Oz

L. Frank Baum was born on this day in 1856 in Chittenango, New York.

A failed theater owner, dry goods seller and magazine editor, and a some-time breeder of fancy poultry, Frank Baum began writing books for children in 1899, publishing the modestly successful Father Goose. The following year he wrote the book which would make his name in pop culture, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), a fantasy tale with decidedly Nietzschean undertones about a Kansas girl and her adventures with a scarecrow, a tin woodsman and a lion in a magical other-world. Baum took the name for his other-world from the letters on the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet: "O-Z."

Wildly popular, the book was almost instantaneously turned into a musical, but the most familiar musical version, preserved in MGM’s classic film, The Wizard of Oz (1939; directed by Victor Fleming, with Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr), did not take shape until shortly before that movie was made, when Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg collaborated on such songs as "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "If I Were King of the Forest."

Following the book’s success, Baum wrote 13 more Oz books, none of which came close to matching the first in its irresistible, mythically pregnant plot or its lasting popularity. He unsuccessfully tried to promote his books with a traveling vaudeville slide show and toured in Europe for a time before filing bankruptcy in 1911 and settling in Hollywood on his wife's money in a home he called "Ozcot." He died there on May 6, 1919.

Will Write Poetry for Shoes

Poet James Thomson was born on this day in 1700 in Ednam, Roxburghshire, Scotland.

Thomson was best known for his collection of nature poems, The Seasons (1730; revised 1744) and for the lyrics of "Rule, Britannia" (set to music by Thomas Arne).

After he left Scotland on foot for his new chosen home in London in 1725, he was mugged and lost all his possessions. Finding himself in London without a shilling, he sold a portion of what would become "Winter," the first part of The Seasons, for a pair of shoes. He died on August 27, 1748, after catching a chill during a boat trip from Hammersmith to Kew.

"He possesses a facility, almost amounting to a genius, for holding together in loose, artificial suspension all the characteristic elements of the popular culture of his day: Augustan patriotism, classicism in diction and tone, gothic excess, sentimentalism." -- M. Wynn-Davies.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night ...

"He never wrote an invitation to dinner without an eye on posterity." -- Benjamin Disraeli.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a prolific novelist with a reputation for ornate wretchedness (Pelham, 1828; The Last Days of Pompeii, 1834; Eugene Aram, 1832), and a Liberal-turned-Tory member of Parliament, was born on this day in 1803 in London.

Although the gods of literature might have been content to leave Bulwer-Lytton to obscurity, Charles Schulz brought him into the 20th century pop culture fold, appropriating the first lines of Bulwer-Lytton's ponderous novel Paul Clifford (1830) ("It was a dark and stormy night . . .") for the beagle Snoopy's various attempts at novel-writing. The English Department of San Jose State University sponsors an annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad opening lines, and Tim Burton chose Bulwer-Lytton's estate at Knebworth as the setting for "stately Wayne manor" in Batman. Whatever you may aspire to in your own writing, just hope they don't remember you better for your house than for your written works.

The Fastest Game

Recently I’ve had the chance to see some old major league pitchers at work. And by old, I mean guys who are just about my age. On a visit to Fenway two weekends ago, I saw Bosoxer Curt Schilling pitch 5 and a third innings against the Orioles. He gave up 4 runs and left a tie game, but looked pretty good for a 39-year-old throwing 95 pitches. Last weekend, I also caught the Mets’ Tom Glavine, on TV and on XM, facing the Yankees and hurling his 295th victory at age 41; and I went to PNC Park on Sunday to see Randy Johnson, age 43, throw 10 strikeouts in 5.2 innings to beat the Pirates 5-2.

It’s a cliché that advanced age is associated with slowness – old preachers give slow sermons, old film directors make slow movies, old grannies drive slowly down the right lane of the parkway -- but watching these pitchers work belies this. Glavine kept the game moving along quickly, pitching 101 pitches before the late-inning rain started to slow the game down; after some sloppy relief pitching, the game finally finished up in about 3-1/2 hours. The Big Unit was even faster in dispatching the Bucs in a game that wound up lasting only 2-1/2 hours. Even Schilling worked pretty quickly; it was only after he left the mound that the 7th and 8th innings of the Red Sox-Orioles game seemed almost like the second independent half of a double header all by themselves.

Johnson’s victory occurred in a game that was faster than the average major league game, but back in 1916, a few fans in Asheville, North Carolina were on hand to see what is now considered to be the fastest game in the history of professional baseball.

The Asheville Tourists played in the inaugural season of the Class D North Carolina State League as the Asheville Mountaineers in 1913. After suffering a last place finish in 1914, the club changed its name to the Tourists for the 1915 season and battled their way to first place under the helm of a popular slick-fielding infielder-manager, John P. “Jack” Corbett, finishing 5-1/2 games ahead of the Durham Bulls. That year, a 15-year-old future novelist named Thomas Wolfe caught Tourist fever, and spent the season serving as Corbett’s bat boy, shagging pre-game pop flies and disappearing into the bleachers once the game would begin.

Recalling his days at Asheville’s Oates Park (pictured above), Wolfe later wrote to baseball writer Arthur Mann: “… [I]n the memory of almost every one of us, is there anything that can evoke spring – the first fine days of April – better than the sound of the ball smacking into the pocket of the big mitt, the sound of the bat as it hits the horse hide; for me, at any rate, and I am being literal and not rhetorical – almost everything I know about spring is in it – the first leaf, the jonquil, the maple tree, the smell of grass upon your hands and knees, the coming into flower of April. And is there anything that can tell can tell more about an American summer than, say, the wooden bleachers in a small-town baseball park, that resinous, sultry and exciting smell of old dry wood.”

But Wolfe well understood the inherent bittersweetness of minor league baseball. Nebraska Crane, a character in Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again, was apparently based on Corbett, an Ohio-born minor league journeyman who never ultimately made it to the bigs. Wolfe wrote about Corbett more directly in Look Homeward, Angel: “Pearl juggled carefully the proposals of several young men during this period. She had the warmest affection for a ball player, the second baseman and manager of the Altamont [i.e. Asheville] team. He was a tough, handsome young animal, forever hurling his glove down in despair during the course of the game, and rushing belligerently at the umpire. She liked his hard assurance, his rapid twang, his tanned, lean body …”

The Tourists won the first half of the 1916 season, and looked poised to repeat their 1915 triumph; but the elation of Thomas Wolfe's boyhood hero Jack Corbett turned to resignation as the club pulled into August. Despite leftfielder Jim Hickman’s league-leading .350 batting average, the Tourists were in 4th place, hovering just above .500 ball on August 30, the last day of the season. The Winston-Salem Twins were in town for the final game, but the Charlotte Hornets had already clinched the league title, so the Twins were definitively in second place for the year.

The game was scheduled for 2 p.m., but apparently the Twins were anxious to call it quits for the season; they wanted to catch a 3 p.m. train back to Winston-Salem. So Corbett and Twins skipper Charlie Jones apparently entered into a gentlemen’s agreement to start the game a half hour early and to keep it as short as possible. After all, they reasoned, it was a meaningless game as far as the standings were concerned. Other teams playing meaningless games at the end of the season in those days were wont to run onto the field wearing clown suits or ladies’ bloomers, so the idea of a fast game was a pretty tame shenanigan by comparison.

Two hundred fans showed up at Oates Park for the game – not many for a ballpark that could hold 1,200, but then again, most of the town’s baseball fans probably hadn’t gotten the message that the game was going to start early. According to Sporting News writer Bob Terrell, Thomas Wolfe was allegedly among those present.

The Asheville Citizen summed up the ensuing game as a “farcical contest.” The paper described the manner of play: “Nobody let a baseball get past. Everyone hit the first ball pitched … Nobody was left on the bases. If a man hit and didn’t come home, he contrived to get tagged out by overrunning the bag. Before the last man in an inning had been called out the players were on the run changing sides in the field. Along about one of the innings, some Twin player rushed to bat and [Tourists’ pitcher Doc] Lowe pitched the ball with no one in to catch. It was hit to center field, a fair single, but Nesser [one of the Twins’ outfielders] grabbed it on the bounce on the way into the bench and threw his team mate out at second.”

Lowe gave up two runs in the first inning; umpire Red Rowe showed up to officiate the game in the 4th inning. In the 7th, the Tourists managed to score one off the Twins’ ace, Whitey Glazner; and after 2 more innings, the two sides mercifully put the game out of its misery. Glazner (who later pitched adequately for 5 seasons, 3-1/2 with Pittsburgh and 1-1/2 with the Phillies) got the win, helping him to attain a league-leading .750 winning percentage for the season. The game was finished in a mere 31 minutes – two minutes before it was actually scheduled to start.

Perhaps the operative base running phrase of the day, with all due deference to Mr. Wolfe, was “You can go home again, but we’d prefer that you don’t, ‘cause we’re trying to wrap this up early.” Imagine your dismay, though, if you showed up at the ballpark looking forward to the last game of the season, only to find the players heading to the showers.

No one was particularly pleased about the day’s display, and Tourists president L.L. Jenkins jumped to his feet after the game and shouted a valedictory, promising that every paying customer would be refunded his or her money. The Citizen noted that women, in particular, were almost unanimous in calling the entire spectacle “perfectly horrid.”

Jack Corbett left Asheville after the 1916 season, and it turned out to be none too soon. While Corbett was busy managing the Columbia Comers to the South Atlantic League pennant in 1917, the Asheville club folded on May 17, 1917. The North Carolina State League itself shuttered two weeks later, a domestic casualty of World War I. Baseball would not return to Asheville for another seven years.

Although Corbett never made it to the big leagues, his name lives on in baseball. As early as 1939, Major League Baseball adopted Corbett’s patented design for the bases used on the field; now all 30 major league teams use “Jack Corbett Hollywood Base Sets,” with a tapered lip on the bottom of each base to grip the infield dirt, and a six-inch stanchion to anchor it. Corbett passed away in Van Nuys, California in 1973, at the age of 85.

Bill James says that baseball games have gotten too long, observing that “the wasted time inside baseball games dissipates tension, and thus makes the game less interesting, less exciting, and less fun to watch.” In an age in which everyone wants everything yesterday, baseball’s slowness is one of the things I appreciate most about the game. Certainly the fans present at Oates Park on August 30, 1916 were not treated to baseball that was interesting, exciting or particularly fun to watch. I do enjoy watching the studied efficiency of a veteran pitcher like Schilling, Glavine or Johnson, but give me a wild rookie pitcher and some guys who can foul off almost every strike, and that will suit me fine. My enjoyment of baseball is not measured by how exciting any particular game is; it is measured by being within the milieu of those sounds, sights and smells that Thomas Wolfe celebrated – to sit back, without any concern for the clock, and to take a break and enjoy an American rite of spring.

The History of Mr. Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding was born on this day in 1707 in Sharpham Park, Somerset, England.

The son of an army general, Henry Fielding studied Greek and Roman classical literature at Eton and was subsequently encouraged by his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to go to London and make his career as a writer. He had a quick success with the play Love in Several Masques (1728) before a brief stint at the University of Leiden, after which he returned to devote himself to writing for the London stage. In 1730, he had another huge popular success, The Tragedy of Tom Thumb, which according to legend made Jonathan Swift laugh for the second time in his life.

Since writing was a hand-to-mouth existence, Fielding assumed the management of the New Theatre, and wrote over a dozen plays that debuted there, including the political satire Pasquin (1737). His period of relative financial success came to an abrupt end when Sir Robert Walpole caught wind of Pasquin's anti-Whig message and passed the Theatrical Licensing Act with the express intention of kicking Fielding off the London stage.

In search of financial stability, Fielding became editor of an opposition journal, Champion, while studying at the Middle Temple. He entered the bar in 1740, but after briefly serving as a circuit judge, due to gout and asthma he failed to pursue active practice. Instead, he found his way into a new literary medium. With the publication of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), the "epistolary novel" was all the rage, although Fielding was fairly disgusted by Richardson's cloying sentimentality and rigid conventional moralizing. In response, Fielding wrote an published a parody of Pamela, known as Shamela (1741), amounting to a lusty 70-page abridgement, exposing all the pretensions and moral ludicrousness of Pamela through a comically twisted point of view of Richardson's original plot. Despite his exasperation with Richardson's book, Fielding was captivated by the possibilities of its form.

The following year, Fielding published his own novel (liberating it from Richardson's epistolary format), The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742; about a virtuous young footman who is fired by his lady for resisting her advances). He described it in his preface as a "comic epic poem in prose," attempting to dignify the status of the novel while exhorting future novelists to use the form as a mirror held up to the prevailing society, revealing truth and exposing hypocrisy. The following year he published The History of Mr. Jonathan Wild, the Great (1743), an ironically admiring narrative based on the career of a well-known criminal, which recent critics have claimed was actually a veiled attack on Walpole.

In 1744, his wife Charlotte died, and 3 years later Fielding caused a scandal by marrying his wife's maid, Mary Daniel, who was pregnant with his child. During this period of social exile, Fielding penned his best-known novel, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), by which he said he intended "to promote the cause of virtue and to expose some of the most glaring evils, as well public as private, which at present infect the country" -- although Samuel Johnson called the book "vicious" and "corrupt." Like Joseph Andrews, the often bawdy Tom Jones is a comic tale about the pretensions of rank, but it is also an object lesson on the nature of happiness and goodness, showing Fielding at the height of his powers as a storyteller and social observer.

Meanwhile, his political exile having ended with the Walpole's fall in 1742, Fielding was appointed justice of the peace for the City of Westminster, London, in 1748. Taking his new position with the utmost seriousness, he worked strenuously to rid Bow Street (the magistracy headquarters) of corruption and made effective crime-fighting his mission, launching his reform of the police force with "An Enquiry into the Causes of the Latest Increase of Robbers" (1751). In 1753, Fielding obtained a small grant from the crown to establish London's first professional police force, known as the "Bow Street Runners" -- 12 men whose first task was to investigate a series of London murders. He resigned his post due to ill health and was succeeded by his half-brother, Sir John Fielding.

Fielding's last novel, Amelia (1751), was not as spry as Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, its relative sobriety informed by his close-up view of criminal society. In 1754, seeking a better climate for his asthma, Fielding journeyed to Portugal, but died there shortly thereafter. His last book, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, was published posthumously the following year.

Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire was born on this day in 1821 in Paris.

Rebelling against his stepfather, Baudelaire briefly lived the luxurious life of a dandy on the money left to him by his father, but soon found himself overwhelmed by debt. He began his freelance writing career at age 24, and while his earliest writing showed enthusiasm for revolutionary principles, it soon came to expose his disillusionment. He achieved fame as a critic, taking as his causes the music of Wagner and the painting of Delacroix.

In 1844, he withdrew from Paris society, exiling himself to a somewhat tragic relationship with the treacherous Jeanne Duval, a mulatto, for 14 years. In his apartment-outpost on the Ile St-Louis, he experimented with drugs (the experiences with which he described in Les Paradis Artificels, 1861), shunned the literary fraternity, considering authors like Victor Hugo to be second-rate, and refused all attempts at help or sponsorship. By 1857, he was already a notorious character in Paris artistic circles, suspected of all sorts of personal depravity, when the French government took him to court over his verse collection, Les Fleurs du Mal, which the government called immoral. He was ultimately convicted of obscenity and blasphemy, was fined, and had six of his poems banned in France until 1949.

While he produced a large and accomplished body of prose, he is remembered for his poems, the small sum total of which appeared in Les Fleurs du Mal. When the collection first appeared, the typical subject matter of his poems -- ranging from erotic love poems to Duval, his "Black Venus," and to Mme Sabatier, his "White Venus," to lesbianism, revolt and decay -- was considered to be lurid; by way of contrast, his style in the treatment of such themes was cool and balanced. After his death, in the 1880s, Symbolist poets such as Stephen Mallarme identified Baudelaire as their ancestor.

From 1856 to 1865, Baudelaire translated the works of Edgar Allan Poe into French (he had spoken English since he was a child, his mother having been born in England), launching Poe's great popularity in France during the 1870s and 1880s. Shortly before his death from a paralytic stroke at age 47, Baudelaire was engaged in a prolonged diatribe against all things Belgian, having recently returned from an unsuccessful lecture engagement there.

Donne

John Donne died on this day in 1631 in London at the age of about 59.

A young man known for his pursuit of female flesh who eventually became the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London in 1621, Donne is remembered today for his remarkable body of poetry, very little of which was published until after his death. Even after publication, it took 300 years for Donne to be taken seriously as a poet. Dr. Johnson regarded him as undecorous stylistically and a bit precious with his imagery, an influential opinion which relegated Donne to the cut-out bins -- to be resurrected only fitfully by Coleridge and Browning, and finally by Modernists such as T.S. Eliot, who prized him for his passionate intellect.

Born a Catholic, a descendant of Sir Thomas More and the grandson of saying-smith John Heywood through his mother's side, Donne was educated at Hart Hall, Oxford and studied law before joining a couple of sailing expeditions in 1596. Upon his return, he became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper of the great seal of England, through whom he met Egerton's niece, Ann More. In December 1601, Donne and More eloped secretly with the help of friends; and when Donne revealed this fact to Sir George More, Ann's father, More had Donne and his friends thrown in jail and attempted to annul the marriage. Eventually, Donne and More reconciled and the marriage was left to stand, but Donne lost his job with Egerton and was virtually unemployed for about 12 years.

Donne's earliest poems show the mind of the young lover. Taking ordinary natural phenomena as his point of departure, Donne seduces his lover in "The Flea" by arguing, in biological detail, how the mingling of his blood with hers in the belly of a flea is a kind of marriage upon which they might shut out the protests of parents. Yet the playful conceit of comparing love to biology leads to the observation of natural decay in other early poems, acknowledging the fleeting nature of erotic attraction and fidelity without spiritual love.

In his poetry during his years of unemployment, written in between hack-writing jobs and attempts to find work with the Virginia Company which sponsored the first English settlement in North America at Jamestown, Donne further explored further the nature of decay in several funeral and memorial poems, observing the decline of our state within a universe which is itself disintegrating ("mankind decays so soon/ we are scarce our fathers' shadows cast at noon . . ."); but as with love, he took refuge in the infinity of the spirit in his Divine Meditations. King James himself was sufficiently impressed with Donne's spiritual tendencies to suggest that he take Anglican holy orders, which Donne eventually, after some reluctance over his own abilities, completed in 1615.

Once he committed to the church, he devoted himself completely to it, especially after the death of wife (in childbirth, with their 12th child) in 1617, a circumstance which led him to seek comfort in spiritual pursuits by imagining a reunion with his dear wife in heaven. Thereafter, his poems merge with his penetrating sermons, becoming almost one body of work, a series of meditations on the nature of decay, death and rebirth, touching upon such matters as the spiritual significance inherent in so banal an act as the forced evacuation of one's bowels during an illness, to the universality of death -- as in the famous passage from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, No. 17: "No Man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main . . . Any Man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

Donne delivered his most famous sermon, Deaths Duell (1632), two weeks before he died, inviting the listener, and himself, to find coherence in death by remembering Christ's death.

Part Managerial, Part Poetic

In the event his life was splitAnd half was lost bewailing it;Part managerial, part poetic --Hard to decide the more pathetic.

-- Roy Fuller, "Obituary of R. Fuller."

Poet and novelist Roy Fuller was born on this day in 1912 near Oldham, England.

Writing under the literary influence of W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, the hallmarks of Fuller's poetry were the sparse directness of his language and his strongly individualistic, humanitarian conscience. Fuller first gained critical notoriety with two collections of poetry he wrote while serving in East Africa with the British Navy during World War II, collections considered to be the among the finest "war" poetry of the period. Following the war he continued to publish poetry collections and several novels while serving as solicitor to a building society. Fuller died on September 27, 1991.

The Poet Laureate of Flight Attendants

Lori Jakiela, one of my favorite writers, was born on this day in 1964 in Pittsburgh.

I first encountered Jakiela while driving home from work, listening to the normally monotonous local poetry program on one of our public radio stations. Jakiela, who was reading selections from her chapbook The Regulars, would have charmed the socks off me were I not at that moment engaged in driving down the parkway at 65+ mph. Her funny, often both funny and poignant vignettes from her experiences as an airline hostess made me laugh out loud, and were a breath of fresh air from the usually ponderous fare I had come to expect from the program. I made a mental note to reserve a special space in my very own personal literary canon for Lori Jakiela as the poet laureate of flight attendants.

Last year, Jakiela published a memoir of growing up in Western Pennsylvania and briefly following her dreams in New York City, entitled Miss New York Has Everything. Miss New York is a sweet and mischievous book, and Jakiela’s voice is so disarmingly blithe that at first it is difficult to understand why it gets under one’s skin.

I know that at least some of what attracts me to Jakiela’s tale is that both of our fathers were machinists. Jakiela depicts her adoptive father, who once dreamed of being the next Frank Sinatra, as a bitter and misanthropic man – “probably closest in temperament to the French writer Celine, who could say the word sh*t in seventeen languages and kept company mostly with dogs and whores” – whereas I tend to think of my father as more of a self-assured and chatty cross between Leonardo da Vinci, Jack LaLanne and Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. As Jakiela’s contemporary, the catalog of references from the junkyard of 1970s pop culture that tumble forth in her work, from “Seasons in the Sun” to Shaun Cassidy to Lassie and That Girl reruns, also sends inevitable shivers of recognition up my spine. Although I grew up in Southern California, a place with which I now enjoy a special love-hate relationship and a prison from which the teenaged me vowed to escape, I now live a mere two-stone’s-throws from the little town of Trafford where Jakiela survived her dour childhood; and it is with a mixture of irony and awe that I find myself viewing the 70s, 80s and 90s through the windshield of an adopted person from my adopted home, cruising past familiar Pittsburgh institutions such as the Electric Banana, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Iron City Beer (“If you’ve never had an Iron City Beer, suck on your car keys. You’ll get the idea.”), bingo night at the Polish Club, and the Squirrel Cage.

What really pushes my buttons about Miss New York Has Everything, however – the kernel of the universal in it that rises above the particulars, if you will – is Jakiela’s portrayal of that fine line between love and horror. One feels Jakiela’s warmth and empathy for the people of her hometown, even as she is compelled to share with us, as though possessed of a pair of X-ray glasses from an ad in the back of a comic book, the ruptures and boils that lie beneath the flowered housecoats of the Trafford ladies. Cartoon visions of hell play prominently amid her early memories.

The distance between horror and love for Jakiela, however, seems to be comparable in magnitude, as the crow flies, to the gap between reality and dreams. Everyone around her, it seems, has at least one broken dream, or a real or imagined near-miss with fame or good fortune; and yet, in her unfailing optimism Jakiela conveys the sense that we’re all walking around like unrecognized stars. Even as she admits that her aunt, the one her father called Shirley Temple, had plenty of ambition but no discernible talent, she is happy to remind you that before James Dean became James Dean, he had a bowl haircut and glasses and played Frankenstein in his high school production of Goon with the Wind. We’re all, it seems, a mere accident away from reaching out and touching the impossible.

In the meantime, as Jakiela observes wistfully,

… [L]ife and the people in it are mostly complicated. We might all be jokes, but there are a lot of punch lines and we don’t always see them coming.

The pope, a piece of string, a blonde, an Irish man, a black man, a nun, a rabbi, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, and a midget walk into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Hold on, this has to be a joke.’

We don’t fit into neat categories, we don’t see ourselves clearly, and, even if we dress the part, there’s a good chance we’ve been miscast.

There you have it. There's a fine line between horror and love, a thin screen between dreams and reality. And, miscast or not, an unforeseen punch line can come along and push you right past those capricious, delicate barriers ... which is how an ex-flight attendant from Trafford can one day become a writer who deserves to be read, the poet laureate of flight attendants.

S.J. Perelman

Sidney Joseph Perelman -- better known as "S.J." -- was born on this day in 1904 in Brooklyn, New York.

A graduate of Brown University, Perelman wrote comic vignettes for magazines but was little appreciated until the publication of a collection of his articles, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge (1929). Despite the fact that his name was left off the title page of the first edition (unintentionally), Perelman gained a national readership for his outrageous wordplay, non sequitirs and puns. Shortly thereafter he moved to Hollywood, where he wrote for the Marx Brothers (Monkey Business, 1931; Horse Feathers, 1932) and continued writing magazine pieces, showing an increasingly angry and nihilist comic persona, while contributing to other Hollywood scripts. He won an Oscar for his work on the script for Around the World in 80 Days (1956, with David Niven).

Once asked by an earnest interviewer how many drafts he wrote of his stories, Perelman replied, in typical wise-ass fashion, "Thirty-seven. I once tried doing 33, but something was lacking, a certain -- how shall I say? -- je ne sais quoi. On another occasion, I tried 42 versions, but the final effect was too lapidary -- you know what I mean, Jack? What the hell are you trying to extort -- my trade secrets?"

Perelman died on October 17, 1979 in New York City.

Eugene Sue and The Mysteries of Paris

"Our sole hope is that we will draw the attention of thinkers and of honest folk to some of the great afflictions of society." -- Eugene Sue.

Novelist Eugene Sue was born on this day in 1804 in Paris. The son of a successful surgeon in Napoleon's army and godson of the future Empress Josephine, Sue originally studied medicine and served as a surgeon in the French navy during the 1820s. After the death of his father, Sue took his inheritance and moved to Paris, devoting himself to womanizing, spending lavishly, and writing. His earliest published works were adventure novels with maritime settings (including Atar-Gull, 1831, and Le Salamandre, 1832), leading him to be praised as "the French James Fenimore Cooper." To put that in perspective, we must remember that at the time Cooper was one of America's best known adventure novelists -- although critical opinion about him was not necessarily uniform. As Mark Twain once observed: "In one place in Deerslayer, and in the restricted space of two thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record."

In any event, following these successes, Eugene Sue showed his capacity for adapting to the prevailing literary tastes of his time, turning his hand to historical novels (such as Latreaumont, 1838) and eventually to the serial romance -- of which his serial autobiographical novel, Arthur, 1837-9, was an early precursor. His popularity growing, with the publication of the widely-read romance Mathilde (1841), Sue became the most successful serial-novelist in France, getting paid by the line for works of high melodrama appearing in installments in the newspapers.

In the 1840s, under the influence of his friend, the Socialist playwright Felix Pyat, Sue became deeply interested in the problems of economic injustice. The subject matter of his serials quickly turned from tales of the aristocracy to the lower classes, resulting in Sue's most famous work, The Mysteries of Paris (published as a serial in 1842): an enormously popular, vividly drawn picture of the Paris slums, it focused on the activities of a highly-principled, almost super-human avenging angel, Rodolphe, a wealthy German prince disguised as a common workman who dispensed rough justice to evil men who tormented the poor and socially disadvantaged.

His next best-selling novel, The Wandering Jew (1844-45; filmed in 1933, starring Conrad Veidt), was based on the legend of the Jewish cobbler who was condemned by Christ to wander throughout eternity for having refused to give him water on his journey to Golgotha, again explored the persecution of the poor.

In 1850, Sue won election to the National Assembly as a Socialist, but showed no stomach for public debate and was widely criticized for proofing the galleys of his novels while sitting in the Assembly chambers. After the 1851 coup d'etat which resulted in Louis Napoleon's accession to power, Sue left France for Savoy, dying in exile there on August 3, 1857.

Muslim Princess

Noor Inayat Khan was born on this day in 1914 in Moscow, Russia.

A direct descendant of India's last Muslim ruler, Tipu Sultan, her father was a Muslim mystic invited to Nicholas II's court by Grigori Rasputin. She moved to Paris as a youth, and after receiving her education there joined Paris Radio as a resident writer of children's stories, publishing Twenty Jataka Tales in 1940.

When the arrival of the Nazis, however, Noor moved to London and joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, and secretly infiltrated France under the code name "Madeleine" in June 1943 as a resistance radio operator, the British War Office's first woman spy in Nazi-occupied France. The War Office ordered her to return after growing concerned about her safety, but she refused on the grounds that she was the last radio operator in the resistance.

Later that fall, she was finally captured by the Nazis, refusing to give them information or to sign a declaration that she would cease her activities -- although they did manage to break her coded messages and send false messages back to London, culminating in the arrest of 3 more British spies. She was imprisoned in solitary confinement in Karlsruhe, and eventually taken to Dachau concentration camp, where she was executed on September 13, 1944 for her refusal to cooperate. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross, the Croix de Guerre and an MBE.

Twain

"My books are water; those of the great writers are wine. Everybody drinks water." -- M. Twain.

Considered by many critics to be the greatest American writer, there are some who are tempted to see him as simply a writer of humorous children's books such as the boyhood reveries The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Although his sense of humor was irrepressible (sometimes to his own chagrin), Twain was raised in an atmosphere of Presbyterian guilt, however, and he spent much of his literary life attempting to throw off the yoke of his conscience through cynical and increasingly dark and bitter writings. His writing is deep and rewarding at both ends of the light-dark spectrum.

Samuel Clemens -- born on this day in 1835 in Florida, Missouri -- spent his boyhood on the banks of the Mississippi, and his boyhood experiences are a recurring backdrop for his work, not only in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but in Life on the Mississippi and many magazine articles. He worked as a riverboat pilot for about 4 years, but eventually became an itinerant printer, settling with his brother Orion in Keokuk, Iowa, and moving with him to Nevada in 1861 when Orion was named secretary to the governor of Nevada, James Nye.

There Clemens became a full-time reporter, and shortly thereafter began to use the pen name "Mark Twain" (a resurrection of the pen name of an old riverboat captain, derived from a warning of shallow water on the river) to distinguish his lighter pieces from his routine political reporting. He moved to California in 1864, where he continue to work as a reporter; but there his fiction was given encouragement by Bret Harte and he published a story which would change his life, "Jim Smiley and his Frog" (1865), a comic report of chicanery involving a wager over jumping frogs which earned Twain a national reputation with its colorful use of Western country vernacular and sly, irreverent review of the differences between genteel Easterners and rough Westerners. Meanwhile, he continued to work as a reporter, although his byline was now becoming more prominent, covering the Hornet shipwreck in the Sandwich Islands in 1866; and after a steamship expedition to the Holy Land he published The Innocents Abroad (1867).

He returned from the Holy Land to New York City to find that he was a celebrity, selling out the Cooper Union with a humorous lecture on the Sandwich Islands. After marrying Olivia (Livy) Langdon in 1870, Twain began to concentrate on making money. At his father-in-law's urging, Twain bought into the Buffalo Examiner and marketed his books throughout the country with traveling salesmen who could reach people who would not find themselves in a bookstore.

In support of his books, Twain often traveled himself, on an almost perpetual book tour, lecturing to appreciative audiences and perpetuating his image as the wild-haired (and eventually white-suited) smart-aleck, sage and celebrity -- an image appropriated in the 20th century by such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. Livy, whom he loved deeply, appealed to his Presbyterian side, and was responsible along with his somewhat blue-nosed occasional editor, Mrs. Fairbanks, for toning down his comic irreverence at times; while Twain toured, Livy would send him copies of Henry Ward Beecher's sermons to develop piety in him. It did not; it did little more than to inflame his resentment over duties of conscience, a theme which would occupy a greater role in his work as he grew older.

During the 1870s he poured his energies into the Examiner as well as writing humorous short stories and other pieces for a New York City journal, the Galaxy (including Twain's personal favorite among his own short works, a hilarious "burlesque map of Paris" which allowed him to poke fun at his days as an ink-monkey). Many of these short pieces (including such works as "Political Economy," 1870; "The Stolen White Elephant," 1878; "The £1,000,000 Bank-Note," 1893; and "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg," 1900) ended up in collections which Twain later published and circulated. In keeping with his obsession for marketing and investing, he developed the "Mark Twain Scrapbook," a set of empty gummed pages with special tabs and other features which became a popular dime store item, started his own publishing company (which, notably, published the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and yielded $400,000 to his bankrupt heirs); and threw away $200,000 on a typesetting machine invented by James Paige which never caught on.

Known for his vernacular writing and his spoofing, Twain was not thought to be a serious writer by the Eastern establishment, William Dean Howells took up his cause, published his work in the Atlantic and introduced him to some of the great Eastern writers. On the occasion of John Greenleaf Whittier's 70th birthday, Howells invited Twain to speak to the assembled crowd, which included three-named literary gods Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes; Howells recalled that the speech was a "disaster," that Twain's irreverent burlesque merely succeeded in freezing the room, and Twain hurriedly followed with letters of apology to each of them, although none of them had actually taken offense to anything he had said.

After the success of The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and Huckleberry Finn, Twain continue to publish popular novels including A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894); The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895) failed to make as much of an impression, however. Twain's later work, particularly that written after the death of Livy in 1904, has been characterized as having been "written from the grave," full of regret and misanthropy with occasional flashes of Twain's signature wit, including: The Diaries of Adam and Eve (1904-6), the philosophical dialogue What is Man? (1906), Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916, published posthumously). Twain died on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut.

Voltaire

"When truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and factions to arise. There has never been a dispute as to whether there is daylight at noon." -- Voltaire.

One of the key figures of the Age of Enlightenment, Voltaire was known and admired throughout Europe by such diverse figures as Bolingbroke, Frederick the Great, Benjamin Franklin and James Boswell as France's great philosopher, satirist and wit. At the same time, he lived the life of a revolutionary for much of his career, spending years in exile and months inside the Bastille for sedition, waging a running battle with the Catholic church and settling in a French border town (Ferney, near Switzerland) so that he could escape the country easily in the event of another state crackdown. As he himself put it, "Philosophers should always have two or three underground holes in case of dogs hunting them."

As to his "philosophy," Voltaire never developed a systematic political theory, but rather he popularized, through poems, plays and essays, what he viewed as enlightened thinking -- characterized by a rational, scientific approach to political matters and technological progress, condemnation of superstition, and an uncompromising devotion to freedom of thought, speech and religion.

Born Francois-Marie Arouet on this day in 1694 in Paris, his father was a conventional bureaucrat who sent him to a Jesuit college (where he learned "Latin and nonsense" as he put it), but Voltaire's earliest intellectual guidance came from his godfather, the free-thinking Abbe de Chateauneuf, who introduced him to scientific skepticism. Voltaire, although educated to practice law, settled down to write plays and poems in a writing style that was brutally logical, trenchant and almost always bitingly humorous, and became the light of Paris society.

In 1717, however, he was falsely accused of lampooning the regent, and was thrown into the Bastille for a year. While there, he wrote his first play, Oedipe (1718) which was hugely successful, as well as an epic poem about Henry IV called the Henriade. Henry IV, as well as Louis XIV (about whose reign Voltaire later wrote in Le Siecle de Louis XIV, 1751), represented Voltaire's ideal of the enlightened despot, an absolute ruler who promoted rational discourse, kept the clergy in its place, and promoted religious tolerance; political liberty, in Voltaire's view, was not necessary if the king is enlightened.

Almost as instantly as his success took hold in France, he was forced into the Bastille again and into exile due to a quarrel with an important French family. He went to England in 1726, mixed in the intellectual society of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, learned English so that he could read and study Shakespeare, John Locke and Isaac Newton in their native tongue, and developed a great admiration for the religious tolerance and freedom of speech practiced there.

He returned to France 3 years later, consolidated the fortune he had begun to amass through the success of his writings and wise investments, and wrote works popularizing the Empiricism of Locke (Lettres philosophiques, 1734) and the scientific principles of Newton (Elements de la philosophie de Newton, 1738), who became his intellectual heroes. Fleeing a warrant for his arrest for sedition in 1734, he took refuge at the country chateau of Madame du Chatelet, a well-read woman with a passion for metaphysics and science, with whom he enjoyed his longest relationship despite the fact that she was married.

During another period of exile Voltaire answered the invitation of the newly-crowned king of Prussia, Frederick II (the Great), to join him in his court at Potsdam. Frederick collected Voltaire almost as he would have collected a painting, for his sparkling wit at court and literary achievements, but their relations became strained as the Prussians treated Voltaire as a demi-god of sorts, and Voltaire soon departed. Nevertheless, they remained friends after Voltaire left.

In the 1750s, Voltaire began to write stories, including Micromegas (1752), arguably the first story in which the Earth is visited by alien beings from another planet. In 1758, Voltaire wrote his masterpiece, Candide (about a Romantic philosopher who experiences a conversion to science and rationalism after suffering misfortune), in response to the "anti-rational," Romantic positions of his intellectual enemy Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Voltaire assumed the role of activist during the infamous Calais Affair in 1762, in which a Protestant shopkeeper was brutally tortured and executed for murder following the suicide of his son, who was despondent over not being allowed to practice his trade due to his religion. The incident was fertile ground for Voltaire's critique of Catholicism, but he also became personally involved in the matter, conducting his own investigation into the matter, paying expenses for a new inquest and providing financial support to the widow.

When Voltaire died on May 30, 1778, crowds gathered in mourning outside his Paris apartment; and although the Catholic church attempted to deprive him of a Christian burial, some local church officials defied the church and provided him with one anyway at the Abbey of Seillieres. After the French Revolution, Voltaire was again declared a hero and his remains were moved to a position of honor in the Pantheon in Paris.

Laxmi Prasad Devkota

The poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota, considered to be Nepal's greatest, is traditionally held to have been born on this date in 1909 in Kathmandu.

Born to the impoverished family of a Hindu priest, Devkota left school early to help support his family, and by the age of 25 found that by selling his poetry, he could earn a meager living. In 1934 he sold 3 poems to the Nepali journal Sharada and attracted widespread attention within the literary community. Two years later he published his first collection, Muna Madan. His poetry was a combination of traditional Sanskrit idioms and themes with currents from European Romantic poetry -- at times evidencing a desire for change in the oppressive regime in Nepal. He occasionally found his poems censored by the ruling Rana family.

Despite publishing and being awarded cultural and government positions, Devkota toiled in poverty throughout his life; his early death by cancer is thought to have resulted from receiving inadequate medical treatment.

"Dirty hands and golden plates -- what can you do with wealth? Better to eat greens and nettles with a happy heart." -- L. Devkota, from Muna Madan.

Blanchot the Obscure

"Despite some stiff competition, Blanchot . . . has acquired a reputation for writing some of the most enigmatic prose in modern French." -- John Lechte.

Maurice Blanchot was born on this day in 1907 in Quain, France.

The reclusive, mysterious Blanchot's critical and fictional themes revolve around indeterminacy. From a critical perspective (in works such as The Space of Literature, 1955, and The Infinite Conversation, 1969), the concept of indeterminacy is Blanchot's argument, generally, against the inevitable homogeneity produced within a Hegelian system of knowledge in which extremes are ultimately erased; and specifically, against critics who cease to be readers and instead become authors who seek to stuff a text into a pre-existing category. Blanchot asks readers to focus not on the author, who produces his work in solitude, but on the text, and the experience of the text as a singular reinvention of writing in every instance. Because writing is always a reinvention produced in solitude, there are no stabilizing or determinative contexts available to the reader -- nothing exists but the writing -- and "what is seen [by the reader] does not belong to the world of reality, but to the indeterminant milieu of fascination."

In his fiction (Thomas the Obscure, 1941; Aminadab, 1942; Death Sentence, 1948; The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, 1973)), his use of language is deceptively transparent; waiting, forgetting and randomness operate as the habits and hallmarks of the indeterminacy of consciousness while the mind strives, in Nietzschean fashion, to locate a moment in which it might impose its will.

Blanchot died on February 20, 2003 in Paris.

When Reporters Knew How to Write

"I remember watching the CBS Morning News one day thirty-two years ago and hearing Hughes Rudd refer to something that had happened during what the Pentagon had described as a 'routine B-52 raid.' At the end of the item, Rudd looked up and said, 'There is nothing routine about a B-52 raid. From a mile away it looks like the end of the world; if you happen to be any closer than a mile away, it is the end of the world.' I knew even then that I would never, ever forget that moment nor how perfectly it illustrated the power of effective use of our language." -- "Reiser," Sept. 16, 2005, on Banned for Life.

Hughes Rudd was born on this day in 1921.

Rudd was best known as the anchorman of the CBS Morning News (1973-77; co-anchor with Sally Quinn, 1973-4). Prior to that, Rudd served as a foreign correspondent for CBS News, including stints in Berlin, Bonn and Moscow, during the 1950s and 60s. Regarding his TV presence, columnist Brooks Peterson recalled, "In addition to being a superlative journalist, Rudd had another quality that especially endeared him to legions of hollow-eyed non-morning-persons: Rumpled, a little grouchy, and defiantly un-chipper, he looked and sounded every bit as crabby about having to be up at such an hour as the rest of us."

A talented storyteller, Rudd's 1966 book, My Escape from the CIA (And Other Improbable Events), was praised by none other than Thomas Pynchon, who wrote: "Without copping out behind idle metaphors or irrelevant plot devices, Mr. Rudd has succeeded in telling, with all his reporter's love of accuracy, and mastery of detail, and irony, and grace, and sometimes terrifying precision, exactly what the hell having to be an American, now, during the years of total war, epidemic anxiety and mass communications whose promise has been corrupted, is really about; where it's really at."

Given Rudd's "reporter's reporter" misgivings about the modern media, it is perhaps a little surprising that he would be invited to anchor the CBS Morning News; it has been suggested that he got the job by being a good drinking buddy to William Paley. After leaving CBS in 1979, he worked as a correspondent for ABC's World News Tonight until retiring to France in 1986. He died on October 13, 1992 in Toulouse, France.

Artaud

Iconoclastic actor, playwright, poet and stage theorist Antonin Artaud was born on this day in 1896 in Marseilles, France.

After suffering from bouts of mental disease in his teens and early 20s, Artaud began acting on the stage in the 1920s (at the Theatre de l'Ouerve, the Atelier, and for Pitoëff) and publishing his poems in literary magazines. Before long, he caught on with Andre Breton and the Surrealists, but by 1926 he was expelled over his disagreement with Breton's conversion to Communism.

While living with his mother and supplementing his income by performing in movies (in Abel Gance's Napoleon, 1927, as Marat; Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928), he opened the Theatre Alfred-Jarry, but it quickly failed. In 1931, he found inspiration from performances of Balinese plays at the Colonial Exposition, in which Artaud perceived that the text was merely incantatory, wrapped around a conglomeration of gestures, postures and sounds. Shortly thereafter, he wrote the first and second manifestos of the "Theater of Cruelty" (1932, 1938), an approach to writing, acting and stagecraft which incorporated the Balinese style, with an emphasis on shock-lighting, violent gestures and noise (the theatrical equivalent of Hieronymus Bosch's paintings, Artaud explained), designed by Artaud's account to liberate the subconscious mind through a kind of magical exorcism, and return the audience to its most primitive responses.

Although his theories were influential on such artists as Beckett, Genet and Ionesco, his stage experiments (such as Heliogabale, or the Crowned Anarchist, 1934; Les Cenci, 1935; Mexico, 1936) largely failed. Following a breakdown, he lived in an insane asylum from 1937 to 1946, undergoing starvation and electroshock treatments. Upon his release, he wrote a couple of combative, scatological rants -- an essay, "Van Gogh, the Suicide of Society," and a radio broadcast, To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947) -- before succumbing to cancer on March 4, 1948 in Paris.

Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant was born on this day in 1850 at Chateau de Miromesnil, France.

After fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, Maupassant made ends meet as a government clerk in Paris for about 10 years while harboring a desire to make his living as a writer. He entered into an "apprenticeship" with Gustave Flaubert, an old family friend, submitting everything he wrote to Flaubert's rigorously critical eye. Nearly everything he produced during this period he discarded, until the publication of his short story "Boule de Suif" (1880) a few weeks before Flaubert's death; the story was an overnight sensation.

For ten years after that, Maupassant worked tirelessly, turning out nearly 300 short stories, several novels and three hundred magazine articles. The short story was the medium in which he showed his mastery, however. Among his greatest: "The Necklace" (about a couple who work for 10 years to replace a lost borrowed necklace only to find out that it was a fake); "The Mother of Monsters" (about a woman who deforms her unborn fetuses to be sold as freaks to traveling shows); "A Madman" (about a judge who kills and sends others to death for his crimes); "The Putter-to-Sleep" (about a suicide factory); "The Old Man" (about a family who hold a funeral party for its patriarch -- only he refuses to die until everyone sits down to dinner); "Mother Savage" (about a mother who exacts revenge on the Prussian Army for killing her son by boarding four soldiers and burning her own house down); "Of Doctor Heraclius Gloss" (about a man who believes in reincarnation who is sent to an asylum for treatment, is cured, and then becomes obsessed with killing animals); "The Flayed Hand" (about an Englishman pursued by a severed hand); "Who Knows?" (about a man whose furniture comes to life and escapes his house); and "The Horla" (about an unseen, malevolent presence which produces madness in people).

Ironic and macabre, Maupassant's stories objectively portray humanity's horrors without revealing any moral point of view; for Maupassant, all humans are beasts, and all dreams are meaningless. Already suffering from recurring bouts of syphillis by the time he became a literary star, he suffered from severe migraines and tried fresh-air (on his yacht, the Bel-Ami) and drugs to combat them, to no avail. After the death of his brother in an insane asylum in 1889, he feared for his own sanity and twice attempted suicide. He entered an asylum in January 1892, and died there 18 months later, on July 6, 1893.

An impressive list of filmmakers have based their works on Maupassant's stories, including D.W. Griffith (The Necklace, 1909), Henry King (The Woman Disputed, 1928, with Norma Shearer), Kenji Mizoguchi (Maria no Oyuki, 1935), John Ford (Stagecoach, 1939, based on "Boule de Suif"), Robert Wise (Mademoiselle Fifi, 1944),and Jean-Luc Godard (Masculin feminin, 1966, with Brigitte Bardot), not to mention Diary of a Madman (1963, starring Vincent Price).

Melville and 'Moby Dick'

Born on this day in 1819 in New York City, the son of fallen Manhattan blue-bloods, Herman Melville's childhood was colored by financial instability and disease; a bout with scarlet fever left him plagued for life by poor eyesight. At age 20, he went to sea as a cabin boy; taught briefly upon his return; then sailed on a whaler, the Acushnet, to the South Seas.

Anchored in the Marquesas Islands, he became the well-treated captive of the local cannibal tribe, the Typees. After his rescue, Melville joined a mutiny and landed in a Tahitian jail, but he easily escaped, sailing home with the Navy in 1844. Although he never considered writing as a career, his friends urged him to write about his travels. Embellishing his idyll with the cannibals, he wrote Typee (1846), which became a popular as well as a critical success, even as some quarters found it outrageous and even immoral (some juicy sex scenes were excised by his publisher). Melville followed Typee with Omoo (1847), an account of his time in Polynesia after his escape from jail.

Benefiting from brisk sales, he married and settled down in Berkshires near Nathaniel Hawthorne. Fresh from approving notices and his new intellectual friends, he published Mardi and a Voyage Thither (1849), which was a miserable failure -- self-consciously symbolic and stylistically uneven. He returned to form with the autobiographical Redburn (1849), a comic novel about his first ocean voyage, and White-Jacket (1850), about his brief stint in the Navy. By this time he had grown distant from sober Hawthorne, who did not appreciate Melville's flowery, open affection, yet Hawthorne's predilection for allegory had left its mark on Melville's work.

In 1851, he published what in time would be considered his masterpiece, Moby Dick, or The Whale, first in England and then in the U.S., to barely a contemporary ripple. Rediscovered in 1917 by Carl Van Doren, among others, and now considered one of the great, essential American novels, its central literal and metaphysical quest has been echoed and replayed and subverted in countless American novels since. Despite lapses in narrative point of view and narrative gaps, Moby Dick succeeds both as adventure narrative and on a different level as a genre-defying, abundantly striped philosophical allegory -- at times rhapsodic, at times funny, and at times surging and dense, with minute descriptions of nautical mechanics and whaling technology as evocative of the pathology of Melville's central characters as the mere narrative itself.

Despite all this, a 1950 survey by the Columbia University Press found Moby Dick to be the second most boring literary classic of all-time, an attitude which fueled one of the recurring jokes of Woody Allen's Zelig. The first most boring: John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

Exhausted for having tackled a work of such scope and depressed about its lack of a warm reception, Melville became somewhat of a recluse. He struggled through the 1850s and early 1860s -- publishing stories, including "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853, the story of a clerk in the dead letter office) and "Benito Cereno" (1855, an account of a slave mutiny), and some verse -- until he received an appointment as a customs inspector at the New York docks in 1866. He spent his last 25 years working in obscurity, believing that his literary reputation would consist of going down in posterity as "the man who lived among the cannibals," if at all. He died in New York City on September 28, 1891. Thirty-three years after his death, in 1924, Melville's final novel, Billy Budd, based on the Somers' mutiny and court-martial, was published to great acclaim.

In spite of the 1950 Columbia survey, Melville's posthumous hold on pop culture has been tenacious. In addition to many film versions of Moby Dick (including 2 with John Barrymore, 1926 and 1930; a French version directed by Michael Curtiz and starring William Dieterle(!); the 1956 version by John Huston, with Gregory Peck; and the 1998 TV version with Patrick Stewart), Orson Welles staged a play, Moby Dick Rehearsed, about a group of Shakesperean actors who spontaneously begin to act out Melville's work. Other interesting spin-offs have included Benjamin Britten's opera, Billy Budd, and film versions of Billy Budd (1962, with Robert Ryan) and Typee (Enchanted Island, 1958, by Allan Dwan with Dana Andrews).

And, yes, Melville is a great uncle of the pencil-necked electronic musician Moby (Everything is Wrong; Play).