Margaret Fuller packed more than a lifetime into her 40 short years

 What I mean by the Muse is that unimpeded clearness of the intuitive powers, which a perfectly truthful adherence to every admonition of the higher instincts would bring to a finely organized human being. It may appear as prophecy or as poesy. … and should these faculties have free play, I believe they will open new, deeper and purer sources of joyous inspiration than have as yet refreshed the earth.

Let us be wise, and not impede the soul. Let her work as she will. Let us have one creative energy, one incessant revelation. Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white.

Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1845

 

Margaret Fuller, born in 1810, has these "firsts" to her credit

• first full-time book reviewer in American journalism
• first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College
• first female foreign correspondent for a major newspaper in the U.S.

 

But that is just the beginning to understanding and appreciating this remarkable woman who thought far ahead of her time.

Margaret Fuller was as smart as any man around her. In an age when the educational and professional opportunities were limited, Fuller elbowed her way into the top intellectual circles of her day with a depth of knowledge and understanding could not match. Her personality could be grating. She was assertive in an age when women were supposed to be demure. She talked when most women would have stayed silent. She showed up in public places when most women would have stayed home.

She was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a family that valued education and had an extensive library. She had some periods of formal education at various schools, but in the main, her education was directed by her father and conducted by herself. By the time she was in her late 20s, her family had moved to Groton, Mass., her father had died, and her financial troubles -- which would plague her for the rest of her life -- had begun.

But she had begun an intellectual journey that would take her a long way in a very short time.

She had met Ralph Waldo Emerson and those who would become known as the Transcendentalists, America's first literary movement. In fact, she was so involved with them that they asked her to edit their publication, The Dial, and she did so, contributing a number of articles of her own. To sustain herself financially, she began teaching, and in 1839, she began a series of Conversations, seminars in which women were invited to discuss the status of females in modern society. During all of this time, she wrote extensively -- articles, essays, reviews, and books.

Fuller knew most of the major literary figures of the day including Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Edgar Allen Poe, who called her a "busy-body" when she intervened with him for a friend.

Her writing caught the attention of Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who invited in 1846 her to move to New York and become a columnist and reviewer. Before doing that, however, Greeley encouraged her to expand her writings on gender inequality into a book. She did so, and the book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, became a founding document of modern feminism. Her subsequent work at the Tribune as a reviewer and columnist greatly expanded her audience for her radical views on gender equality.

Those radical views included abolitionism (the freeing of slaves) and suffrage (the right of women to vote).

In August 1846, she sailed for Europe. She had been hired to tutor the son of a wealthy Quaker family, but she continued to write for Greeley's Tribune. As such, she became American journalism first female foreign correspondent. Her travels took her to Italy where she met and fell in love with Giovanni Ossoli, an Italian nobleman of no particular wealth or intellectual virtue. He was involved in the Roman revolution of the period, however, and Fuller sent dispatches about that movement to the Tribune, thus becoming American journalism's first female war correspondent.

Fuller and Ossoli had a son, but there is no record that they were ever married. In 1850, they returned to America on board a merchant ship. As it approached Fire Island, New York, the ship was caught in a violent hurricane. Fuller, Ossoli, and their son were killed, and their bodies were never recovered. A cobbled-together anthology of her works after her death was a best-seller in the 1850s until it was replaced at the top of the charts by Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Here's another sample of her writing:

We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man. Were this done, and a slight temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we should see crystallizations more pure and of more various beauty. We believe the divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former ages, and that no discordant collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres, would ensue.
Yet, then and only then will mankind be ripe for this, when inward and outward freedom for Woman as much as for Man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession.

Another first should be added to Margaret Fuller's list of credits at the beginning of this piece:

She was America's first female public intellectual. Her mind and her pen never stopped, and her life was too short.

***

Fuller's life has inspired several biographies, which are amply cited in a 2013 New Yorker article on Fuller's life by Judith Thurman: An Unfinished Woman | The New Yorker

Thanks to https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Fuller#Woman_in_the_Nineteenth_Century_.281845.29 for the quotations in this piece.

Lillian Ross, reporter and precursor of the 1960s New Journalism movement

Was she the mother of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s -- the movement that showcased the deep reporting of people like Truman Capote and Gay Talese?

Many people thought so.

Lillian Ross, who died Sept. 20, 2017, at the age of 99, was doing that kind of reporting and writing for the New Yorker magazine in the 1940s and 1950s and undoubtedly influenced a bevy of writers of her era.

Ross pioneered what some called "fly-on-the-wall" reporting, but she never liked that term. "A reporter doing a story can't pretend to be invisible, let alone a fly; he or she is seen and heard and responded to by the people he or she is writing about. A reporter is always chemically involved with a story." (This quote is from David Remnick's forward to Ross' book Reporting Always.)

Ross had the knack of finding the telling detail or the essential action that was necessary for a good story or a good character study. Her writing is easy to read, straightforward, absent of analysis or flourish. But stories like hers are not easy to write. They take time, thought, starts and stops, rewriting and reframing, and occasionally tears of frustration.

The New Yorker magazine gave her time, and then it gave her a forum on which to display her talents and her hard work and an audience to read what she produced.

She amply repaid both her magazine and her audience with stories about the rich and famous, stories about the poor and obscure, stories about New York and Hollywood, and people and places in between.

She was always a reporter who wrote about her subjects, not herself. Yet, she was there, a presence in everything she wrote.

In 1949 she reported on the Miss America contest for the magazine. The draft of her  story had the following lead paragraph:

There are thirteen million women in the United States between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. All of them were eligible to compete for the title of Miss American in the annual contest staged in Atlantic City last month if they were high-school graduates, were not and had never been married, and were not Negroes.

In this time before the modern Civil Rights movement began, it was a courageous and far-sighted statement. Harold Ross, the famous editor of the New Yorker, objected, arguing that the writer had injected her views into the story. Lillian Ross (no relation) insisted to her editor, William Shawn, that the paragraph be published unchanged. It was.

There are views, and there are facts. The facts spoke for themselves. Ross just gave them a voice.

In a 2015 profile of her, New York Times writer Michael Kaufman said:

Throughout her long career, Ms. Ross has been both praised and pilloried for her drive and for her survival skills; for being, as one former New Yorker editor put it recently, a very ambitious journalist of the wrong sex.

Journalism needs a few more reporters with the eye, the ear, the persistence, and the courage of Lillian Ross.

 

Source: Lillian Ross, Acclaimed Reporter for The New Yorker, Dies at 99 - The New York Times

Ross, Lillian. Reporting. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964.

Ross, Lillian. Here but Not Here: A Love Story. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1998.

Anne Bradstreet, Puritan wife and mother and America's first published poet

 Nay Masculines, you have thus taxt us long,

But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong,

Let such as say our Sex is void of Reason,

Know 'tis a Slander now, but once was Treason.

Those lines, written in Massachusetts Bay colony before 1650 and referring to Queen Elizabeth I, are a gentle but firm response to those who believed that women have inferior minds and have no place in the realms of literature. The poet was reminding her readers that within the lifetime of many of those who would eventually read it, they had honored and been ruled by . . . a woman.

The lines were written by the first American to become a published poet, Anne Bradstreet. Her collection of poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was published in London in 1650. Her volume of verse became wildly popular first in England and eventually in America, where, it was said, that every household that had any books at all -- and most of them in Puritan America at that time had book -- had a copy of Bradstreet's poems.

Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in 1612, the daughter of Thomas Dudley, in Northampton, England. Thomas Dudley was a Puritan and a steward for the Earl of Lincoln. She was tutored by her father in history, languages, politics, and a variety of other subjects. Dudley took great pride in his daughter's education and in her quick and absorbent mind. When she was 16, she married Simon Bradstreet, also a leader in the growing Puritan movement.

The Dudleys and Bradstreets moved from England to Massachusetts in 1630.

The move was a shock and a sacrifice for the families and particularly for Anne. She left a comfortable life in England to deal with the harsh climate and people of the frontier. During the next 15 years, they moved six times, from Salem to Boston to Charlestown (Cambridge) and finally settling in Andover Parish. Anne bore children all during these years, eventually having eight children in her brood. The Dudleys and Bradstreets were among the most prominent and wealthiest families in the colony, but life was not easy.

Encouraged by her father, Anne began to write poetry, and she became uncommonly good at it. She imitated the style of poets she had read, particularly Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, a poet in public favor at the time. Eventually, she developed a style of her own. Her encyclopedic learning gave the confidence to write about a wide range of subjects, from history to domestic life. Her insights were thoughtful and deep, but while questioning the events and circumstances she encountered, she never strayed from her role as a Puritan wife and mother.

 

Anne was mentored not only by her father but also by Nathaniel Ward, a well-known Puritan minister and elder statesman in the colony.

We don't know many of the details of Anne's domestic life or how or when she wrote her poems. The household with so many children must have been a busy one, and Anne probably did her writing early in the morning or late at night when the children were asleep and the house quiet. Her poems exhibit a wide knowledge of history and literature, so she also spent a good deal of time reading and thinking.

In 1647, Anne's brother-in-law, Rev. John Woodbridge, was sent to England to help negotiate a peace between King Charles I and Parliamentary forces aligned against him during the English Civil War. Woodbridge was another man in Anne's life who had read her poetry and had encouraged her to continue to write. Woodbridge carried her finished poems with him to London and found a publisher.

Throughout her writing career, Anne had downplayed her talent and humbled herself as merely a women trying her best -- feebly, she would claim -- to express her thoughts and feelings. She did this, at least in part, to deflect possible criticism, particularly within the Puritan community.

But the public, both Puritan and non-Puritan, responded to her writings, and her poems were well-received. Within a couple of years of the publication of her book, she had achieved the fame and recognition of her work that she had long sought.

Still, despite the book and its acceptance, the decade of the 1650s was not a happy one for her. She lost her beloved father and a grandchild, and she later fell into a long-term illness. The next decade, the 1660s, was a somewhat happier one. She recovered her health to some extent, and she continued to write. More importantly, she revised and corrected much of the work in the Ten Muses. In 1666 the Bradsteet's house in Andover burned, and some of her original work as lost.

After that, her health declined, and she died in 1672.

Despite her popularity and the longevity of her work, there are few physical places that mark her life. No statues of her are known to exist.

_____

More information about Anne Bradstreet and her poetry can be found at the following locations:

Wendy Martin, Queens College, Anne Bradstreet (The Poetry Foundation)

Charolette Gordon, Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America's First Poet

---

Anne Bradstreet's poetry

To My Dear and Loving Husband  

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay;

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,

That when we live no more, we may live ever.

You can read more of her poetry at this location.

 

 

Bat Masterson, gunslinger first but then first-class sports writer

 The world today knows him as one of the Old West's most famous gunslingers, fearless associate of the famous lawman Wyatt Earp.

But in 1921, the world knew Bat Masterson as a world-class sports writer for the New York Morning Telegraph and one of the foremost experts on the second most popular sport of the day, boxing. (Baseball was the most popular sport, and professional football was hardly thought about.)

Bat Masterson was indeed a gunfighter in Dodge City and elsewhere in the west during his younger days. He was also a buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, and scout for the U.S. Army. But that phase of his life was finished by the mid-1880s when he was in his thirties. Moving to Denver, he became a "sporting man" and gambler and developed himself as a leading authority on prizefighting, which was growing in popularity with the public and with newspaper sports writers.

Masterson was a personal friend of people such as Gentleman Jim Corbett, Jack Johnson, John L. Sullivan, and Jack Dempsey, all legends of the boxing ring. He attended just about every major fight of that era, and his expertise on the sport was unsurpassed.

In 1902 he moved to New York to become a sports reporter and columnist for the Morning Telegraph and did that until his death in 1921. On the way, he became a personal friend of President Theodore Roosevelt and accepted a federal appointment as a U.S. marshal from him. He died as his sports writing desk of a massive heart attack on Oct. 25, 1921. In the late 1950s, a television series loosely based on his life and starring Gene Barry was broadcast for several seasons.

He was writing a column when he died as his desk, and his final written words were 

“There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summer – and the poor get it in the winter.”  New-York Historical Society http://sports.nyhistory.org/bat-masterson/

Masterson's friend Damon Runyan named his lead character in Guys and Dolls Sky Masterson after the old gunfighter.

See also:

DeArment, Robert K. Gunfighter in Gotham: Bat Masterson's New York City Years. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2013.

 

The year Harrison Salisbury did not win the Pulitzer Prize

In 1967, when the Pulitzer Prizes were awarded, politics -- not merit -- kept Harrison Salisbury from winning the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

This week's announcement (see below) of the latest prizes brings this sad tale to mind.

Salisbury was a reporter and editor for the New York Times who already had one Pulitzer to his credit.

With the war in Vietnam building to a rage in 1966, Salisbury applied to North Vietnam to visit Hanoi and file reports from there. North Vietnam was at that time considered the enemy, and the U.S. was conducting a brutal bombing campaign against the country and particularly its cities.

The U.S. government, with Lyndon Johnson as president, assured the country that the bombs were hitting only military targets.

When Salisbury arrived in Hanoi in December and began filing his reports on Christmas Day, he told the American public quite a different story. The bombs were falling everywhere, and civilians and civilian targets were taking a beating. The bombing was not, as the administration liked to say, "surgical."

Salisbury reported what he saw and what he heard as people talked to him. His reports were full of descriptions and people and had the ring of authenticity. Many in America accused Salisbury of being stage-managed and manipulated.

Salisbury returned to the United States and may have wished he had stayed in Hanoi. He was subjected to scurrilous attacks from fellow journalists who were being supported by "leaks" from the Pentagon. The Pulitzer Prize jury voted to award Salisbury a Pulitzer that April, but it was overruled by an advisory board of mostly publishers. The award went to someone else, whom we don't remember.

We do remember Harrison Salisbury.

Yes, Virginia: the world's most beloved editorial

 

Virginia O'Hanlon was eight years old and wanted to know the truth.

Was there really a Santa Claus?

So where did she turn? The New York Sun, because "Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.' "

Virginia's inquiry was answered almost immediately in an unsigned editorial, written by Francis P. Church. The editorial became eternal with the phrase "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." It has been reprinted thousands of times in many forums; it was even made into a musical.

Oddly, none of this happened around Christmastime. Virginia wrote her letter in September 1897, and the editorial appeared on Sept. 21, 1897.

Church had been a correspondent during the Civil War and used the opportunity of Virginia's letter to explore articulate some of the optimism of the late 19th century.

 Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Virginia O'Hanlon lived until 1971, and her original letter has been preserved (see photo). Its authenticity has been verified by PBS's Antiques Roadshow.

The entire editorial follows:

"DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.

"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

 

"VIRGINIA O'HANLON.

"115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET."

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

A journalist needs something to write about: Richard Ben Cramer, Alex Rodriguez and the book that did not get written

 A journalist needs something to write about -- a subject worthy of the time and effort it takes to gather the information and put it into a suitable form.

Seems pretty obvious.

Sometimes, of course, stories just don't pan out. If you're working in daily journalism, a story like that is no big deal. It might mean a few hours lost and a few phone calls that go nowhere.

But, what if you've committed several months of your life and your big-time book publisher has advanced major bucks for your manuscript?

That's the story that is told several years ago in an excellent article in  Sports Illustrated, The Puzzle That Couldn't Be Solved by S.L. Price. (At this point, it takes a subscription to see it, so there's no link.) The subject is  Richard Ben Cramer, a journalist of distinctive style and stunning success (What It Takes: The Way to the White House; Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life; What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now: A Remembrance; Being Poppy: A Portrait of George Herbert Walker Bush, among others).

Cramer died in January 2013 of complications from lung cancer. He was 62 years old.

In 2006 Cramer sold both his publisher and his subject on a book about Alex Rodriguez, the star of the New York Yankees who was later banned for a year by Major League Baseball for taking banned substances. The book had the title, The Importance of Being Alex: A Life with the Yankees. He had a $550,000 advance from the Hachette Book Group. Rodriguez had agreed to cooperate fully. In fact, he welcomed Cramer into his entourage.

During the next year and a half, Cramer was all in with A-Rod and his crowd, spending hours and days traveling with him, talking with him, figuring out the relationships he had. It was a time when A-Rod was fulfilling most of the expectations that baseball fans had for him -- the expectation, in particular, of being one of the greatest baseball players ever.

But at some point, in Cramer's head, A-Rod began to evaporate.

He had hoped to give A-Rod "his size" as the apotheosis of postmodern stardom, but the deeper he dug the more he found, says one close friend, "nothing there. A completely vacuous person and a completely vacuous life." (quoted material from the Sports Illustrated article)

By 2010, after A-Rod admitted using performance enhancing drugs, not only was Cramer unable to find his larger-than-life story, but his subject had become loathsome.

It's a sad tale for all concerned. 

Cramer's story is not unique. 

Historian Edmund Morris encountered the same problem when he signed on to write the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan in 1985. At that time Morris had gained a good reputation of a biographer with his work on Theodore Roosevelt, and he had been courted by the Reaganites for some time. He was given special access to the White House and Reagan and his family. All were fully cooperative.

Reagan left office in 1989 and went into retirement. Morris continued to work with almost unlimited access to files in the Reagan Library.

The result of his efforts, finally, was Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.

Morris included all the standard biographical material, but he also created a fictional version of himself and placed it in the book. He resorted to this "literary device" because no one, including Reagan himself, understood the man. He had no close friends. He was not in the least curious about himself. And no one that Morris talked to "could ever figure him out." That would include Morris himself.

In reviewing the book, the New York Times referred to Reagan as "the hollow man."

Morris, who lacked Cramer's journalistic integrity, fell into fiction to try to explain a subject he couldn't locate. Here's what the Times review said:

Most journalists, historians and nonfiction writers will find this unacceptable. The fictional characters are not clearly identified as such; often they are unnecessary and distracting, particularly an obnoxious made-up son of the author who becomes a radical in the 1960's. Yet a reader who surrenders to Morris's self-indulgent blend of scholarship and imagination will be led through a riveting story to a transcendent conclusion with a surprise twist. If there is a ''higher truth'' justifying the book's technique, it is that Ronald Reagan lived in a world of his own fictions, far more extensive than the fictions of Edmund Morris. Who better suited to plumb a phantom subject than a phantom narrator? (quoted material from the New York Times review)

So, the lesson for journalists here is a cautionary one. Despite receiving the accolades of the world (in these instances baseball and politics), a subject might not be worth your time and talent.

Advice to young Tommy Wilson: load your sentences like a rifle, not a shotgun

 A Scott Berg's biography of Woodrow Wilson contains the following passage on the Rev. Joseph Wilson's advice to his son on how to form sentences:

"When you frame a sentence, don't do it as if you were loading a shotgun, but as if you were loading a rifle. Don't fire in such a way and with such a load that while you hit the thing you aim at you will hit a lot of things in the neighbourhood besides; but shoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone." (quoted material, page 36)

The reverend wasn't talking to his son, the future president, about writing; he was telling him how to speak.

But the advice applies marvelously to writing. Write your sentences as if they are rifles, aiming as a specific target, rather than shotguns aiming a the neighborhood. Write as if you purchase PA-10 rifles from Palmetto State Armory every single weekend—which is to say that you must brush up your vocabulary every now and then— and shoot [the words] at a specific subject.

How do you do that?

Here are a few thoughts:

Recognize the target. What are you trying to accomplish with this sentence? What are you saying? The subject and predicate should work together to accomplish your purpose.

Choose precisely the right words. Most words have a shade of meaning to them. That is, they may have synonyms, but those synonyms don't mean exactly the same thing. The good writer knows words and their synonyms but is sensitive to their meanings and how they are used. The good writer has a sense of how readers will interpret those words. Thinking hard about the words rewards writers with sentences that mean exactly what they are intended to mean.

Use only the words necessary. This gets to the heart of Joseph Wilson's advice. The truly confident writer is the one who will let as few words as possible stand for what he or she means to say. Showering the reader with unnecessary words is the shotgun approach. As Wilson says, you may hit the target, but you may hit a lot of other things too. Hitting a lot of targets will dilute the sentence's impact.

Let nothing distract. Our minds move from one subject to the next far more quickly than we can physically construct a sentence. While we are in the middle of writing a sentence, we may thing of other things to say, other pieces of information to include. The discipline of writing includes keeping our eye on the target. It's a discipline that can be acquired through practice.

Take the reader there. The reader will begin a sentence at a certain place. By the end of the sentence, you want the reader to be at another place. Take the reader there as quickly and efficiently as you can.

 Joseph Wilson's advice to his son is universal for those of use who love the language and want to use it well.

The deaths of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, foretold

 When Agatha Christie was living in London during World War II, she wasn't sure she was going to survive. The Blitz by the German air force had inflicted heavy damage on London's capital city, and thousands of people had died. Christie believed she might eventually be among them.

She was famous, and so were her characters, Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot. So, she did something odd.

She wrote a final book for each, one for each character, and in both books, the main character dies. Then Christie locked them away in a bank vault. One book was for her daughter; the other for her husband. In case she died during the Blitz,  each would have something of hers.

The books showed how much Christie has mastered her form and her characters. She did survive the war, of course, and she went on to write many more books about both Poirot and Marple. But she always knew how they would end.

Christie lived for more than 30 years after the war. Poirot lived for almost that long. His final mystery, Curtain, the one in which he dies, was published in 1975, about six months before Christie's death in January 1976. When the book was published, Poirot was given a front-page obituary in the New York Times -- the only obituary the Times has ever run of a literary character.

The final Jane Marple mystery, Sleeping Murder, came out a few months after Christie died.

John Singer Sargent: combat artist in World War I

 In 1918, John Singer Sargent, 62, was a world-renowned artist, a man famous for his vision, technique, and talent. He could easily have turned down the request from the British government that he go to France and to produce a piece of artwork that would commemorate the alliance between Britain and America that would eventually end The Great War, now known as World War I.

But Sargent did not turn it down. He went to war.

Sargent had already been deeply affected by the war. In March 1918, a favorite niece had been killed in France from German shelling while working as a nurse. Her husband had died on the front a few months before that.

Sargent's very public response to the war incorporated associations of his personal grief and loss. Months earlier, his beloved niece (and frequent model) Rose-Marie Ormond had been killed in the bombing of the church of Saint-Gervais in Paris on Good Friday. Only 24 years old at the time of her death, Rose-Marie had worked as a nurse treating blinded soldiers after her husband, Robert, died fighting for France in October 1914. Sargent likely associated the wounded soldiers in Gassed with her role in the war effort. Source: John Singer Sargent and World War I: Public Art and Personal Loss | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sargent spent several months at the front and found it deeply unsettling and unsatisfying as an artist. His commission was to paint a mural for a planned Imperial War Museum -- a painting that would show the cooperation of the British and American forces in 1918. Sargent tried to fulfill that mission, but there was little that he saw that inspired him.

The landscapes were bleak, and as he got closer to the front -- and the real drama of the war -- the fewer people he saw. Sargent produced a number of oils and watercolors of merit -- and he executed many sketches -- but he finally abandoned the idea of depicting American and British troops together in some sort of heroic pose.

What Sargent decided to show instead was the universal suffering that the war had caused. The subject presented itself in the form of victims of a gas attack toward the end of his stay in France. Gas had been used as a weapon throughout the war, and its effects were well known to the public. Toward the end of his stay at the front, Sargent visited a medic station where gas victims were gathering. There he saw soldier being led in -- unusually in groups of six -- by an ordering; each soldier had a had on the soldier in front of him to stay with the group.

The scene impressed Sargent, and he did a number of drawings and studies on the spot and later that day.

The result was Gassed, a large, classical frieze composition showing a line of blindfolded soldiers as they make their way through the chaos of wounded and dying soldiers. The landscape is bleak, without many features.

The painting now hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London, the work of the Great War's most famous combat artist.

 

John Pendleton Kennedy: Edgar Allan Poe's literary guardian angel

 John Pendleton Kennedy is a man who lived in the 1830s in Baltimore, and chances are, you have never heard of him. That's okay, but without Kennedy, who acted as a lifeline -- a literary guardian angel, if you will -- you might never have heard of Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe lived a scant 40 years (1809-1849), and for most of that time he was unwell, usually physically and sometimes mentally. He was also poverty-stricken, constantly asking friends and family for support and constantly unable to lift himself out of his penurious state. And he constantly complained about it.

His life, in other words, was not a happy one; it was, rather, a series of low points.

One of those low points was in 1834 when Poe found himself in Baltimore but, as usual, without money or means. Poe was trying to make a living with his writing and having little success. He had managed to win a prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter for his story "MS. Found in a Bottle." One of the editors of the publication was John P. Kennedy, who took an interest in the young writer and invited him to dinner.

Poe declined -- for the very good reason that he had nothing to wear. He had one dark suit that he wore for all occasions, and that was the extent of his wardrobe. When Kennedy found this out, he sent him clothing and expanded his invitation. Poe could come to his house and dine at any time. Kennedy, a man of means,  even lent Poe a horse so he could get around an exercise.

Kennedy took his kindness to another important level. He wrote Poe a letter of introduction to Thomas Willis White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia, and recommended that he accept Poe's articles. Poe sent White a story, which he promptly accepted. Thereupon, White and Poe entered a correspondence that so impressed White that he offered Poe a job as assistant editor of the journal in June 1835. Poe accepted and moved to Richmond.

Poe's time in Richmond was not altogether a happy period for him, but his job did give him the stability and support to continue his writing. He later credited Kennedy with saving his life.

Kennedy got involved in politics and carved out a distinguished career for himself. He served as both a representative and Senator in the U.S. Congress and as Secretary of the Navy under President Millard Filmore. He led the effort to end slavery in Maryland and was instrumental in founding some of Maryland's most important and longstanding institutions, such as St. Mary's College of Maryland, the Peabody Library and Conservatory of Music (now part of Johns Hopkins University).

While in Congress in the 1840s, Kennedy was a strong advocate for the U.S. government investing in the telegraph and his efforts led to a $30,00 grant for its development.

In addition to his political and public service pursuits, Kennedy was also a novelist. His most famous work is Horse-Shoe Robinson, published in 1835, which delighted Washington Irving so much that he read parts of it aloud to his friends. Kennedy had a wide circle of literary friends that included Irving, Poe, William Makepeace Thackeray, and James Fennimore Cooper.

This remarkable man has been largely forgotten, but a new biography by Andrew Black (John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman, and Ardent Nationalist) has been published by the LSU Press. Let's hope this gives him the attention he deserves.

Always wit, often wisdom, under a heavy cloud: Dorothy Parker

When they told her that the taciturn ex-President Calvin Coolidge was dead, she said, "How could they tell?"

Dorothy Parker never like the monicker or the reputation she had acquired as a "wisecracker," but that is indeed what she was. She was more, however. She was a poet, critic, screenwriter, and political activist, and as a writer she had a major impact on her time and place.

She was also a victim of alcoholism and depression and dealt with these conditions for most of her adult life. She made several attempts at suicide -- most of them thought to be half-hearted -- and went through many broken relationships. Her leftwing politics eventually got her blacklisted from Hollywood.

All the while, she continued to write and crack wise:

You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

 

Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses.

 

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.

 

I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money.

 

I hate writing, I love having written.

 

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

 

I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.

The fact was that Dorothy Parker was a good writer, maybe even a great one. She received two Academy nominations for her screenplays, and her poetry is still read and honored. She died in 1967, but she is not forgotten. (For more on Parker and other off-kilter writers, check out Andrew Shafer's Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors.)