Author List Volume X

Alain Rene Le Sage (1668-1747) The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane (1715-1735) Born: Sarzeau, Brittany, France. Buried: Boulogne, Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, France. Cathedral of St Mary, Toledo, Castile-La Mancha, Spain.

Though there is a famous anecdote regarding Le Sage's funeral and the inscription on this tomb that shows up frequently in old books, there is no indication as to where he was buried other than one reference to its being in Boulogne. The site, wherever it was, may very well have been destroyed in the Second World War. 

Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987) Tobacco Road (1932), God's Little Acre (1933) Born: The Little Manse, Erskine Cladwell Museum, East Camp Street, Moreland, Georgia. Buried: Scenic Hills Memorial Park, Ashland, Oregon. College: Erskine (S.C.)

There are indications on the internet that the Caldwell Museum is now closed. He does seem to be increasingly forgotten as the years go by.

Lucius Apuleius (124-c.170) The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius (c.150) Born: M'Daourouch, Algeria.

James Hilton (1900-1954) Lost Horizon (1933), Goodbye, Mr Chips (1934) Born: 26 Wilkinson Street, Leigh, Lancashire, England. Buried: Knollkreg Memorial Park, Abingdon, Virginia. Shangri-La, 900 South Beretania Street, Honolulu, Hawaii. College: Christ's (Cambridge)




J.B. Priestley (1894-1984) The Good Companions (1929) Born: 34 Mannheim Road, Manningham, Yorkshire, England. Buried: St Michael and All Angels Church, Hubberholme, Yorkshire, England. College: Trinity Hall (Cambridge).

Pearl Buck (1892-1973) The Good Earth (1931) Pearl S. Buck Birthplace, 8129 Seneca Trail, Hillsboro, West Virginia. Buried: Green Hills Farm Grounds, Perkasie, Pennsylvania.  Pearl Buck House, 520 Dublin Road, Perkasie, Pennsylvania. Pearl Buck Museum, 6 Runzhoushan Road, Zhenjiang, China. College: Randolph-Macon.




Jaroslav Hasek (1883-1923) The Good Soldier Schweik (1929) Born: Skolska Street, Prague, Czech Republic. Buried: Old Lipnice Cemetery, Lipnice nad Sazavou, Czech Republic. Hasek Museum, Lipnice nad Sazavou, Czech Republic. Monument, Prokopovo Namesti, Prague, Czech Republic.

Selma Lagerlof (1858-1940) The Story of Gosta Berling (1894), The Ring of the Lowenskolds (1931) Born: Marbacka, Sonne, Sweden. Buried: Ostra Amtervik Kyrkogard, Sunne, Sweden. College: Uppsala.

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939) Born: John Steinbeck House, 132 Central Avenue, Salinas, Monterey, California.  Buried: Garden of Memories, Salinas, Monterey, California. National Steinbeck Center, 1 Main Street, Salinas, Monterey, California. College: Stanford.

George Barr McCutcheon (1866-1928) Graustark (1901) Born: nr Lafayette, Indiana. Buried: Spring Vale Cemetery, Lafayette, Indiana. College: Purdue.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) The Great Gatsby (1925) Born: 481 Laurel Avenue, St. Paul, Minnesota. Buried: Old St. Mary's Catholic Church Cemetery, Rockville, Maryland.                     Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, 919 Felder Avenue, Montgomery, Alabama. College: Princeton.

Louis Bromfield (1896-1956) The Green Bay Tree (1927) Born: Mansfield, Ohio. Buried: Olivet Cemetery, Lucas, Ohio. Malabar Farm, 4050 Bromfield Road, Lucas, Ohio. Oak Hill Cottage, Springmill Street and Oakhill Place, Mansfield, Ohio. College: Cornell.

Lynn Riggs (1899-1954) Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) Born: Claremore, Oklahoma. Buried: Woodlawn Cemtery, Claremore, Oklahoma. Lynn Riggs Memorial Exhibit, 121 North Weenonah, Claremore, Oklahoma. College: Oklahoma.

Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) Born: Harlem, New York, New York. Buried: Mt Zion Cemetery, Maspeth, Queens, New York. College: Columbia.



Michael Arlen (1895-1956) The Green Hat (1924) Born: Rousse, Bulgaria. Buried: (possibly) Golders Green Crematorium, Golders Green, London, England. College: Edinburgh.

W. H. Hudson (1841-1922) Green Mansions (1904) Born: Museo Historico Provincial Guillermo E. Hudson, Calle 1356, Avenida Hudson, Quilmes (Florencio Varela), Argentina. Buried: Broadwater and Worthing Cemetery, Worthing, Sussex, England.

Marc Connelly (1890-1980) The Green Pastures (1930) Born: McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Buried: Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, Westchester, New York.

Roark Bradford (1896-1948) Born: Lauderdale County, Tennessee. Buried: Unknown. College: California (Berkeley)

Jakob Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) Grimm's Fairy Tales (1815) Born: Parade (now Freedom) Plaza 1, Hanau, Hesse, Germany. Buried: St Matthaus Kirchhof Cemetery, Schoneberg, Berlin, Germany. Bruder-Grimm-Haus und Museum Steinau, Bruder Grimm-Strasse 80, Steinau-an-der-Strasse, Hesse, Germany. Bruder Grimm-Museum Kassel, Bruder Grimm-Platz 4A, Kassel, Germany. Monument, Am Markt 14-18, Hanau, Hesse, Germany. College: Marburg (all both).

Charles Perrault (1628-1703) Born: 5eme, Paris, France (baptized, Eglise St Etienne-du-Mont). Buried: Carrieres de Paris, 14eme, Paris, France. Chateau d'Usse, Rigny-Usse, Centre-Val-de-Loire, France.

Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) Hunger (1890), Growth of the Soil (1917) Born: Lom, Norway. Buried: ashes in garden, Norholm, Grimstad, Norway.  Knut Hamsun Centre, Hamaroy, Norway.

The Knut Hamsun Center in remote northern Norway. 

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Gulliver's Travels (1727) Born: 7 Hoey's Court, Dublin, Ireland (*****9-3-96*****). Buried: St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, Ireland (*****9-3-96*****) College: Trinity (Dublin).

Hamlet: Buried: (1) Marienlyst Castle, Helsingfor, Denmark. (2) Ammelhede, Randers Municipality, Denmark. Kronborg Castle, Helsingfors, Denmark.

Brian Donn Byrne (1889-1928) Hangman's House (1926) Born: New York, New York. Buried: Churchyard, Rathclarin, Cork, Ireland. College: Dublin.

Expanding on the June Update

I was overtired the other night when it was due and in my haste to slap a few sentences together and get it up I made a sloppy posting. I was (probably) especially unfair to David Eisenhower, whom I described as an unmanly prig. In truth his account of himself as a young person reminded me of myself, if my grandfather had been the president and I had been as a general result of that association a few rungs higher on the privilege ladder. As a result of this I actually have some sympathy for him, as I am sure whenever he has had to engage with really accomplished or powerful men even from an early age, that they have taken their measure of him largely by way of comparison with his grandfather, by which he could not help but come off lacking. In pictures of him as a young man he comes across as an unthreatening, slightly dorky, rather complacent guy, which also irritated people. His wedding to Julie Nixon, it is sometimes claimed, inspired the angry Creedence Clearwater Revival rock hit "Fortunate Son". Most of the people I knew growing up (apart from my grandparents) despised Richard Nixon, in some ways on a more intimate and impassioned level than that of the hatred that people feel for the candidates in the current presidential race, and as such young David Eisenhower's connection with that family, in addition to his blandness and lack of a distinct and strong personality, I would imagine negatively affected his popularity and esteem as well, especially with the more rebellious element of the 60s generation.

Dwight Eisenhower, the President, comes across here mainly as an old guy who is used to being surrounded by people whose existences revolve around doing what he tells them to do, which of course is what he was. It's all very matter of fact, there are no complicated intellectual motivations or gymnastics involved beyond the circumstance that Dwight Eisenhower assumes leadership and the giving of directions in his interpersonal relations and assumes that the other person will fall in line. I would be curious to know more about his upbringing in Kansas, because in addition to himself two of his brothers achieved substantial success as well, the one being described as a millionaire and the top lawyer in Tacoma, while the other was a college president (Johns Hopkins) and foreign policy expert who held significant positions in politics during Franklin Roosevelt's administrations. The family is always described as being poor, yet these three sons rose to positions of great eminence. How does this happen?

Oh dear, I am getting tired again. President Eisenhower was pretty old-fashioned in his beliefs, He certainly did not believe, for example, that as a general rule women were capable of running affairs and governments.

David Eisenhower, as noted above, married Richard Nixon's cute daughter Julie in December, 1968, about a month after my parents, who are also roughly the same age, Unlike my parents, David and Julie are still married now, and even appear to still like each other, which would make them the only young-married Baby Boomer couple of that era that I am aware of to have achieved that distinction. Here is some footage of the wedding:




Apropos of nothing, here is the report of the wedding of their nephew (and Richard Nixon's grandson) in 2010. Besides themselves, among those on the guest list were Henry Kissinger, Rudy Giuliani, Ed Rendell, and the ubiquitous Hillary Clinton. Despite their notoriety, the 1968 wedding looks to have been a fairly modest and low key affair--Julie even looks like she went light on the makeup, which especially for a Republican is astounding. I assume that Dwight Eisenhower earned a decent income by the time he left the Presidency, but, having been a military officer most of his life, he certainly never developed extravagant spending habits, and other than wintering in Palm Springs, his retirement routine on the farm in Gettysburg strikes the modern follower of politics as almost banal. David Eisenhower went to Exeter Academy and Amherst in the 60s but apart from this his mode of life did not seem that removed from that of middle class people of the time. My point being that all of these people of this class either seem to have a lot more money now, or they are employing it more shrewdly to distance themselves from the mainstream of American life. Probably both are at work here.

 

June Update

A List: Between books

B List: Anna Karenina 664/950

C List: David Eisenhower--Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life With Dwight D Eisenhower 1961-1969  175/284

The most recent things I've read for the "A" List are a couple of short stories, Sherwood Anderson's "I Don't Know Why" and Henry James's "The Real Thing". The Anderson story was written around 1920 and is kind of a darker take on the snappy Ring Lardner-esque American vernacular style. The post-modern reader would probably be most struck by its copious and unabashed use of the "n" word. The A List is taken from the GRE exam circa-1990. A lot has changed since then. I possess a copy of the story in a 1968 edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. I also have an edition from around 1995 in which this story was replaced by different Anderson stories. I am guessing that the story was most notable for its style and other aspects of it technique, narration, etc, which were not bad, though I felt like I could see where the story was going pretty early on. The contrast between the beauty and excellence represented by the horses with the bestiality and sordidness of men did not strike me as having anything new to say on that subject. The James story, which checked in at around 30 pages, was very Jamesisan, from his middle period, It is tasteful, neat, and largely devoid of action, but I have learned, somewhat, how to read and approach Henry James as a type, or a brand, and this is what you get with him.

The Eisenhower book I find engaging enough as a memoir of the almost quaint old days of the American 60s. His grandson, David, who seems to be the primary author thus far (his wife, Richard Nixon's daughter Julie, is named as a co-author), comes across as a fairly undynamic and even priggish boy and man who seems to represent a considerable decline in the manliness department from his grandfather. I have more to say about this book, perhaps I will do an addendum to this post tomorrow....

Picture Gallery

Portrait of a Young Lady (so-called Anna Karenina) by Aleksei Mikhailovich Kolesov. 

Checking out the girls at a poetry reading in London. 

Portrait of genius

Eisenhower Memorial, Abilene, Kansas.

This person is a writer named Julie Bell. Most new writers seem to have to be attractive nowadays. 

Just some of the cuteness that was Julie Nixon (Eisenhower) in the 60s. I found the other writer-Julie when I was looking for her.