Fannie Hurst (1889-1968) Back Street (1930) Born: Hamilton, Ohio. Buried: New Mount Sinai Cemetery & Mausoleum, Affton, Missouri. College: Washington (Missouri)
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) Balder Dead (1855) Born: Laleham, Surrey, England. Buried: All Saints' Churchyard, Laleham, Surrey, England. College: Balliol (Oxford)
William Morris (1834-1896) Born: Fire Station, opposite site of Elm House, Walthamstow, London, England. Buried: St George's Churchyard, Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, England. William Morris Gallery, Lloyd Park, Forest Road, Walthamstow, London, England. Kelmscott Manor, Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, England. Red House, Red House Lane, Bexleyheath, London, England. Kelmscott House (William Morris Society), 26 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, London, England. College: Exeter (Oxford)
Felix Salten (1869-1945) Bambi (1929) Born: Budapest, Hungary. Buried: Israelitischen Friedhof, Zurich, Switzerland.
Walt Disney (1901-1966) Born: 2156 Tripp Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. Buried: Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, Los Angeles, California. Walt Disney Family Museum, 104 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, California. Walt Disney World, Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Disneyland, 1313 South Disneyland Drive, Anaheim, Orange, California.
Par Lagerkvist (1891-1974) Barabbas (1950) Born: Vaxjo, Sweden. Buried: Lidingo Kyrkogard, Lidingo, Sweden. College: Uppsala
Barabbas: Jerusalem, Israel. Creation Museum, 2800 Bullittsburg Church Road, Petersburg, Kentucky. Painting, Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York.
Jesus Christ (6 B.C.-27) Born: Bethlehem, Israel. Tombsite: Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Jerusalem, Israel. Baptism Site, Al-Maghtas, Jordan.
Pontius Pilate. Born: Bisenti, Abruzzo, Italy (tradition). Grave (tradition): Plan de l'Aiguille, Vienne, Rhone-Alpes, France. Pilate Stone, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel. Scala Santa, Chapel of San Lorenzo, Rome, Italy (the steps Jesus climbed to meet Pilate).
Alan Blair. Translator. I can find no biographical information.
Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799) The Barber of Seville (1775) Born: Rue Saint-Denis, 1ere, Paris, France. Buried: Pere Lachaise Cemetery, 20eme, Paris, France. Hotel Caron de Beaumarchais, 12 Rue Vieille du Temple, 4eme, Paris, France. Seville, Andalusia, Spain.
Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) Born: 34 Via Rossini, Pesaro, Marches, Italy. Buried: Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence, Italy. Original Tomb (now empty), Pere Lachaise Cemetery, 20eme, Paris, France. College: Conservatorio di Bologna.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Pickwick Papers (1837), Oliver Twist (1839), Barnaby Rudge (1841), A Christmas Carol (1843), Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1852-3), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1861) Born: Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum, 1 Mile End Terrace, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England*****(6-30?-99)***** Buried: Westminster Abbey, Westminster, London, England*****(9-7-96)***** Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, Holborn, London, England*****(6-24-99)***** Dickens World The Grand Tour, Leviathan Way, Chatham Maritime, Kent, England.
Lord George Gordon (1751-1793) Born: Upper Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, London, England. Buried: St James Chapel Piccadilly (destroyed), public garden, Hampstead Road, Euston (?), London, England. Wedgewood Cameo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York.
Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945) Barren Ground (1926) Born: Richmond, Virginia. Buried: Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia.
Percival Christopher Wren (1875-1941) Beau Geste (1924) Born: Deptford, South London, England. Buried: Holy Trinity Churchyard, Amberley, Gloucestershire, England. College: St Catherine's (Oxford)
Ronald Colman (1891-1958) Born: Richmond, Surrey, England. Buried: Santa Barbara Cemetery, Santa Barbara, California. Niles Essenay Silent Film Museum http://www.nilesfilmmuseum.org/index.htm, 37417 Niles Boulevard, Niles (Fremont), Alameda, California.
George Farquhar (1677-1707) The Beaux' Stratagem (1707) Born: Shipquay Street, Derry, Northern Ireland. Buried: St Martin's-in-the-Field Churchyard, Strand, London, England. College: Trinity (Dublin).
Gerhardt Hauptmann (1862-1946) Before Dawn (1889), The Weavers (1892), The Beaver Coat (1893) Born: Szczawno-Zdroj, Poland. Buried: Near church, Hiddensee, Mecklenberg-Vorpommem, Germany. College: Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. Gerhardt Hauptmann Museum, Gerhardt-Hauptmann Strasse 1, Erkner, Brandenburg, Germany. Museum Agnetendorf (Gerhardt Hauptmann House, Jelenia Gora-Jagniatkov, Poland. Carl und Gerhardt Hauptmann House, 11 Listopada Street #23, Szklarska Poreba, Poland. Gerhart Hauptmann House, Hiddensee, Mecklenberg-Vorpommem, Germany.
Ludwig Lewisohn (1882-1955) Born: Berlin, Germany. Buried: Brookline, Norfolk, Massachusetts. College: College of Charleston.
John Gay (1685-1732) The Beggar's Opera (1728) Born: 35 High Street (plaque on Joy St side), Barnstaple, Devonshire, England. Buried: Westminster Abbey, Westminster, London, England.
Kurt Weill (1900-1950) Born: Dessau, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Buried: Mount Repose Cemetery, Haverstraw, Rockland, New York. College: Berlin University of the Arts. Kurt Weill Zentrum, Dessau, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.
John Hersey (1914-1993) A Bell For Adano (1944) Born: Tianjin, China. Buried: Martha's Vineyard, Dukes, Massachusetts. College: Yale. Bell Tower, Licata, Sicily, Italy.
Lew Wallace (1827-1905) Ben Hur (1880) Born: Brookville, Indiana. Buried: Oak Hill Cemetery, Crawfordsville, Indiana. General Lew Wallace Study and Museum (www.ben-hur.com/), 200 Wallace Avenue, Crawfordsville, Indiana. Circus Maximus, Rome, Italy.
Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) The Betrothed (1827) Born: Via Visconti di Modrone 16, Milan, Lombardy, Italy. Buried: Cimitero Monumentale, Milan, Lombardy, Italy. Casa del Manzoni (http://www.casadelmanzoni.mi.it/) Via Morone 1, Milan, Lombardy, Italy.
A.B. Guthrie, Jr. (1901-1991) The Big Sky (1947) Born: Bedford, Indiana. Buried: Mt Lebanon Cemetery, Glendale, Queens, New York. College: Harvard.
Aristophanes (448-385 B.C.) Lysistrata (411 B.C.), The Frogs (405 B.C.), The Birds (Date unknown?) Born/Buried: Athens, Attica, Greece.
Anna Sewell (1820-1878) Black Beauty (1877) Born: 26 Whitehorse Plain, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England. Buried: Quaker Burial Ground, Lamas, Norfolk, England.
Anna Sewell's birthplace was a museum for many decades, but is now a tea room. This appears to have happened some time within the past six years.
Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948) Black Oxen (1923) Born: Rincon Hill, San Francisco, California (plaque north Lafayette Park, at Octavia & Washington). Buried: Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma, San Mateo, California.
Robert Browning (1812-1889) A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (1843) Born: Southhampton Street, Camberwell, England *****(6-28?-01)***** Buried: Westminster Abbey, Westminster, London, England. College: University College (London). Armstrong Browning Library (http://www.browninglibrary.org/), 710 Speight Avenue, Waco, Texas.
Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) The Blue Bird (1907) Born: Ghent, Belgium. Buried: Stele of platform near Palais Maeterlinck, 8 Boulevard Maurice Maeterlinck, Nice, Provence-Alpes-Cote-d'Azur, France. College: U. of Ghent.
Far from sated with sites commemorating literary greatness, we went the very next day down to Amherst to invade the sanctuary of Emily Dickinson, whose birthplace and lifelong home is now a museum.
In spite of the apparent size of the house, the tour only includes four rooms, one of which is not furnished other than with modern chairs. Nonetheless I enjoyed the tour, as the guide speaks for about ten minutes in each of the rooms, and the information is generally interesting. I find as I get older that I like going on guided tours, provided that the guide is at all capable. It is pleasant to walk leisurely through an old building listening to an intelligent person talk, regardless of the comparative importance of the facts being relayed.
The tour did not go into great detail as far as breaking down the actual poetry of Emily Dickinson, the greatness of which I must confess even at my advanced age I have a hard time truly convincing myself. And this is a real failure, because it is something that is so obvious to serious literary scholars that not to grasp it is to relegate oneself eternally to a lower status of literacy than all genuinely educated people. It is not that I do not like the poems of Emily Dickinson, or that I am not happy that they exist. To this point however I am incapable of seeing that they are great in the way that Donne or Sir Philip Sidney or Herrick seems to me to be really great. At this point I have no choice but to keep plugging away. It is too late for me to try to pursue expertise in any other worthwhile area of human endeavor.
I have noted this elsewhere on the internet, but I really enjoyed being in Amherst for the day. College towns are wonderful places, and it will be a sad day if they disappear because everybody is spending the years from 18-24 acquiring job skills on the computer at their parents' house, and not only because I have five children and am desperately counting on some of them leaving the house once in a while before they are thirty-five. The combination of youthful energies, above average intelligence, and free time in which to indulge in the course of an average day is highly attractive, to me anyway.
Because we have little children still, we had to go on alternate tours, mother and children 1 & 3 on one, and myself and child 2 on the other. But I liked this, as it enabled us to wander around town a little, which we probably would have neglected to do otherwise. At one of the parks there were a number of hyper-progressive looking student types about, female mainly, unsmiling towards me, and reading and writing out longhand notes on paper just like the old times, when my two year old daughter decided to skip around the fountain singing "I'm a princess, I'm a princess", much to my horror as you can imagine. She did not pick this up from me, I assure you.
Along the walk to the other house on the property, where Emily Dickinson's brother lived. I would have liked to seen that too, but to see that required going on a combined tour that was an hour and forty minutes long, and seeing as we had to go on two separate tours as it was I thought that would be pushing it.
In front of the other house.
The main entrance, with a full view of the front of the house.
The West Cemetery in Amherst, where Emily Dickinson is buried, is a bit shabby, and is occupied by a number of people of the sort who look like they dropped out of college many years back and now hang around the cemetery all day acting weird.
I don't know why I included three different grave pictures, I guess to give a feel for the setting, which, in contrast to most cemeteries I go to, was not very peaceful. It is small and is bordered by a gas station and the business district of Amherst, and all sorts of people are constantly tramping through, and there are the aforementioned people who are camped out there for no apparent reason and watch you tramping dutifully to Emily Dickinson's grave.
I do not know what the significance of the toy chair is, though I suspect it is something obvious, even juvenile. Nonetheless, it eludes me.
We made a trip out to this very tiny graveyard, which lies within the Green Mountain National Forest in the vicinity of a settlement that I am not sure even qualifies as a town. The cemetery is down a long gravel road, and no other cars or people passed by in the entire 30-45 minutes that we were there.
We took our lunchboxes and had a picnic. The spot is tranquil and beautiful and well-maintained.
Given that Robert Penn Warren as an author is so strongly identified with the South, it was somewhat of a surprise to find his grave in this well-kept but obscure corner of Vermont. Evidently he summered there for many years.
What thoughts did I have at this memorial? Nothing pertinent. I do not know very much about Robert Penn Warren, other than that he had a successful career, and people trusted and respected his talent and knowledge in literary matters, which has always struck me, absurdly really, as the most desirable state to which a person could attain. I thought about the loneliness of the spot, the now complete passing of Warren's literary generation, which retained some prominence and authority even in my youth. I thought about the universal male desire for money, power, and sex, and thought that in his own milieu Warren seemed, compared to me anyway, to have attained a fair portion of the first two of these--I don't know about the sex. So yes, this is what I thought about, in between my major concerns about my children behaving, not climbing on or tipping over gravestones, and so on.
This has a Vermont Life magazine feel to it, don't you think. I must confess, I love that magazine. Though the older numbers from the 60s and 70s are a world of their own that can never be recaptured, I like the newer issues too.
I thought this was an unusually beautiful tree. It reminded me of one that used to be in my grandparents' yard.
