shirt, by the way, and the night was very cold.

We did 16 takes altogether. I was surrounded by gunmen in dark woods. Each time I was shot, I had to fall down hard, hitting what felt like frozen earth.

Finally, it was over. When I got home, showered and got into bed, I was sore. So sore and bruised I would find, I stayed in bed for two days.

In 2008, when the film was released, I saw it at the New York Film Festival. The pain came racing back again.

So much for my "acting" career.

Frank Beacham and Melvin Van Peebles after the film shoot in 2006

John Houseman, film producer and actor, was born 118 years ago today

Orson Welles and John Houseman in the theatre during rehearsals of Horse Eats Hat in 1936

John Houseman, film producer and actor, was born 118 years ago today.

The Romanian-born British-American actor and film producer became known for his highly publicized collaboration with director, Orson Welles, from their days in the Federal Theatre Project through to the production of the classic film, Citizen Kane.

Houseman is perhaps best known for his role as Professor Charles Kingsfield in the 1973 film, The Paper Chase, for which he won a best supporting actor Oscar. He reprised his role as Kingsfield in the subsequent TV series adaptation of The Paper Chase.

Houseman produced numerous Broadway productions, including Heartbreak House, Three Sisters, The Beggar's Opera and several Shakespearean plays, including a famous "Blackshirt" Julius Caesar directed by Orson Welles in 1937.

In 1934, Houseman was looking to cast a play he was producing based on a drama by Archibald MacLeish concerning a Wall Street financier whose world crumbles about him when consumed by the crash of 1929.

Although the central figure is a man in his late fifties, Houseman became obsessed by the notion that a young man named Orson Welles he had seen in a Cornell Company production of Romeo and Juliet was the only person qualified to play the leading role.

In 1936, the Federal Theatre Project (part of Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration) put unemployed theatre performers and employees to work. Within a year of its formation, the project had more than fifteen thousand men and women on its payroll at an average wage of approximately twenty dollars a week.

Houseman and Welles ran a WPA unit in midtown Manhattan for classic productions called Project #891. The following year Project #891 would produce their most controversial work, The Cradle Will Rock.

Written by Marc Blitzstein, the musical was about Larry Foreman, a worker in Steeltown (played in the original production by Howard Da Silva), which is run by the boss, Mister Mister (played in the original production by Will Geer).

The show was thought to have had left-wing and unionist sympathies (Foreman ends the show with a song about "unions" taking over the town and the country), and became legendary as an example of a "censored" show.

Shortly before the show was to open, Federal Theatre officials in Washington announced that no productions would open until after July 1, 1937, the beginning of the new fiscal year.

All the performers had been enjoined not to perform on stage for the production when it opened on July 14, 1937. The cast and crew left their government-owned theatre and walked 20 blocks to another theatre, with the audience following.

No one knew what to expect. When they got there, Blitzstein himself was at the piano and started playing the introduction music. One of the non-professional performers, Olive Stanton, who played the part of Moll, the prostitute, stood up in the audience, and began singing her part.

All the other performers, in turn, spontaneously stood up in the audience to perform their parts. Thus the "oratorio" version of the show was born.

Apparently, Welles had designed some intricate scenery, which ended up never being used. The event was so successful that it was repeated several times on subsequent nights, with everyone trying to remember and reproduce what had happened spontaneously the first night.

The incident, however, led to Houseman being fired and Welles's resignation from Project #981.

That same year, 1937, after detaching themselves from the Federal Theatre Project, Houseman and Welles founded the acclaimed New York drama company, The Mercury Theatre.

Beginning in the summer of 1938, the Mercury Theatre was featured in a weekly dramatic radio program on the CBS network, initially promoted as First Person Singular before gaining the official title, The Mercury Theatre on the Air.

The show became famous for its notorious 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which had put much of the country in a panic. By all accounts, Welles was shocked by the panic that ensued.

According to Houseman, "he hadn't the faintest idea what the effect would be.” CBS was inundated with calls. Newspaper switchboards were jammed. The Welles-Houseman collaboration continued in Hollywood.

In the spring of 1939, Welles began preliminary discussions with RKO's head of production, George Schaefer, with Welles and his Mercury players being given a two picture deal, in which Welles would produce, direct, perform and have full creative control of his projects. Welles decided to make “Citizen Kane.”

During a corporate dinner for the Mercury crew, Welles exploded, calling Houseman a "bloodsucker" and a "crook.” As Houseman attempted to leave Chasen’s Restaurant, Welles began hurling dish heaters at him, setting curtains on fire in the restaurant. The act effectively ending both their partnership and friendship.

Houseman would later, however, play a pivotal role in ushering Citizen Kane (1941), which starred Welles. Welles telephoned Houseman asking him to return to Hollywood to "babysit" screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz, while he completed the script, and keep him away from alcohol.

Still drawn to Welles, as was virtually everyone in his sphere, Houseman agreed.

Although Welles took credit for the screenplay of Kane, Houseman stated that the credit belonged to Mankiewicz, an assertion that led to a final break with Welles. Houseman took some credit himself for the general shaping of the story line and for editing the script.

Among the many Houseman achievements, he was the founding director of the Drama Division at The Juilliard School where his first graduating class included Kevin Kline and Patti LuPone.

Unwilling to see his first class immediately disbanded by the commercial world of stage and screen, he formed them into a touring repertory company appropriately named the Group 1 Acting Company (later shortened to, The Acting Company).

John Houseman: A Personal Remembrance

In 1985, as a young producer working for Orson Welles, the great director regaled me with stories during a leisurely three-hour lunch on a Saturday afternoon at the Ma Maison Restaurant on Melrose Ave. in Los Angeles.

It was a rare day for Orson, who didn’t like to “walk down memory lane.” But on this day, Orson was in a lighter mood than usual and told me the incredible story of the staging of “The Cradle Will Rock” in 1937.

I was spellbound. Few people could tell a story like Orson Welles. It was about the only time in U.S. history the military had been sent out to shut down a Broadway play. Orson and his acting company defied the government and became famous for it. During Orson’s telling of this epic tale, I was on the edge of my seat, and hung on to his every word.

Orson told me he had wanted to produce and direct the story himself and had written a script about it. But the money had fallen apart just before production was to begin. “The story of my life,” he said, sadly. Then he suggested that I might want to produce it.

A short time later, Orson died and the project I was doing with him — Orson Welles Solo — went up in smoke. I was in shock and needed to do something...anything. I vividly remembered The Cradle Will Rock story and decided to tackle it. After a visit with Marc Blitzstein’s sister in Philadelphia, I obtained the film rights from his family.

John Houseman had written about The Cradle Will Rock in one volume of his autobiography, Run Through. I had long admired Houseman and had grown up watching “The Paper Chase” on television. I contacted Houseman, and inadvertently entered the long-running feud he had with Orson.

Unwittingly, I sent Houseman the Orson Welles’ script of The Cradle Will Rock. It irritated him immensely, projecting only Orson’s view of what had happened. “It must never be made,” Houseman told me in his most intimidating Professor Kingsfield voice. (I later discovered that Kingsfield arrogance was really Houseman. No acting involved!)

The anger and disdain Houseman had for Welles continued to burn bright long after Orson’s death. In fact, it didn’t subside until Houseman’s own death three years later in 1988 at age 86.

I wanted to option Houseman’s material on Cradle, assuring him I would not use the Welles script but would commission a totally new one. Houseman had cancer at this point and was near death.

From his death bed, he said to me, “Mr. Beacham, you shall pay me $5,000 now or you shall pay much more after I expire.”

To make a long story short, I told this story to a stranger in an LA bar later that night, having run out of options to raise additional money. He was so entranced by the story, he wrote me a check after we hammered out an agreement on the back of a bar napkin. Talk about luck!

The next day, after this stranger’s check cleared, I gave the money to Houseman, who scribbled his signature on the option agreement. I had all the needed rights to do a film.

I took the story to a young director and actor, Tim Robbins, sensing he would he would interested. He was, and we worked together over ten years to make a film. I was an executive producer of “Cradle Will Rock,” which was released by Disney’s Touchstone company in 1999. Tim wrote the script and directed the film. Cary Elwes played Houseman in the movie.

Whenever I want to be reminded of the real John Houseman, I watch a re-run of The Paper Chase. That was the man I knew and experienced. He may have won an Academy Award for playing a role, but he was just being himself. That I know.

H.G. Wells — pioneer of science fiction — was born 155 years ago today in Bromley, England

H.G. Wells — pioneer of science fiction — was born 155 years ago today in Bromley, England.

Wells was born near London and received a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London. After school, he worked as a draper's apprentice and bookkeeper before becoming a freelance writer. His lively treatment of scientific topics quickly brought him success as a writer.

In 1895, he published his classic novel, The Time Machine, about a man who journeys to the future. The book was a success, as were his subsequent books, The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898).

Passionately concerned about the fate of humanity, Wells joined the socialist Fabian Society but quit after a quarrel with George Bernard Shaw, another prominent member.

He was involved romantically for several years with Dorothy Richardson, pioneer of stream-of-consciousness writing.

In 1912, the 19-year-old writer Rebecca West reviewed his book, Marriage, calling him "The old maid among novelists." He asked to meet her, and the two soon embarked on an affair that lasted 10 years and produced one son, Anthony.

Wells died in 1946 at age 79.

Thanks History.com

In the above photo, Wells measures a move in a war game, 1913

Photo by Mary Evans

Stephen King is 74 years old today

Stephen King is 74 years old today.

King is an author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy. His books have sold more than 350 million copies, and many of them have been adapted into feature films, television movies and comic books.

King has published fifty novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and five non-fiction books. He has written nearly two hundred short stories, most of which have been collected in nine collections of short fiction. Many of his stories are set in his home state of Maine.

King has received Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards and British Fantasy Society Awards. His novella, The Way Station, was a Nebula Award novelette nominee. His short story, The Man in the Black Suit, received the O. Henry Award.

In 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

King has also received awards for his contribution to literature for his entire oeuvre, such as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (2004), the Canadian Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2007) and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America (2007).

King is a fan of the Ramones, to the extent that he wrote the liner notes for the 2003 Ramones tribute album, We're a Happy Family. He is also a fan of hard rock such as AC/DC; he arranged for their album, Who Made Who, to feature as the score for the film he directed in 1986, Maximum Overdrive.

King has also stated that he likes heavy metal and has named bands like Anthrax, Judas Priest and Metallica as amongst his favorites to write to. King collaborated with Michael Jackson to create Ghosts (1996), a 40-minute musical video, and collaborated with Shooter Jennings and his band Hierophant, providing the narration for their album, Black Ribbons. King also wrote a musical play Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2012) with John Mellencamp.

King played guitar for the rock band Rock Bottom Remainders, several of whose members are authors. Other members have included Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Scott Turow, Amy Tan, James McBride, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount, Jr., Matt Groening, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Sam Barry and Greg Iles.

King and the other band members collaborated to release an e-book called Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All (June 2013).

Stephen King performs with the Rock Bottom Remainders

Upton Sinclair, author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres, was born 143 years ago today

Upton Sinclair, author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres, was born 143 years ago today.

Sinclair achieved popularity in the first half of the 20th Century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle, in 1906. It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

In 1919, he published, The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States.

Four years after the initial publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created.

Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence."

In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.

Ken Kesey was born 86 years ago today

Ken Kesey was born 86 years ago today.

Kesey was an author, best known for his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

"I was too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie," Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder.

Born in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers, in 1946 Kesey’s family moved to Springfield, Oregon. He was a champion wrestler in both high school and college in the 174 pound weight division, and he almost qualified to be on the Olympic team until a serious shoulder injury stopped his wrestling career.

Kesey graduated from Springfield High School in 1953. An avid reader and filmgoer, the young Kesey took John Wayne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Zane Grey as his role models (later naming a son, Zane) and toyed with magic, ventriloquism and hypnotism.

He graduated from the University of Oregon's School of Journalism with a degree in speech and communication in 1957. After a brief sojourn in Los Angeles, he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in 1958.

Because he lacked the prerequisites to work toward a master's degree in English, he elected to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University that fall, where he would develop lifelong friendships with fellow writers Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman and Robert Stone.

While at Stanford, Kesey resided on Perry Lane (a historically bohemian enclave adjacent to the university golf course) and clashed with program director, Wallace Stegner.

According to Stone, Stegner "saw Kesey... as a threat to civilization and intellectualism and sobriety" and rejected Kesey's Stegner Fellowship applications for the 1959-60 and 1960-61 terms.

Nevertheless, Kesey received the $2,000 Harper-Saxton Prize for his first novel in progress (the oft-rejected Zoo) and continued to audit the graduate writing seminar through 1960 (taught that year by Frank O'Connor and the more congenial Malcolm Cowley) on a Ford Foundation fellowship granted by Leslie Fiedler as he began the manuscript that would become One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

At the instigation of Perry Lane neighbor and Stanford psychology graduate student, Vik Lovell, an acquaintance of Richard Alpert and Allen Ginsberg, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study under the aegis of Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, where he worked as a night aide.

The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, aMT and DMT on people. Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. His role as a medical guinea pig, as well as his stint working at the state veterans' hospital, inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The success of this book, as well as the demolition of the Perry Lane cabins in August, 1963, allowed him to move to a log house at 7940 La Honda Road in La Honda, California, an hour south of San Francisco.

He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests," involving music (such as Kesey's favorite band, The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead), black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes and, of course, LSD.

These parties were noted in some of Ginsberg's poems and are also described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as well as Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson and, Freewheelin Frank, Secretary of the Hell's Angels, by Frank Reynolds.

In 1959, Kesey wrote Zoo, a novel about the beatniks living in the North Beach community of San Francisco, but it was never published. In 1960, he wrote End of Autumn, about a young man who leaves his working-class family after he gets a scholarship to an Ivy League school, also unpublished.

The inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while working on the night shift (with Gordon Lish) at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. There, Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs with which he had volunteered to experiment.

Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, but rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave. Published under the guidance of Cowley in 1962, the novel was an immediate success.

When the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, in 1964, required his presence in New York, Kesey, Neal Cassady and others in a group of friends they called the "Merry Pranksters" took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed, "Furthur."

This trip, described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later in Kesey's own screenplay "The Further Inquiry") was the group's attempt to create art out of everyday life.

After the bus trip, the Pranksters threw parties they called Acid Tests around the San Francisco area from 1965 to 1966. Many of the Pranksters lived at Kesey's residence in La Honda.

In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who then turned them on to Timothy Leary. Sometimes a Great Notion was made into a 1971 film starring and directed by Paul Newman. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, and in 1972, was the first film shown by the new television network HBO in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana in 1965. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked suicide by having friends leave his truck on a cliffside road near Eureka, along with an elaborate suicide note, written by the Pranksters.

Kesey fled to Mexico in the back of a friend's car. When he returned to the United States eight months later, Kesey was arrested and sent to the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City, California, for five months where he was introduced to a highly recommended San Francisco lawyer, Richard Potack, who specialized in marijuana cultivation.

On his release, he moved back to the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, where he spent the rest of his life. He wrote many articles, books (mostly collections of his articles) and short stories during that time.

In 1984, Kesey's 20-year-old son, Jed, a wrestler for the University of Oregon, was killed on the way to a tournament when the team's bald-tired van crashed. It went off the road in icy conditions and down a 185 foot slope. One team member, Lorenzo West, was killed instantly, and Jed suffered a severe head injury. After two days in the hospital, he was declared brain dead and his parents gave permission for his organs to be harvested.

This deeply affected Kesey, who later said Jed was a victim of conservative, anti-government policy that starved the team of proper funding. There is a memorial dedicated to Jed on the top of Mount Pisgah, near the Keseys' home in Pleasant Hill.

At a Grateful Dead Halloween concert just days after promoter Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash, Kesey appeared on stage in a tuxedo and delivered a eulogy while the Grateful Dead was playing the song "Dark Star," and mentioned that Graham had donated $1,000 for Jed's mountain-top memorial.

In 1994, he toured with members of the Merry Pranksters performing a musical play he wrote about the millennium called Twister: A Ritual Reality.

Many old and new friends and family showed up to support the Pranksters on this tour that took them from Seattle's Bumbershoot, all along the West Coast including a sold out two-night run at The Fillmore in San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado, where they coaxed (or pranked) the Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg into performing with them.

Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992. In 1997, health problems began to take their toll, starting with a stroke that year. On October 25, 2001, Kesey had surgery on his liver to remove a tumor. He never recovered from the operation and died of complications on November 10, 2001 at age 66.

Here, Kesey talks about LSD