Author List Volume IV

Jacinto Benavente y Martinez (1866-1954) Bonds of Interest (1907) Born: Madrid, Spain. Buried: Cementerio de Galapagar, Madrid, Spain. Hostal Residencia Universitaria Jacinto Benavente,  Avenue Jacinto Benavente 2, Malaga, Andalusia, Spain.

Francoise Sagan (1935-2004) Bonjour Tristesse (1954) Born: Maison Quoirez, Cajarc, Midi-Pyrenees, France. Buried: Seuzac Village Cemetery, Cajarc, Midi-Pyrenees, France.

I had not realized that she had died. I thought she be a candidate for the last person on this list to still be alive. I am aware of at least one author from this group who lives yet. He is coming up in this very post, too.



William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) The Book of Snobs (1846-7), Vanity Fair (1847-8), Henry Esmond (1852) Born: 56B Free School Street (nr Armenian College), Calcutta, India. Buried: Kensal Green Cemetery, Kensal Green, London, England. College: Trinity (Cambridge).

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) Boris Gudonov (1825), Eugene Onegin (1831), The Captain's Daughter (1836) Born: Moscow, Russia. Buried: Svyatogorsk Monastery Cemetery, Pushkinskiye Gory, Pskov Oblast, Russia. National Pushkin Museum (http://www.museumpushkin.ru/eng), 12 Moika River Embankment, St Petersburg, Russia. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts (http://www.arts-museum.ru/index.php?lang=en), Volkhonka Street, Moscow, Russia. State Alexander Pushkin Museum (http://www.moscow.info/museums/state-alexander-pushkin-museum.aspx), Ul Arbat 53, Moscow, Russia. Alexander Pushkin Museum (http://www.vilniausmuziejai.lt/a_puskinas/index.htm), Subaciaus g-24, Vilnius, Lithuania. Mikhailovskoye, State Museum-Preserve of A.S. Pushkin (http://pushkin.elink.ru/english/pushkin/push1.asp), Pushkinskiye Gory, Pskov Obl., Russia. Alexander Pushkin Museum, Chisinau, Moldova. Alexander Pushkin's Museum, Pushkins'ka 13, Odessa, Ukraine. Dacha-Museum, Pushkin, Leningrad, Russia. Catherine Palace, Pushkin, Leningrad, Russia. College: Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum.

Boris Godunov (1551-1605) Born: Vyazma, Smolensk Obl., Russia (?) Buried: Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, Segiyev Posad, Russia. Kremlin, Moscow, Russia.

Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) Born: Mussorgsky Estate-Museum (?), Karevo, Toropets, Tver Obl., Russia. Buried: Tikhvin Cemetery, Alexander Nevsky Cemetery, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

There is definitely at least one Mussorgsky museum in Russia, and there may be two. Some of the pages identify a museum as being in Karevo, and others in Naumovo, which is about 13 miles away. There are pictures and even videos of one of these places, but I can no definitive information in a brief search as to exactly where it is.

Moliere (1622-1673) Tartuffe (1664), The Misanthrope (1666), The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670) Born: 96 Rue St Honore, 1ere, Paris, France. (There is a second monument claiming to represent Moliere's birthplace, apparently incorrectly, at 31 Rue du Pont-Neuf, 1ere, Paris, France) Buried: Pere Lachaise Cemetery, 20eme, Paris, France. Hotel Moliere (http://www.hotel-moliere-paris-louvre.com/), 21 Rue Moliere, 1ere, Paris, France.

John Maddison Morton (1811-1891) Box and Cox (1847) Born: Pangbourne, Berkshire, England. Buried: Kensal Green Cemetery, Kensal Green, London, England.

Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) Born: Lambeth, London, England. Buried: St Paul's Cathedral, City, London, England. College: Royal Academy of Music.

W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) Born: 17 Southhampton Street, Strand, London, England. Buried: Church of St John the Evangelist, Stanmore, Harrow Weald, London, England. College: King's (London).

Francis Burnand (1836-1917) Born: London, England. Buried: St Augustine's Abbey Churchyard, Ramsgate, Kent, England. College: Trinity (Cambridge).

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) Brave New World (1932) Born: Laleham House, Peperharow Road, Godalming, Surrey, England. Buried: Watts Mortuary Chapel Grounds, Compton, Surrey, England. College: Balliol (Oxford).

Ignazio Silone (1900-1978) Bread and Wine (1937) Born: Pescina, Abruzzo, Italy. Buried: Pescina, Abruzzo, Italy (exact site apparently unknown, however).

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), Ivanhoe (1820), Kenilworth (1821) Born: College Wynd (plaque on 8 Chambers Street), Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland. Buried: Dryburgh Abbey, Borders, Scotland. College: Edinburgh. Scott Monument (http://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/Venues/Scott-Monument), Princes Street Gardens East, Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland. The Writer's Museum (http://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/Venues/The-Writers-Museum), Lady Stair's Close, Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland. Abbotsford House (http://www.scottsabbotsford.co.uk/), Melrose, Scotland. Sir Walter Scott's Courtroom, Market Place, Selkirk, Selkirkshire, Scotland.

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) Born: 14 Borgo Canale, Bergamo, Lombardy, Italy. Buried: Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, Lombardy, Italy. Donizetti Museum, 9 Via Arena, Bergamo, Lombardy, Italy.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) Brideshead Revisited (1945) Born: 11 Hillfield Road, Hampstead, London, England. Buried: Churchyard, Combe Florey, Somerset, England. College: Hertford (Oxford).

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) The Cabala (1926), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), Our Town (1938) Born: 140 Langdon Street, Madison, Wisconsin. Buried: Mt Carmel Cemetery, Hamden, Connecticut. Miller Memorial Central Library, 2901 Dixwell Avenue, Hamden, Connecticut. College: Yale. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Born: 2 Dostoevsko Street, Moscow, Russia. Buried: Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St Petersburg, Russia. Dostoevsky Museum, Kuznetsky Lane 5/2, St Petersburg, Russia. Omsk State Dostoevsky Museum, Dostoevskaya 1, Omsk, Russia. Hotel Dostoevsky, Vladimirski Prospekt 19, St Petersburg, Russia. Museum, Darovoe, Russia. Museum, 40 Dosoevsky Street, Kuznetsk, Penza Obl., Russia. Museum, Dostoevsky Street 117, Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. Museum, Dostoevsky Embankment 42, Staraya Russa, Novgorod Obl., Russia. College: Military Engineering-Technical University (St Petersburg)

Constance Garnett (1861-1946) Born: Brighton, Sussex, England. College: Newham (Cambridge).

I cannot find any evidence that Garnett was buried in the churchyard at Limpsfield in Surrey; however she appeared to have lived in this  village for the last fifty years of her life.

Princess Alexandra Kropotkin (1887-1966) Born: Bromley(?) or Harrow(?), London, England. 

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (1924), Joseph and His Brothers (1933-44) Born: Lubeck, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Buried: Kilchberg Village Cemetery, Kilchberg, Switzerland. Buddenbrookhaus, Mengstrasse 4, Lubeck, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Thomas Mann Museum & Cultural Center, 17 Skruzdynes Street, Nerunga (Nida), Lithuania. Thomas Mann Archives, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland. B & B Al Pantheon con Thomas Mann, Via del Pantheon 57, Rome, Italy. College: Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.    

Thomas Bulfinch (1796-1867) Bulfinch's Mythology (1855) Born: Newton, Middlesex, Massachusetts. Buried: Mt Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts. College: Harvard.

O. Henry (1862-1910) Cabbages and Kings (1899) Born: Greensboro, North Carolina. Buried: Riverside Cemetery, Asheville, North Carolina. O. Henry Museum, 409 East 5th Street, Austin, Texas. O Henry House Museum, 601 Dolorosa Street, San Antonio, Texas. O Henry Room, Capital Visitors Center, 112 East 11th Street, Austin, Texas.

Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.) The Gallic Wars (50 B.C.), The Civil Wars (47 B.C.) Born: Rome, Lazio, Italy. Buried: Temple of Caesar, Forum, Rome, Lazio, Italy. Bust of Caesar, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna, Austria. Murder Site, Largo di Torre Argentina, Rome, Italy.

Herman Wouk (1915-    ) The Caine Mutiny (1951) Born: East 167th Street, Bronx, New York. College: Columbia. 

At age 98, and with Francoise Sagan already passed, I am pretty certain Herman Wouk is the only author on this list who can still be alive. Here is a Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire he did last year at 97. 

W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Cakes and Ale (1930) Born: British Embassy, 35 Rue du Faubourg St Honore, 8eme, Paris, France. Buried: Ashes scattered near Maugham Library, King's School, Canterbury, Kent, England. College: Heidelberg

Jack London (1876-1916) The Call of the Wild (1903) Born: near 3rd & Brannan Streets, San Francisco, California. Buried: Jack London State Historic Park, Glen Ellen, Sonoma, California. Jack London Interpretive Museum, Dawson City, Yukon, Canada. Jack London Square, 466 Water Street, Oakland, Alameda, California. Jack London Inn, 444 Embarcadero West, Oakland, Alameda, California. College: California. 

Alexandre Dumas Fils (1824-1895) Camille (The Lady of the Camellias) (1848). Born: 1 Place Boieldieu, 2eme, Paris, France. Buried: Cimitiere de Montmartre, 18eme, Paris, France.

Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) Born: Ni 24/32, Via XX Settembre, Vigevano, Lombardy, Italy. Buried: Cemetery of Sant' Anna, Asolo, Veneto, Italy.  

The IWE reports that "The play appeared in 1852 with Eleonora Duse in the title role," but this obviously is wrong, unless there was another, older, Eleonora Duse, who has been completely forgotten by fame. This seems unlikely, however. 

Checking In

Finished City of Thieves today. Over the last few days I thought that the extreme implausibility of the climactic scenes detracted from the overall book, but then I considered that maybe the character of the book is in the same tradition as the implausible romances of Scott or Cooper or the tales of the medieval knights, with the bonus that the narrative is more modern and interesting than these other books. All the same, the last third of it was a drop off from the earlier parts, which I was impressed by, and I am pretty good at resisting writers, especially when I have been told in advance how smart they are. It is one of the hard and last tests of literature, for a writer to carry a book all the way through and bring it to a satisfying, conclusive end, but of course if you want to be great you must be able to do it.

I don't know if this is considered a trend yet, or if it was considered a trend but has already come and gone, or if people like Woody Allen and Mel Brooks and Philip Roth are already long considered to have broached the subject, but this story seems to share with the Quentin Tarantino movie Inglorious Basterds which also came out a few years ago (and which I haven't seen) the character of having Jewish characters in World War II stories possessed of agency to combat successfully and heroically against Nazis. I think I have read of other books and stories that have taken this tack as well. It is being largely driven by people, mainly, as far as I can tell, men, from my generation, who were born 20-30 years after the war ended and grew up during a period when sober dramatizations of the Holocaust were a central component of and influence on the culture, popular and otherwise. The, to this point, mild reaction against this represented by the stories referred to here, makes a certain amount of sense when one considers it, but I do not think most observers would have predicted it in the 1970s or 80s. Nonetheless, even though it occurred in a modern age of hyper-documentation and historiography and voice recordings and film footage--I just saw a clip of some of the footage from Buchenwald the other day, mounds of corpses being bulldozed into pits and so on--in modern American life anyway it seems inevitable as time goes on and the world in which these atrocities took place and the commentaries and interpretations that were made of them grows every day less immediate, less remembered, less real by the living, that people will not regard or relate to it in the same way either.

Update 10/21/2021: I had not at the time I wrote this post read any Scott, and I was basing my opinion of him on what I took to be the common contemporary judgment. I underestimated him, he is a great novelist and should still be held in the high regard he was formerly. 

I did like the Benioff book (City of Thieves) at the time, I thought it was skillfully written, though I haven't thought about it very much in the years since. I don't know that my commentary in the second paragraph has either aged terribly or proved especially prescient or insightful, but I don't think there is nothing to it. This trend seems to have faded, at least among reasonably serious or intellectual artists, though I do not pay as much attention to current trends as I used to.   

Abraham Lincoln (1918)--John Drinkwater

I didn't like this one quite as much as the Sherwood play, though it held my interest. It is hurt by a couple of weak scenes which will make even a person like me who has a higher tolerance for both archaic attitudes and schmaltz than they ought to cringe. One features a black character who meets Lincoln and unfortunately talks in an Uncle Remus dialect. I suspect that this sort of thing is going to turn up more frequently in the forgotten books on this old list than one would desire to have to cope with. I noted a similar deficiency many years ago when I read Booth Tarkington, an otherwise more than able novelist who is little honored today. And Drinkwater, who was an Englishman, was in theory I suppose trying to celebrate the end of slavery and introduce a human voice into that commemoration; but imagining black characters who possessed any of the admired qualities of the prevailing civilization of the time in any kind of high degree seems to have been beyond the capability of nearly everyone. The other poor scene involved the generals Grant and Meade talking about what a great man and leader Lincoln was on the occasion of imminent end of the war, which was excruciatingly corny; as I alluded to earlier, I don't cringe that easily (at corniness). Otherwise, the play was tolerable as literature of its period, and I enjoyed reading it. It is obvious that my long history of studying, thinking about and playing games with this list, combined with all the confusion and disappointment that has accompanied most of my attempts to do anything requiring the exertion of my mental faculties in the years since this list first attracted me, has made me more excited to finally read some of these books than I had realized, and than they probably intrinsically merit. The next two titles up, Absalom, Absalom and Adam Bede, I have read before for my other list. They are certainly worth reading again, and I am hell-bent to do so. That said however, I cannot neglect this edition's

Bourgeois Surrender Challenge

1. City of Thieves--David Benioff....................4.56
2. The Accidental City--Lawrence N Powell...4.52
3. Fahrenheit 451--Ray Bradbury...................4.17
4. The Handmaid's Tale--Margaret Atwood....4.12
5. Total Recall--Piers Anthony.........................3.50
6. Four titles from this challenge remained unrated: American Eloquence: Studies in American Political History, by Dunston & Woodburn; Julia Ward Howe, by Richards & Elliott; Sword & Pen: Ventures & Adventures, by Willard Glazier; and The Mediterranean,by T.G. Bonney, et al. 

An interesting challenge, with surprise at the Atwood and the Bradbury scoring so low. As in all endeavors that choose to rely on mass approval, this game has its perils. I have read Handmaid's Tale and I admit, it did not do much for me (I did like Lady Oracle, for what it's worth). I've never read Fahrenheit 451 and I was kind of hoping it would win, since it is both short and such an iconic book of postwar America, the literature of which time period I frequently like. City of Thieves is a modern book (2008) by a modern author about which, and whom, I knew nothing. My local library had a copy and it is fairly short (258 pages) so I decided to accept the challenge. In fact, I am already up to page 165 in it. I have endured some mild...chastisement?--I am not sure what exactly to call it, the suggestion is that I am hidebound and overly and perhaps even mindlessly attached to the classics--about my easy dismissal of most modern books, and it is true I don't generally like them. While they are the works of my rivals and would be peers who have succeeded so brilliantly in navigating the intellectual waters of our times, such as they are, whereas I have failed more utterly than once would have seemed possible, I am still confident that most of them are not very good. I have to say, though, that this City of Thieves does seem to me to be very good, and its author is certainly capable enough--contrary to much apparent contemporary belief, a lack of capability is not one of the primary problems afflicting the book world. Although it is a modern book it is set during the siege of Leningrad in 1942, so it has an old and, given the conditions which were in operation at that time, decidedly elemental atmosphere. It does not redefine the possibilities of the novel or exhilarate in and make sense of the most vital trends and movements of our own time. Nonetheless it is smoothly written and especially shows an advanced degree of skill for the telling description or metaphor. I have no idea what a real survivor of that time would make of it--it does have something of the American 'endurance of the human spirit' quality about it that Europeans, especially those in the countries hardest it by the 20th centuries' wars, seem to have moved beyond believing in--but it does a better job at describing the fatigue and hunger, if not the terror, that were endemic in that period than other things I have read. For example, there is a bit where a thoroughly exhausted and starving character is trudging through the snow at night in -20 degree or so cold, with the German army all around the area, and how the only way he is able to cope with this is by making it as far a certain tree that his eye has alighted upon, and then when he reaches this to pick out another one, and so on. I believe I gained a couple of pounds at the beginning of the book because the descriptions of the hunger effected me enough to make me crave food more than I do ordinarily.

I was curious enough to look up some of the big professional reviews of the book. I am almost sorry that I did, as the instinct of most reviewers seems to be to spend as much time working through their issues with the idea of David Benioff the person as to think about the book. There is a lot to chew on there. He is apparently monstrously handsome. His father was the head of Goldman Sachs. He is married to a Ivy-League educated movie actress. He has a highly successful career writing for television and movies--book fiction seems, at least in terms of income, to be kind of a sidelight. Then there is the obvious talent, whatever one thinks of how it is being deployed, for fluid and satisfying plotting and prosifying across genres. As far as I can tell it is not like this guy sells massive numbers of books or generate an inordinate amount of love from the literary community, passionate young intellectuals, and so on, but he makes enough, and is known and connected enough in a lot of desirable circles, to make a lot of people look at themselves in the mirror and wonder where it all went wrong for them.

The edition of Abraham Lincoln I ordered was from the old Riverside Literature Series (1927, in this instance), which is a set of (from what I have seen) scrawny little books with pale blue covers, the series seal imprinted on the front and the book's number on the back (268 for A.L.). The skinny spines are ugly and spare, the title only appearing in boring block capital letters When I was in high school I had copies of Hamlet and Macbeth from this series, but I have long lost those, and this is the first book from the series I have had since then. The series was evidently intended to be used in schools; the texts are accompanied by many pages of notes, study questions, & suggestions for essays and classroom dramatizations. There were fifteen general questions taken from 'College Entrance Board Examinations'. A sample:

"Choose one character from each of five novels or plays and show briefly in each case how this character changes for the better or for the worse because of one or more of the following reasons: a. The influence of another character. b. Circumstances over which the character has no control. c. The character's own strength or weakness."

Another suggested 'topic for investigation' was "Calhoun's Doctrines of Nullification and Secession."

I am aiming to be more positive and likable. I don't know if it is possible to achieve this if one has to make a conscious effort to aim for it, but I think it is worth trying.