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  TODAY’S LITERARY BIRTHDAY: Walter Savage Landor. English writer and poet. (born 1775) His best known works were the prose “Imaginary Conversations”, and the poem “Rose Aylmer”, but the critical acclaim he received from contemporary poets and reviewers was not matched by public popularity. As remarkable as his work was, it was equaled by his rumbustious character and lively temperament. Imaginary Conversations is five volumes of imaginary conversations between personalities of classical Greece and Rome: poets and authors; statesmen and women; and fortunate and unfortunate individuals. Landor spent a lifetime quarreling with his father, neighbors, his wife, and any authorities at hand who offended him. Paradoxically, he won the friendship of literary men from Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Lamb to Charles Dickens and Robert Browning. As a poet, Walter Savage Landor was best known for his classic epigrams and idylls. He was a seriously emulative classicist and ...

  Peet developed many of his ideas from bedtime stories he had told his children. Much of the success Peet's stories have enjoyed is due to the memorable themes they contain: trying when there's not much obvious hope, not allowing taunting of others to prevent individual success, finding compromise in solutions and others. Unlike most other children's authors, Peet did not dumb down the vocabulary of his stories, but somehow managed to include enough context to make the meaning of difficult words obvious. All of his 36 books published by Houghton Mifflin Company remain actively in print. He joined Disney in 1937 and worked first on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And continued on most of the major animations that made a name for the Disney Studio. “Building Your Great Collection One Fine Book at a Time” Check us out at BlindHorseBooks.com

  DID YOU KNOW …… He claimed many of his ideas came from dreams; throughout his writing life he arranged to be awakened every 90 minutes during his sleep period so he could write down his dreams. In his early writing, van Vogt displayed a wild talent, creating stories of vivid imagery and sudden, dream-like twists of plot and perspective that found an appreciative audience in a genre trying to shake off its image of rockets and ray guns. Encouraged by editor John W Campbell, van Vogt brought his interest in psychology and language to traditional science-fiction themes such as alien contact, interstellar war, time travel and its paradoxes, immortality and the superhuman. He was always interested in the idea of all-encompassing systems of knowledge (akin to modern meta-systems)—the characters in his very first story used a system called "Nexialism" to analyze the alien's behavior, and he became interested in the general semantics of Alfred Korzybski. Van Vogt was profoundly...

  More than seventy years after her death, Virginia Woolf continues to be a source of inspiration, analysis, interest, and admiration. Emphasis on a small number of famous events in her lifetime has turned her into a mythological figure that, at times, may have little resemblance to the flesh-and-blood woman behind the brand. Did You know: In April 1935, Virginia and Leonard Woolf decided to drive through Germany as part of their annual holiday. Although they made light of the possible dangers of this endeavor, in Bonn they found the streets lined with Nazi supporters awaiting the arrival of Hermann Goering. Leonard would later recall that, for miles, he ‘drove between two lines of frenzied Germans’ who, at the sight of their pet monkey Mitz, delightedly shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ and ‘gave her (and secondarily Virginia and me) the Hitler salute with outstretched arm.’ Virginia, for her part, raised her hand and waved back. And a FUN FACT When Virginia and Leonard Woolf, who together r...

TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: Celebrating the Birthday of EDITH WHARTON (born in 1862) Edith Wharton was born into a tightly controlled society at a time when women were discouraged from achieving anything beyond a proper marriage. Wharton broke through these structures to become one of America’s greatest writers. Author of The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and The House of Mirth, she wrote over 40 books in 40 years, including authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel. She was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Edith Wharton continues to seem credible and contemporary 80 years after her death. One reason is the authenticity of her writing; she was a keen observer not just of society but of the human condition. Contemporary counterparts of her characters can be found in today’s literature because the qualities she imbu...

    TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: Birthday of Stendhal, 1783, One of the most original and complex French writers of the first half of the 19th century. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism, as is evident in the novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839). Stendhal is considered one of the foremost and earliest practitioners of the realistic form. Prior to Stendhal, most novelists used a highly exaggerated rated and melodramatic Romantic style, which lent itself well to romances and Gothic horror, but was inadequate for depicting the contemporary and increasingly urban world. Stendhal's writing style is realistic in the sense that offers a penetrating and almost scientific view of the thought processes of his characters, and his model would prove to be an exemplar for generations of novelists attempting to crea...

 TODAY’S LITERARY BIRTHDAY: Lord Byron, English Romantic poet. (born 1788) The most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable poet of the day. He created an immensely popular Romantic hero—defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt—for which, to many, he seemed the model. He is also a Romantic paradox: a leader of the era’s poetic revolution, he named Alexander Pope as his master; a worshiper of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality; a deist and freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of original sin; a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his works and deeds, giving money, time, energy, and finally his life to the Greek war of independence. Byron captivated the Western mind and heart as few writers have, stamping upon nineteenth-century letters, arts, politics, even clothing styles, his image and name as the embodiment of Romanticism.  A favorite stanza: (Childe Harold, Canto...

TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: Remembering Roger Nash Baldwin, American author and activist, co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union. (born 1884) Many of the ACLU's original landmark cases took place under his direction, including the Scopes Trial, the Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial, and its challenge to the ban on James Joyce's Ulysses.   Baldwin was a well-known pacifist and author. He began his career as a social worker and, over the course of a seven–decade career, became one of the foremost figures associated with the protection of civil rights. “Building Your Great Collection One Fine Book at a Time” BlindHorseBooks.com

TODAY’S LITERARY BIRTHDAY:  Joy Adamson, British author and naturalist.  A conservationist who pioneered the movement to preserve African wildlife. Her book, Born Free, describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa. During the course of his work, her husband, George Adamson shot and killed a lioness who charged him and another warden. Afterward, George realized she was protecting her cubs and took them home. The two larger cubs were given to a zoo in Rotterdam, but they kept the smallest and named her “Elsa”. The couple decided that they were going to attempt to release Elsa back into the wild, and they were successful. In fact, Elsa was the first lioness to be released successfully. She won international renown with her African wildlife books, especially the trilogy describing how the couple raised a lion cub, Elsa. In 1961 she founded the Elsa Wild Animal Appeal.  At age 69 she was murdered by a disgruntled employee in the Shaba Game Reserve in 1980. She was o...

  Did you know: ……….Poe was obsessed with cats, Edgar often wrote with a cat on his shoulder. He introduced the first recorded literary detective in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The detective character would lead to become the prototypical detective we know today.   He was early adopter of the genre of Science Fiction. In 1844, he published “The Balloon” in Sun Newspaper. He described a lighter than air balloon that transversed the Atlantic Ocean in three days. The accounts were so believable that the newspaper had to retract the story two days later. However untrue the story was, the Sun newspaper made a ton of money off the story, and they did not give Poe a cent. From then on, Poe hated the Sun newspaper. In “The Raven”, Poe originally wanted to use a parrot instead of a raven, but he thought it didn’t evoke the right tone. Edgar changed the writing and publishing world. Before Poe, writing was a noble profession where not many were able to make a living off of ...

  Diverting from Literary History today. Here is memory from long ago, I feel it’s worth the time to read today. Thanks for taking a moment to do so. Seven years-old and trapped with my mom at her workplace on a perfectly good morning on a teacher’s workday – what could be worse? First, for some reason we had no books or toys for me. Secondly, my mother was secretary for the president of Crozier Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania and in these hallowed halls no children were seen or heard. In compassion, but more likely to hide me, my mom placed me on a couch at the end of a large library/reading room.   From the untrustworthy memory and perception of a seven-year-old, the room was enormous, stretching past the distance as an eye could see. There were no interior walls. The appearance of several connected rooms was achieved by the placement of couches, chairs, and tables. Each area had its own entrance door, but once inside one could move freely from one ...