It’s been quite some time since I’ve bothered to write for the blog, partially through my busy work schedules, family commitments and in all honesty lack of interest…and I know I’m late as the news has been known for almost 12 hours now, however, it is with a heavy heart that I am compelled to write the following post.
William Peter Blatty, the author whose best-selling book The Exorcist was both a milestone in horror fiction and a turning point in his own career, died on Thursday in Bethesda, Md. He was 89. The cause was multiple myeloma, his wife, Julie Blatty, said.
The Exorcist, the story of a 12-year-old girl possessed by the Devil, was published in 1971 and sold more than 13 million copies. The movie version, made in 1973, starring Linda Blair and directed by Blatty’s longtime friend, William Friedkin, was a massive commercial success, breaking box-office records at many theaters and becoming the highest-grossing film to date for Warner Bros. studios. It earned Mr. Blatty, who wrote the screenplay, an Academy Award. (It was also the first horror movie nominated for the best-picture Oscar.)
The Exorcist marked a radical shift in Mr. Blatty’s career, which was already well established in another genre: He was one of Hollywood’s leading comedy writers having collaborated with the director Blake Edwards on the screenplays for four films, beginning in 1964 with A Shot in the Dark, the second movie (after The Pink Panther) starring Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau and, in some critics’ view, the best. His other Edwards films were the comedy What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966); the musical comedy-drama Darling Lili (1970); and Gunn (1967), based on the television detective series Peter Gunn. He also wrote the scripts for comedies starring Danny Kaye, Warren Beatty and Zero Mostel.
The phenomenal success of The Exorcist essentially signaled the end of Mr. Blatty’s comedy career, making him for all practical purposes the foremost writer in a new hybrid genre: theological horror. It was a mantle he was never entirely comfortable wearing.
When he declined his publisher’s entreaties for a sequel to The Exorcist and instead delivered an elegiac memoir about his mother, I’ll Tell Them I Remember You, published in 1973, Mr. Blatty felt the first cinch of the horror-writing straitjacket.
“My publisher took it because I wanted to do it,” he was quoted as saying in “Faces of Fear” (1985), a collection of interviews with horror writers by Douglas E. Winter. “But the bookstores were really hostile. The sad truth is that nobody wants me to write comedy,” he said in another interview. “ ‘The Exorcist’ not only ended that career; it expunged all memory of its existence.”
Mr. Blatty gave various accounts of what led him to try his hand at horror. He sometimes said the market for his comedy had waned in the late 1960s, and he was ready to move on. At other times, he said that his mother’s sudden death in 1967 had led to a renewed commitment to his Roman Catholic faith, and to a soul searching about life’s ultimate questions, including the presence of evil in the world.
In every account, he said the idea for The Exorcist was planted in 1949, when he was a student at the Jesuit-affiliated Georgetown University in Washington and read an account in The Washington Post of an exorcism under the headline “Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil’s Grip.” The incident, widely discussed at the time among Georgetown students and faculty members, came back to Mr. Blatty 20 years later as the basis for a book about something not getting much press in the fractured, murky landscape of late-1960s America: the battle between Good and Evil.
He began writing what he thought would be a modest-selling thriller about a girl, a demon and a pair of Catholic priests. About halfway through, he later said, he sensed he had something more. “I knew it was going to be a success,” he told People magazine. “I couldn’t wait to finish it and become famous.”
William Peter Blatty was born on Jan. 7, 1928, in Manhattan to Peter and Mary Blatty, immigrants from Lebanon. His father left home when he was 6, and his mother supported the two of them by selling quince jelly on the streets, yielding a wobbly income that precipitated 28 changes of address during a childhood he once described as “comfortably destitute.”
The church figured prominently in his life. His mother was a churchgoing Catholic, and he was educated at prominent Jesuit-run schools that admitted him on full scholarships: the Brooklyn Preparatory School, now closed, where he was the 1946 class valedictorian, and Georgetown, from which he graduated in 1950.
After serving in the Air Force, Mr. Blatty worked for the United States Information Agency in Beirut. He returned to the United States for a public relations job in Los Angeles, where he hoped to begin his career as a writer.
He had already published his first book — a memoir, “Which Way to Mecca, Jack?” — but was still working in public relations in 1961 when he appeared as a contestant on a TV Game show hosted by Groucho Marx. He and a fellow contestant won $10,000. His winnings freed him to quit his day job and become a full-time writer. He never had a regular job again.
Mr. Blatty lived in Bethesda. In addition to his wife, the former Julie Witbrodt, whom he married in 1983, he is survived by their son, Paul William Blatty; three daughters, Christine Charles, Mary Joanne Blatty and Jennifer Blatty; and two sons, Michael and William Peter Jr., from earlier marriages; seven grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Another son, Peter Vincent Blatty, died in 2006; his death was the subject of Mr. Blatty’s 2015 book, “Finding Peter.”
His work after The Exorcist included several more theologically themed works of horror, including The Ninth Configuration in 1978 (a reworking of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane,” from 1966) — and Legion in 1983. Both books were made into movies, directed as well as written by Mr. Blatty; the film version of Legion was released in 1990 as The Exorcist III.
Mr. Blatty became reconciled over the years to the overwhelming dominance The Exorcist — most recently adapted into a 2016 TV mini-series — would have on his reputation as a writer. (He also maintained a sense of humor about it, as reflected in the name of a comic novel about Hollywood he published in 1996: “Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing.”) He knew, he told several interviewers, that it would be what people remembered him for. But one thing bothered him.
Many moviegoers, including the president of Warner Bros., had interpreted the movie’s climax — in which the younger of the two priests (played by Jason Miller) goads the demon into leaving the girl to take up residence inside him instead, then jumps to his death — as a win for the demon.
That was not how Mr. Blatty meant it. For years he pleaded his case to Mr. Friedkin, a longtime friend. In 2000, Mr. Friedkin relented, issuing a re-edited director’s cut of the film that made the triumph of Good over Evil more explicit.
With the same purpose in mind, Mr. Blatty rewrote parts of the original book, even adding a chapter, for a 40th-anniversary edition of The Exorcist published in 2011. It was essential to him, he told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans in 2000, that people understand the point of The Exorcist: “That God exists and the universe itself will have a happy ending.”
January 14, 2017 | Categories: Biography: AUTHORS, Deaths, Uncategorized | Tags: Death, entertainment, exorcist, Film, Friedkin, Georgetown, Humour, literature, Washington | Leave a comment
Mike Mignola was born September 16, 1960 in Berkeley, California and grew up in nearby Oakland. His fascination with ghosts and monsters began at an early age (he doesn’t remember why) and reading Dracula at age 13 introduced him to Victorian literature and folklore from which he has never recovered.
In 1982, hoping to find a way to draw monsters for a living, he moved to New York City and began working for Marvel Comics—First as a (very terrible, according to the man himself) inker and then as an artist on comics like Rocket Raccoon, Alpha Flight, and The Hulk.
By the late 80’s he had begun to develop his signature style (Thin lines, clunky shapes and lots of black) and moved onto higher profile commercial projects like Cosmic Odyssey (1988) and Gotham by Gaslight (1989) for DC Comics, and the not so commercial Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (1990) for Marvel. In 1992 he drew the comic book adaptation of the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula for Topps Comics.
In 1993 Mike moved to Dark Horse comics and created Hellboy – A half-demon occult detective who may or may not be the Beast of the Apocalypse. While the first story line (Seed of Destruction 1994) was co-written by John Byrne, Mike has continued writing the series himself. There are, at this moment, 13 HELLBOY graphic novel collections (with more on the way), several spin-off titles (BPRD, Lobster Johnson, Abe Sapien and Witchfinder), 3 anthologies of prose stories, several novels, 2 animated films and 2 live action films staring Ron Perlman. Hellboy has earns numerous comic industry awards and is published in a great many countries.
Mike also created the award-winning comic book The Amazing Screw-On Head and has co-written two novels (Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire and Joe Golem and the Drowning City) with best selling author Christopher Golden.
Mike worked (very briefly) with Francis Ford Coppola on his film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), was a production designer on the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and was visual consultant to director Guillermo del Toro on Blade II (2002), Hellboy (2004) and Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (2008).
Mike considers The Magician and the Snake the best thing he has ever done. Though scripted and drawn by him the 6 page story was actually plotted by his daughter Katie (at the time 7 years old) and earned both of them Eisner Awards for best short story.
He lives somewhere in Southern California with his wife, daughter, a lot of books and a cat. He is one of the few comic artists that I buy work unseen based on his participation (the others are Berni Wrightson, Liberatore and Eric Powell) I suggest you purchase some of his work immediately.
September 16, 2014 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Abe Sapien, Action, Aliens, Art, Batman, Berkeley, Biography, Blockbuster, Bram Stoker's Dracula, California, Classic, Comic Book Movies, Controversial, Cult, Disturbing, Dracula, Festival, Franchise, Gore, Groot, Guillermo Del Toro, Hellboy, Horror, Icons, Images, Independent, Legend, Lobster Johnson, Marvel Comics, Mike Mignola, Possession, Post Apocalyptic, Sci-Fi, Scream Queens, Serial Killer, Suspense, The Walking Dead, Thriller, Vampires, Violence, Zombies | 1 Comment
René Goscinny (14 August 1926 – 5 November 1977) was an award-winning French comics editor and writer, who is best known for the comic-book Astérix, which he created with illustrator Albert Uderzo.
Goscinny was born in Paris in 1926, to a family of Jewish immigrants from Poland. The Gościnnys moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, two years after René’s birth, as Stanisław had obtained there. He spent a happy childhood in Buenos Aires, and studied in the French schools. He started drawing very early on, inspired by the illustrated stories which he enjoyed reading.
In December 1943, the year after he graduated from school, 17 year old Goscinny’s father died, forcing him to find a job. The next year, he got his first job, as an assistant accountant in a tire recovery factory, and when he was laid off the following year, he became a junior illustrator in an advertising agency.
Goscinny, along with his mother, left Argentina and went to New York in 1945, to join their uncle Boris. To avoid service in the US military, he travelled to France to join the French Army in 1946. He served at Aubagne, in the 141st Alpine Infantry Battalion. Promoted to senior corporal, he became the appointed illustrator of the regiment and drew illustrations and posters for the army.
The following year, he illustrated the book The Girl with The Eyes of Gold and returned to New York. By 1948, he started working in a small studio where he met and became friends with future Mad alumni Will Elder, Jack Davis and Harvey Kurtzman. Goscinny then became art director at Kunen Publishers where he wrote four books for children. Around this time he met Joseph Gillain, better known as Jijé, and Maurice de Bevere aka Morris, the cartoonist and author of the series Lucky Luke (which Goscinny would write from 1955 to his death in 1977).
Also, he met Georges Troisfontaines, chief of the World Press agency, who convinced Goscinny to return to Paris and work for his agency as the head of Paris office in 1951. Here, he met Albert Uderzo, with whom he started a longtime cooperation. They started out with some work for Bonnes Soirées, a female magazine for which Goscinny wrote Sylvie. Goscinny and Uderzo also launched the series Jehan Pistolet and Luc Junior in La Libre Junior.
In 1955, Goscinny, accompanied by Jean-Michel Charlier, Albert Uderzo and Jean Hébrad, founded the syndicate Edipress/Edifrance. The syndicate launched publications like Clairon for the factory union and Pistolin for a chocolate company. Goscinny and Uderzo cooperated on the series Bill Blanchartin Jeannot, Pistolet in Pistolin and Benjamin et Benjamine in the magazine of the same name. Under the pseudonym Agostini, Goscinny wrote Le Petit Nicolas for Jean-Jacques Sempé in Le Moustique and later Sud-Ouest and Pilote.
In 1956, Goscinny began a collaboration with the magazine Tintin. He worked on Signor Spaghetti, Monsieur Tric, Prudence Petitpas, Globul le Martien, Alphonse, Strapontin and Modeste et Pompon. An early creation with Uderzo, Oumpah-pah, was also adapted for serial publication inTintin from 1958-1962. In addition, Goscinny appeared in the magazines Paris-Flirt (Lili Manequin with Will) and Vaillant (Boniface et Anatole with Jordom, Pipsi with Godard).
In 1959, the Édifrance/Édipresse syndicate started the comics magazine Pilote. Goscinny became one of the most productive writers for the magazine. In the magazine’s first issue, he launched his most famous creation Astérix, with Uderzo. This series was an instant hit and is now known worldwide. Goscinny also restarted the series Le Petit Nicolas and Jehan Pistolet, now called Jehan Soupolet. Goscinny also began Jacquot le Mousse and Tromblon et Bottaclou with Godard.
The magazine was bought out in 1960, and Goscinny became editor-in-chief. He also began new series like Les Divagations de Monsieur Sait-Tout, La Potachologie Illustrée, Les Dingodossiers, and La Forêt de Chênebeau. He launched Calife Haroun El Poussah in Record, a series that was later continued in Pilote as Iznogoud.
Goscinny died at 51, in Paris of cardiac arrest on 5 November 1977, during a stress test at his doctor’s office. He was buried in the Jewish Cemetery of Nice. In accordance with his will, most of his money was transferred to the chief rabbinate of France.
August 14, 2013 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Action, Albert Uderzo, Art, Asterix, Asterix and Obelix, Asterix the Gaul, Biography, Classic, Comic Book Movies, Cult, Foreign, Franchise, French, Gaul, Icons, Images, Legend, Ompa-Pa, Violence | Leave a comment
John Barrett McInerney Jr. (born January 13, 1955) is an American author. His novels include Bright Lights Big City; Ransom; Story of My Life; Brightness Falls; and The Last of the Savages. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote the screenplay for the television film Gia, which starred Angelina Jolie. He was the wine columnist for House & Garden magazine, and his essays on wine have been collected in Bacchus & Me (2000) and A Hedonist in the Cellar (2006).
McInerney was born in Hartford, Connecticut, studied writing with Raymond Carver, and once worked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker. He achieved fame with his first published novel Bright Lights, Big City. Published in 1984, the novel was unique at the time for its depiction of cocaine culture in second-person narrative. The title is taken from a 1961 blues song by Jimmy Reed. The novel established McInerney’s reputation as part of a new generation of writers. Labelled the ‘literary brat pack’ in a 1987 article in the Village Voice, McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz were presented as the new face of literature: young, iconoclastic and fresh. Five novels followed in rapid succession: Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, The Last of the Savages and Model Behavior.
After the success of Bright Lights, Big City, publishers started looking for similar works about young people in urban settings. Ellis’s Less Than Zero, published in 1985, was promoted as following McInerney’s example. McInerney, Ellis and Janowitz were based in New York City and their lives there were regular literary themes, chronicled by New York media.
Ellis used McInerney’s character, Alison Poole (Story of My Life), in his novels American Psycho and Glamorama. McInerney revealed that the character of Alison Poole is based upon his former girlfriend, Rielle Hunter, then known as Lisa Druck. He described the character as “cocaine addled,” and “sexually voracious” but also treated her with some sympathy.
McInerney also has a cameo role in Ellis’s Lunar Park, attending the Halloween party Bret hosts at his house. It was later revealed that McInerney was not pleased with his representation in the novel. Throughout his career McInerney has struggled against the strong, almost indelible, image of himself as both the author and protagonist of Bright Lights, Big City.
His most recent novel is titled The Good Life, published in 2006, and since April 2010 he is a wine columnist for The Wall Street Journal. In 2009 he published a book of short stories which spanned his entire career entitled How It Ended which was named one of the 10 best books of the year by Janet Maslin of The New York Times.
January 13, 2013 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: A Hedonist in the Cellar (2006), Bacchus & Me (2000), Bret Easton Ellis, Bright Lights Big City, Brightness Falls, Model Behavior, Ransom, Story of My Life, Tama Janowitz, The Last of the Savages | Leave a comment
Charles Samuel “Chas” Addams (January 7, 1912 – September 29, 1988) was an American cartoonist known for his darkly humorous and macabre characters. Some of the recurring characters, who became known as The Addams Family, became the basis for two live-action television series, two animated TV series, three motion pictures and a Broadway musical.
Charles Samuel Addams was born in Westfield, New Jersey, the son of Grace and Charles Huy Addams. His father encouraged him to draw, and Addams did cartoons for the Westfield High School student literary magazine, Weathervane. He attended Colgate University in 1929 and 1930, and the University of Pennsylvania, where a fine-arts building on campus is named for him, in 1930 and 1931. In front of the building is a sculpture of the silhouettes of Addams Family characters. He then studied at the Grand Central School of Art in New York City in 1931 and 1932.
In 1933 he joined the layout department of True Detective magazine, where he had to retouch photos of corpses that appeared in the magazine’s stories to remove the blood from them. Addams complained that “A lot of those corpses were more interesting the way they were.”
His first drawing in The New Yorker ran on February 6, 1932 (a sketch of a window washer), and his cartoons ran regularly in the magazine from 1938, when he drew the first instance of what came to be called the Addams Family, until his death. He also created a syndicated comic strip, Out of This World, which ran in 1956. There are many collections of his work, including Drawn and Quartered (1942) and Monster Rally (1950),
During World War II, Addams served at the Signal Corps Photographic Centre in New York, where he made animated training films for the U.S. Army. In late 1942, he met his first wife, Barbara Jean Day, who purportedly resembled the cartoon Morticia Addams. The marriage ended eight years later.
He married his second wife, Barbara Barb (Estelle B. Barb), in 1954. A practicing lawyer, she “combined Morticia-like looks with diabolical legal scheming,” by which she wound up controlling the “Addams Family” television and movie franchises and persuaded her husband to give away other legal rights. They divorced in 1956.
The Addams Family television series began after David Levy, a television producer, approached Addams with an offer to create it with a little help from the humorist. All Addams had to do was give his characters names and more characteristics for the actors to use in portrayals. The series ran on ABC for two seasons, from 1964 to 1966.
Addams was “sociable and debonair,” and described by a biographer as “A well-dressed, courtly man with silvery back-combed hair and a gentle manner, he bore no resemblance to a fiend.” Figuratively a ladykiller, Addams squired celebrities such as Greta Garbo and Jacqueline Kennedy on social occasions.
Later, he married his third and last wife, Marilyn Matthews Miller, best known as “Tee” (1926–2002), in a pet cemetery. In 1985, the Addamses moved to Sagaponack, New York, where they named their estate “The Swamp.”
Addams drew more than 1,300 cartoons over the course of his life. Those that did not appear in The New Yorker were often in Collier’s and TV Guide. In 1961, Addams received, from the Mystery Writers of America, a Special Edgar Award for his body of work. His cartoons appeared in books, calendars and other merchandising. Dear Dead Days (1959) is not a collection of his cartoons (although it reprints a few from previous collections); it is a scrapbook-like compendium of vintage images (and occasional pieces of text) that appealed to Addams’s sense of the grotesque, including Victorian woodcuts, vintage medicine-show advertisements and a boyhood photograph of Francesco Lentini, who had three legs.
In 1946, Addams met science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury after having drawn an illustration for Mademoiselle magazine’s publication of Bradbury’s short story “Homecoming”, the first in a series of tales chronicling a family of Illinois vampires named the Elliotts. The pair became friends and planned to collaborate on a book of the Elliott Family’s complete history with Bradbury writing and Addams providing the illustrations, but it never materialized. Bradbury’s stories about the “Elliott Family” were anthologized in From the Dust Returned in October 2001, with a connecting narrative and an explanation of his work with Addams, and Addams’ 1946 Mademoiselle illustration used for the book’s cover jacket. Although Addams’ own characters were well-established by the time of their initial encounter, in a 2001 interview Bradbury states that “(Addams) went his way and created the Addams Family and I went my own way and created my family in this book.”
In the Alfred Hitchcock classic North by Northwest, Cary Grant references Charles Addams in the auction scene. Discovering Eve with Mr. Vandamm and Leonard, he says, “The three of you together. Now that’s a picture only Charles Addams could draw.” Hitchcock was a friend of Addams’, not surprising considering their shared macabre sense of humor, and owned two pieces of original Addams art.
Addams died September 29, 1988, at St. Clare’s Hospital and Health Centre in New York City, having suffered a heart attack while still in his car after parking it. An ambulance took him from his apartment to the hospital, where he died in the emergency room. As he had requested, a wake was held rather than a funeral; he had wished to be remembered as a “good cartoonist.” He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in the pet cemetery of his estate “The Swamp.”
For more extensive coverage visit the Charles Addams Foundation at www.charlesaddams.com
January 8, 2013 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Alfred Hitchcock, Dark Humor, Gomez, Gothic, Macabre, Morticia, Ray Bradbury, The Addams Family, Uncle Fester | Leave a comment
Shane Black (born December 16 1961) is an American actor, screenwriter and film director. He wrote the late 1980’s and early 1990’s action movie hit Lethal Weapon and made his directorial debut with the film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Shane Black was born and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Paul and Patricia Ann Black. His father was in the printing business. His family moved to to Fullerton, California during his sophomore year of high school, there he attended Sunny Hills High School.
He studied theatre at UCLA and graduated in 1983 with the intent to become an actor. While looking for a way to make some income as he struggled to find acting roles, his friend Fred Dekker encouraged Black to try his hand at screenwriting. Remembering what he learned from a dramatic writing class he took in college, he borrowed a typewriter and went to work on his first script. At age 23, Black wrote his second screenplay, Lethal Weapon, in six weeks. His agent David Greenblatt sold the screenplay in three days.
Black’s first acting role came in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Predator; since then he has acted in a further five films and in one television episode for the TV series Dark Justice. The majority of Black’s career is in screenwriting – he has written 10 produced scripts. He wrote the cult classic, The Monster Squad (1987), and was a co-writer of Lethal Weapon 2 released in 1989. Since then he made substantially more money as a screenwriter. He received $1.75 million for his screenplay The Last Boy Scout released in 1991, and $1 million for Last Action Hero released in 1993. At the height of his career he was the highest paid screenwriter in the Hollywood movie industry, making $4 million for penning The Long Kiss Goodnight.
He then had a long break, penning his next movie, and directorial debut, the excellent Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005). He has since written and is currently directing Iron Man 3, which is due out in Northern Summer 2013.
Black has admitted that many of the scripts he had written for other directors, although commanding a hefty sum, were rewritten to a point where they scarcely resembled his product. This is such a common experience in Hollywood that the Writers Guild of America, West conducts an arbitration system whereby the “multiple writers who contributed to a given screenplay contend for screen credit on the resulting film.” Black used the pseudonyms Harry Lime and Holly Martins, the names of two leading characters in the film The Third Man, for certain projects.
Black has a recognizable writing style where he often adds comments (referred to as “Shane Blackisms”) and jokes about the situations taking place in the story. He also occasionally directs comments at studio executives and certain script readers, sometimes to ensure that they are paying attention, and sometimes to just to ‘have a go’ at someone…
In 2009 he conducted an excellent interview with The Guardian newspaper in the UK where he gave a mini-masterclass in the art of writing action films. Read it HERE
December 16, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Action, Blockbuster, Comic Book Movies, Controversial, Franchise, Icons, Iron Man 3, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Lethal Weapon, Marvel, Predator, The Avengers, Thriller, Violence | Leave a comment
James Graham “J. G.” Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction. His best-known books are Crash (1973), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, and the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984), made into a film by Steven Spielberg, based on Ballard’s boyhood in the Shanghai International Settlement and internment by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War.
After the Pearl Harbour attack, the Japanese occupied the International Settlement. In early 1943 they began interning Allied civilians, and Ballard was sent to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre with his parents and younger sister. He spent over two years, the remainder of World War II, in the internment camp. His experiences there formed the basis of Empire of the Sun, although Ballard exercised considerable artistic licence in writing the book, notably removing his parents from the bulk of the story.
It is often supposed that Ballard’s exposure to the atrocities of war at an impressionable age explains the apocalyptic and violent nature of much of his fiction. Martin Amis wrote that Empire of the Sun “gives shape to what shaped him.” However, Ballard’s own account of the experience was more nuanced: “I don’t think you can go through the experience of war without one’s perceptions of the world being forever changed” But also: “I have—I won’t say happy—not unpleasant memories of the camp. […] I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on—but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!”
In 1946, after the end of the war, his mother returned to Britain with Ballard and his sister. They lived near Plymouth where he attended The Leys School in Cambridge. After a couple of years his mother and sister returned to China, rejoining Ballard’s father, leaving Ballard to live with his grandparents when not boarding at school. In 1949 he went on to study medicine at Kings College, Cambridge, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist.
At university, Ballard was writing avant-garde fiction heavily influenced by psychoanalysis and surrealist painters. At this time, he wanted to become a writer as well as pursue a medical career. In May 1951, when Ballard was in his second year at King’s, his short story “The Violent Noon”, won a crime story competition and was published in the student newspaper Varsity.
Encouraged by the publication of his story, Ballard abandoned his medical studies, and in 1952 he enrolled at Queen Mary University of London to read English Literature. Ballard then worked as a copywriter for an advertising agency and as an encyclopaedia salesman. He kept writing short fiction but found it impossible to get published.
In 1953 Ballard joined the Royal Air Force before leaving the following year to pursue writing. He made his science fiction debut in 1956 with two short stories, “Escapement” and “Prima Belladonna”, published in the December 1956 issues of New Worlds and Science Fantasy. The editor of New Worlds, Edward J. Carnell, would remain an important supporter of Ballard’s writing and would publish nearly all of his early stories.
In 1960 Ballard moved with his family to Shepperton in Surrey, where he wrote his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere, over a two-week holiday simply to gain a foothold as a professional writer, not intending it as a “serious novel”; in books published later, it is omitted from the list of his works. When it was successfully published in January 1962, he quit his job at magazine Chemistry and Industry, and from then on supported himself and his family as a writer. Later that year his second novel, The Drowned World.
In 1964 Ballard’s wife Mary died suddenly of pneumonia. After the profound shock of his wife’s death, Ballard began in 1965 to write the stories that became The Atrocity Exhibition, while continuing to produce stories within the science fiction genre.
The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) proved controversial – it was the subject of an obscenity trial, and in the United States, publisher Doubleday destroyed almost the entire print run before it was distributed – but it gained Ballard recognition as a literary writer. It remains one of his iconic works, and was filmed in 2001. Along with the book, he also produced a 75-hour installation for the ICA called The Assassination Weapon, the title of one of the book’s chapters, featuring a film about a deranged H-bomber pilot projected simultaneously on three screens to the sound of cars crashing.
Another chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition is titled “Crash!”, and in 1970 Ballard organised an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory, simply called “Crashed Cars”. The crashed vehicles were displayed without commentary, inspiring vitriolic responses and vandalism. In both the story and the art exhibition, Ballard explored the sexual potential of car crashes, a preoccupation which culminated in the novel Crash in 1973.
The main character of Crash is called James Ballard and lives in Shepperton (though other biographical details do not match the writer), and curiosity about the relationship between the character and his author gained fuel when Ballard suffered a serious automobile accident shortly after completing the novel. Regardless of real-life basis, Crash, like The Atrocity Exhibition, was also controversial upon publication. In 1996, the film adaptation by David Cronenberg was met by a tabloid uproar in the UK.
Although Ballard published several novels and short-story collections throughout the seventies and eighties, his breakthrough into the mainstream came only with Empire of the Sun in 1984. It became a best-seller and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It made Ballard known to a wider audience, although the books that followed failed to achieve the same degree of success. Ballard continued to write until the end of his life, and also contributed occasional journalism and criticism to the British press. Of his later novels, Super-Cannes (2000) was particularly well received. Ballard was offered a CBE in 2003, but refused, calling it “a Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy”.
Ballard was diagnosed with prostate cancer in June 2006, from which he died in London in April 2009. The last of his books published in his lifetime was the autobiography Miracles of Life, written after his diagnosis. His final published short story, “The Dying Fall”, appeared in the 1996 issue 106 of Interzone, a British sci-fi magazine. It was reproduced in The Guardian on 25 April 2009.
The literary distinctiveness of his work has given rise to the adjective “Ballardian”, defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.” In 2008, The Times included Ballard on its list of “The 50 greatest British Writers since 1945”.
November 15, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Awards, Biography, Classic, Controversial, Crash, Cult, David Cronenberg, Empire of the Sun, Icons, Sci-Fi, Steven Spielberg, Suspense, The Atrocity Exhibition, Thriller, Violence | 1 Comment
Herbert George “H. G.” Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing textbooks and rules for war games. Together with Jules Verne, Wells has been referred to as “The Father of Science Fiction”. His most notable science fiction works include The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Herbert George Wells was born at Atlas House, 46 High Street, Bromley, Kent, on 21 September 1866. He was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells (a former domestic gardener, and at the time a shopkeeper and professional cricketer) and his wife Sarah Neal.
A defining incident of young Wells’s life was an accident in 1874 that left him bedridden with a broken leg. To pass the time he started reading books from the local library, brought to him by his father. He soon became devoted to the other worlds and lives to which books gave him access; they also stimulated his desire to write.
Wells’s earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views.
Wells’s first non-fiction bestseller was Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1901). When originally serialised in a magazine it was subtitled, “An Experiment in Prophecy”, and is considered his most explicitly futuristic work. It offered the immediate political message of the privileged sections of society continuing to bar capable men from other classes from advancement until war would force a need to employ those most able, rather than the traditional upper classes, as leaders. Anticipating what the world would be like in the year 2000, the book is interesting both for its hits (trains and cars resulting in the dispersion of population from cities to suburbs; moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom; the defeat of German militarism, and the existence of a European Union) and its misses (he did not expect successful aircraft before 1950, and averred that “my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea”).
His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of “Journalist.” Most of his later novels were not science fiction. Some described lower-middle class life (Kipps: The History of Mr Polly), leading him to be touted as a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English Society as a whole. Wells also wrote abundantly about the “New Woman” and the Suffragettes (Ann Veronica).
In 1933 Wells predicted in The Shape of Things to Come that the world war he feared would begin January 1940, a prediction which ultimately came true just four months early, when the Second World War broke out in September 1939.
On 28 October 1940 Wells was interviewed by Orson Welles, who two years previously had performed an infamous radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, on KTSA radio in San Antonio, Texas. In the interview, Wells admitted his surprise at the widespread panic that resulted from the broadcast, but acknowledged his debt to Welles for increasing sales of one of his “more obscure” titles.
Wells died of unspecified causes on 13 August 1946 at his home at 13 Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, London, aged 79. Some reports also say he died of a heart attack at the flat of a friend in London. In 1941, Wells had stated that his epitaph should be: “I told you so. You damned fools.” He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 16 August 1946, his ashes scattered at sea. A commemorative blue plaque in his honour was installed at his home in Regent’s Park.
I feel totally unqualified to write at any length about the work of Wells, for more information, check out these various sites: for Wells’ BBC broadcasts HERE, bibliography and downloadable pdf HERE, and downloadable audio books HERE.
September 21, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: History, Island of Lost Souls, Jules Verne, literature, politics, science, Science Fiction, Stephen Spielberg, The Invisible man, The Island of Doctor Moreau., The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Things To Come | 3 Comments
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) — known as H. P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.
Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, in his family home at 194 (later 454) Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman of jewelry and precious metals, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft. In 1893, when Lovecraft was three, his father became acutely psychotic in a Chicago hotel room while on a business trip. The elder Lovecraft was taken back to Providence and placed in Butler Hospital, where he remained until his death in 1898.
Lovecraft was a prodigy, reciting poetry at the age of three and writing complete poems by six. His grandfather encouraged his reading, providing him with classics such as The Arabian Nights, and children’s versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. His grandfather also stirred the boy’s interest in the weird by telling him his own original tales of Gothic horror. Beginning in his early life, Lovecraft is believed to have suffered from night terrors, a rare parasomnia disorder; he believed himself to be assaulted at night by horrific “night gaunts.” Much of his later work is thought to have been directly inspired by these terrors.
Lovecraft wrote some fiction as a youth but, from 1908 until 1913, his output was primarily poetry. During that time, he lived a hermit’s existence, having almost no contact with anyone but his mother. This changed when he wrote a letter to The Argosy, a pulp magazine, complaining about the insipidness of the love stories of one of the publication’s popular writers, Fred Jackson. The ensuing debate in the magazine’s letters column caught the eye of Edward F. Dass, President of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), who invited Lovecraft to join them in 1914. The UAPA reinvigorated Lovecraft and incited him to contribute many poems and essays.
In 1917, at the prodding of correspondents, he returned to fiction with more polished stories, such as The Tomb and Dagon. The latter was his first professionally-published work, appearing in W. Paul Cook’s The Vagrant (November, 1919) and Weird Tales in 1923. Around that time, he began to build up a huge network of correspondents. His lengthy and frequent missives would make him one of the great letter writers of the century. Among his correspondents were Robert Bloch, and Robert E. Howard.
Lovecraft’s guiding aesthetic and philosophical principle was what he termed “cosmicism” or “cosmic horror”, the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally inimical to the interests of humankind. As such, his stories express a profound indifference to human beliefs and affairs. Lovecraft is best known for his Cthulhu Mythos story cycle and the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore.
For most of the 20th century, the definitive editions (specifically At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, The Dunwich Horror and Others, and The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions) of his prose fiction were published by Arkham House, a publisher originally started with the intent of publishing the work of Lovecraft, but which has since published a considerable amount of other literature as well. Penguin Classics has at present issued three volumes of Lovecraft’s works: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, and most recently The Dreams in the Witch Hose and Other Weird Stories. In 2005 the prestigious Library of America canonized Lovecraft with a volume of his stories edited by Peter Straub, and Random House’s Modern Library line have issued the “definitive edition” of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (also including Supernatural Horror in Literature).
Despite his best writing efforts, however, he grew ever poorer. He was forced to move to smaller and meaner lodgings with his surviving aunt. He was also deeply affected by his former correspondent Robert E. Howard’s suicide. In 1936, Lovecraft was diagnosed with cancer of the intestine, and he also suffered from malnutrition. He lived in constant pain until his death on March 15, 1937, in Providence.
Although Lovecraft’s readership was limited during his lifetime, his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century. According to Joyce Carol Oates, Lovecraft—as with Edgar Allan Poe in the 19th century—has exerted “an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction”. Stephen King called Lovecraft “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” King has even made it clear in his semi-autobiographical non-fiction book Danse Macabre that Lovecraft was responsible for King’s own fascination with horror and the macabre, and was the single largest figure to influence his fiction writing. His stories have also been adapted into plays, films and games.
For more extensive information on Lovecraft, visit the excellent H. P. Lovecraft Archive HERE.
August 20, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Cosmic Horror, Cthulhu, Dagon, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, H.P.Lovecraft, Psycho, Stephen King, The Argosy, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The Dreams in the Witch Hose and Other Weird Stories, The Dunwich Horror and Others, The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, The Tomb | 1 Comment
Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer. Best known for his novel Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts. Huxley spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.
I’ve only read Brave New World (1931) and The Devils of Loudun (1952). Brave New World (1931, published in 1932), is set in London, AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of futurology. Huxley answered this book with a reassessment in an essay, Brave New World Revisited (1958) and with his final work, a novel titled Island (1962).
The Devils of Loudun is a historical narrative of supposed demonic possession, religious fanaticism, sexual repression, and mass hysteria which occurred in 17th century France surrounding unexplained events that took place in the small town of Loudin; particularly on Roman Catholic priest Urbain Grandier and an entire convent of Ursuline Nuns, who allegedly became possessed by demons after Grandier made a pact with Satan. The events led to several public exorcisms and executions by burning. I must admit that I read this book after seeing the Ken Russell adaptation The Devils at a college cinema.
Aldous Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist, and he was latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. He is also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics. By the end of his life Huxley was widely recognized to be one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time and respected as an important researcher into visual communication and sight-related theories as well.
For much more in depth reading about Huxley, and especially Brave New World, check out these website: huxley.net and these videos on youtube.
July 27, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited, Island, Ken Russell, Satan, The Devils, The Devils of Loudin, Urbain Grandier, Ursuline Nuns | 4 Comments
Hubert “Cubby” Selby, Jr. (July 23, 1928 – April 26, 2004) was a 20th century American writer. His best-known novels are Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and Requiem for a Dream (1978). Both novels were later adapted into films within his lifetime.
Hubert Selby Jr. lived in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge. He attended various New York state school, including Stuyvesant High School. His childhood nickname, “Cubby,” stuck with him his entire life.
Selby dropped out of school, and at the age of 15, was able to persuade the recruiters to allow him to join the Merchant Marines, which his father had recently rejoined. In 1947, while at sea, Selby was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis; doctors predicted that he would live less than a year. For the next three and a half years, Selby was in and out of the Marine Hospital in New York for treatment.
Selby went through an experimental drug treatment, streptomycin, that later caused some severe complications. During an operation, surgeons removed several of Selby’s ribs in order to reach his lungs, one of his lungs collapsed, and doctors removed part of the other. The surgery saved Selby’s life, but left him with a year-long recuperation and chronic pulmonary problems for the rest of his life. The medical treatments also marked the beginning of Selby’s dependence on painkillers and heroin, an addiction that lasted for decades.
With no qualifications, no work experience aside from the Merchant Marine, and his poor health, Selby had trouble finding a job. He spent most of the time at home, raising his daughter while his wife worked in a department store.
For the next ten years, Selby remained bedridden and was frequently hospitalized with a variety of lung-related ailments. A childhood friend, writer Gilbert Sorrentino, encouraged Selby to write.
With no formal training, Selby used his raw language to narrate the bleak and violent world that was part of his youth. He stated, “I write, in part, by ear. I hear, as well as feel and see, what I am writing. I have always been enamoured with the music of the speech in New York.” In style, Selby also differed from other writers. He was not concerned with proper grammer, punctuation, or diction, although Selby’s work is internally consistent; he uses the same unorthodox techniques in most of his works.
Like Jack Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose”, Selby’s writing was often completed in a fast, stream of consciousness style, and to facilitate this he replaced his apostrophes with forward slashes “/” due to their closer proximity on his typewriter, thus allowing uninterrupted typing. He did not use quotation marks, and his dialogue might consist of a complete paragraph, with no denotion among alternating speakers. His prose was stripped down, bare and blunt.
His experience with longshoremen, the homeless, thugs, pimps, transvestites, prostitutes, homosexuals, addicts and the overall poverty-stricken community, was to become the subject matter for his work.
Selby started working on his first short story, “The Queen Is Dead”, in 1958. At the time, he worked on his fiction every night after his day work as a secretary, a gas station attendant, and a freelance copywriter. The short story evolved slowly for the next six years before it saw the light of publication.
In 1961, one of Selby’s short stories, “Tralala”, was published in a literary journal, The Provincetown Review. It also appeared in Black Mountain Review andNew Directions. With his unstructured style and coarse descriptions, Selby examined the seedy life (ridden with violence, theft and mediocre con-artistry) and the gang rape of a prostitute. He quickly drew negative attention from a number of critics. The editor was arrested for selling pornographic literature to a minor and the publication was used as evidence in an obscenity trial, but the case was later dismissed on appeal.
As Selby continued to work on his writing, Amiri Baraka, Selby’s longtime friend, encouraged Selby to contact Sterling Lord, who at the time was Jack Kerouac’s agent. In 1964, “Tralala”, “The Queen Is Dead” and four other loosely linked short stories appeared in Selby’s first novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn. The novel was accepted and published by Grove Press, which had already released works by William S. Burroughs.
The novel was praised by many, including Allen Ginsberg, who predicted that it would “explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.” But as with any controversial work, not everyone was happy. Because of the detailed depictions of homosexuality and drug addiction, as well as gang rape and other forms of human brutality and cruelty in the novel, it was prosecuted for obscenity in the U.K. in 1967. Anthony Burgess was among a number of writers who appeared as witnesses in defense of the novel.
In 1967, Selby moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in an attempt to escape his addictions. That same year, Selby met his future wife, Suzanne, and they married in 1969.
Even though all his work was written while he was sober, Selby continued to battle drug addiction. In 1967 his heroin addiction landed him in Los Angeles County jail, where he spent two months for heroin possession. After his release from jail, he kicked the habit and stayed clean of drugs and alcohol until his death. He even refused morphine on his deathbed, although he was in pain.
In 1971, Selby published his second novel, The Room. The novel received positive reviews. The Room was about a criminally insane man locked up in one room in a prison who reminisces about his disturbing past. Selby himself described The Room as “the most disturbing book ever written,” and he noted that he could not read it for decades after writing it.
Requiem for a Dream (1978), concerns four New Yorkers whose are all initially searching for the key to their dreams, only for their lives to spiral out of control as they succumb to their addictions.
His last published novel, The Willow Tree, was published in 1998. As bleak as his writing before, it follows the story of a young African American boy and his Hispanic girlfriend who are viciously attacked by a local gang… things get worse.
Selby continued to write short fiction, screenplays and teleplays, and his work appeared in many magazines, including Yugen, Black Mountain Review, Evergreen Review, Provincetown Review, Kulchur, New Directions Annual, Swank and Open City. For the last 20 years of his life, Selby also taught creative writing as an adjunct professor in the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California.
A film adaptation of Last Exit to Brooklyn, directed by Uli Edel, was made in 1989, while Selby’s 1978 novel Requiem for a Dream was made into a film by Darren Aronofsky in 2000. Brooklyn featured Selby himself in a brief cameo as a taxi driver; in Dream he appeared in a small role as a prison guard. Ellen Burstyn was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress for her role in the latter film. During the filming of Last Exit, a documentary was shot, following Selby and some friends around the neighborhood as they reminisced.
In the 1980s, Selby made the acquaintance of singer/writer Henry Rollins, who had long admired Selby’s works and publicly championed them. Rollins not only helped broaden Selby’s readership, but also arranged recording sessions and reading tours for Selby. Rollins issued original recordings through his own 2.13.61 publications, and distributed Selby’s other works.
During the last years of his life, Selby suffered from depression and fits of rage, but was always a caring father and grandfather. The last month of his life Selby spent in and out of the hospital. He died in Highland Park, Los Angeles, on April 26, 2004 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Selby was survived by his wife of 35 years, Suzanne; four children and 11 grandchildren.
July 25, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Allen Ginsberg, Darren Aronofsky, Henry Rollins, Heroin, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), Requiem for a Drea, Requiem for a Dream (1978), The Queen Is Dead, Tralala, Uli Edel | 1 Comment
The book for which Thompson gained most of his fame had its genesis during the research for Strange Rumblings in Aztlan, an exposé for Rolling Stone on the 1970 killing of the Mexican-American television journalist Rubén Salazar who had been shot in the head at close range with a tear gas canister fired by officers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department during the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War. One of Thompson’s sources for the story was Oscar Zeta Acosta, a prominent Mexican-American activist and attorney. Finding it difficult to talk in the racially tense atmosphere of Los Angeles, Thompson and Acosta decided to travel to Las Vegas, and take advantage of an assignment by Sports Illustrated to write a 250-word photograph caption on the Mint 400 motorcycle race held there.
What was to be a short caption quickly grew into something else entirely. Thompson first submitted to Sports Illustrated a manuscript of 2,500 words, which was, as he later wrote, “aggressively rejected.” Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner was said to have liked “the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively scheduled it for publication — which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it”, Thompson later wrote.
The result of the trip to Las Vegas became the 1971 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which first appeared in the November 1971 issues of Rolling Stone as a two-part series. It is written as a first-person account by a journalist named Raoul Duke on a trip to Las Vegas with Dr. Gonzo, his “300-pound Samoan attorney”, to cover a narcotics officers’ convention and the “fabulous Mint 400”. During the trip, Duke and his companion (always referred to as “my attorney”) become sidetracked by a search for the American Dream, with “…two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers […] and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls.”
The book was greeted with considerable critical acclaim, including being heralded by The New York Times as “by far the best book yet written on the decade of dope”. “The Vegas Book”, as Thompson referred to it, was a mainstream success and introduced his Gonzo journalism techniques to a wide public.
Within the next year, Thompson wrote extensively for Rolling Stone while covering the election campaigns of President Richard Nixon and his unsuccessful opponent, Senator George McGovern. The articles were soon combined and published as fear and Loathing on the campaign Trail ’72. Thompson was an early supporter of McGovern and wrote unflattering coverage of the rival campaigns in the increasingly widely read Rolling Stone.
Thompson was to provide Rolling Stone similar coverage for the 1976 Presidential Campaign and Jann Wenner then asked Thompson to travel to Vietnam to report on what appeared to be the closing of the Vietnam War.Both stories were pulled and Thompson’s story about the fall of Saigon would not be published in Rolling Stone until ten years later. These two incidents severely strained the relationship between the author and the magazine, and Thompson contributed far less to the publication in later years.
Despite publishing a novel and numerous newspaper and magazine articles, the majority of Thompson’s literary output after the late 1970s took the form of a 4-volume series of books called The Gonzo Papers. Beginning with The Great Shark Hunt in 1979 and ending with Better Than Sex in 1994, the series is largely a collection of rare newspaper and magazine pieces from the pre-gonzo period, along with almost all of his Rolling Stone short pieces, excerpts from the Fear and Loathing… books, and so on. He wrote for many publications, including Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, The San Juan Star, and Playboy. A collection of his articles for Rolling Stone was released in 2011 as Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writings of Hunter S. Thompson.
Thompson died at his “fortified compound” known as “Owl Farm” in Woody Creek, Colorado, at 5:42 p.m. on February 20, 2005, from a self-inflicted gun shot wound to the head. On August 20, 2005, in a private ceremony, Thompson’s ashes were fired from a cannon. The cannon was placed atop a 153-foot (47 m) tower of his own design, in the shape of a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button originally used in Hunter S. Thompson’s 1970 campaign for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado. Red, white, blue, and green fireworks were launched along with his ashes. According to his widow Anita, Thompson’s funeral was financed by actor Johnny Depp, a close friend of Thompson. Depp told the Associated Press, “All I’m doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true. I just want to send my pal out the way he wants to go out.”
The plans for this monument were initially drawn by Thompson and Steadman and were shown as part of an Omnibus program on the BBC entitled Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision (1978). It is included as a special feature on the second disc of the 2003 Criterion Collection DVD release of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, labeled on the DVD as Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood.
July 19, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966), Kentucky, Louisville, National Observer, Prince Jellyfish, ralph Steadman, Rolling Stone magazine, The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, The Rum Diary, Time Magazine | Leave a comment
After The Nation published the article (May 17, 1965), Thompson received several book offers and spent the next year living and riding with the Hell’s Angels. The relationship broke down when the bikers concluded that Thompson was exploiting them for his personal gain. The gang demanded a share of the profits from his writings and after an argument at a party Thompson ended up with a savage beating, or “stomping” as the Angels referred to it. Random House published the hard cover Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in 1966, and the fight between Thompson and the Angels was well-marketed. A reviewer for The New York Times praised it as an “angry, knowledgeable, fascinating and excitedly written book”, that shows the Hells Angels “not so much as dropouts from society but as total misfits, or unfits — emotionally, intellectually and educationally unfit to achieve the rewards, such as they are, that the contemporary social order offers.” The reviewer also praised Thompson as a “spirited, witty, observant and original writer; his prose crackles like motorcycle exhaust.”
Following the success of Hells Angels, Thompson was able to publish articles in a number of well-known magazines during the late 1960s, including The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Pageant, and Harper’s. In the Times Magazine article, published in 1967, entitled “The Hashbury is the Capital of the Hippies”, Thompson wrote in-depth about the Hippies of San Francisco, deriding a culture that began to lack the political convictions of the New Left and the artistic core of the Beats, instead becoming overrun with newcomers lacking any purpose other than obtaining drugs. It was an observation on the 1960’s counterculture that Thompson would further examine in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and other articles.
In early 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. According to Thompson’s letters and his later writings, at this time he planned to write a book called The Joint Chiefs about “the death of the American Dream.” He used a $6,000 advance from Random House to travel on the 1968 Presidential campaign trail and attend the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago for research purposes. From his hotel room in Chicago, Thompson watched the clashes between police and protesters, which he wrote had a great effect on his political views. The planned book was never finished, but the theme of the death of the American dream would be carried over into his later work, and the contract with Random House was eventually fulfilled with the 1972 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
By late 1967, Thompson and his family moved back to Colorado. In early 1969, Thompson finally received a $15,000 royalty check for the paperback sales of Hells Angels and used two-thirds of the money for a down payment on a modest home and property where he would live for the rest of his life. He named the house Owl Farm and often described it as his “fortified compound.”
In 1970, Thompson ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, as part of a group of citizens running for local offices on the “Freak Power” ticket. With polls showing him with a slight lead in a three-way race, Thompson appeared at Rolling Stone magazine headquarters in San Francisco with a six-pack of beer in hand and declared to editor Jann Wenner that he was about to be elected the next sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, and wished to write about the Freak Power movement. Thus, Thompson’s first article in Rolling Stone was published as The Battle of Aspen with the byline “By: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Candidate for Sheriff).” Despite the publicity, Thompson ended up narrowly losing the election.
Also in 1970, Thompson wrote an article entitled The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved for the short-lived new journalism magazine Scanlan’s Monthly. Although it was not widely read at the time, the article is the first of Thompson’s to use techniques of Gonzo journalism, a style he would later employ in almost every literary endeavor. The manic first-person subjectivity of the story was reportedly the result of sheer desperation; he was facing a looming deadline and started sending the magazine pages ripped out of his notebook. Ralph Steadman, who would later collaborate with Thompson on several projects, contributed expressionist pen-and-ink illustrations.
The first use of the word Gonzo to describe Thompson’s work is credited to the journalist Bill Cardoso. In 1970, Cardoso wrote to Thompson praising the “Kentucky Derby” piece in Scanlan’s Monthly as a breakthrough: “This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling.” Thompson took to the word right away, and according to illustrator Ralph Steadman said, “Okay, that’s what I do. Gonzo.”
Thompson’s first published use of the word Gonzo appears in a passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.”
July 18, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966), Kentucky, Louisville, National Observer, Prince Jellyfish, ralph Steadman, Rolling Stone magazine, The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, The Rum Diary, Time Magazine | Leave a comment
Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author. He first came to popular attention with the publication of Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966), although the work he remains best known for is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), which was first serialised in Rolling Stone magazine.
Thompson became a counter cultural figure as the creator of Gonzo journalism, an experimental style of reporting where reporters (him initially) involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. He had an inveterate hatred of Richard Nixon, who he claimed represented “that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character” and who he characterised in what many consider to be his best book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. He was known also for his lifelong use of alcohol and illegal drugs; his love of firearms and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism.
Thompson was born into a middle class family in Louisville, Kentucky. Interested in sports from a young age, Thompson joined Louisville’s Castlewood Athletic Club, and excelled in baseball. Thompson attended I. N. Bloom Elementary School, Highland Middle School, and Atherton High School, before transferring to Louisville Male High School in September 1952. Also in 1952, he was accepted as a member of the Athenaeum Literary Association, a school-sponsored literary and social club that had been founded at Male High in 1862.
As an Athenaeum member, Thompson contributed articles and helped edit the club’s The Spectator; but the group ejected Thompson in 1955, citing his legal problems. Charged as an accessory to robbery after being in a car with the robber, Thompson was sentenced to 60 days in Kentucky’s Jefferson County Jail. He served 31 days and, a week after his release, enlisted in the United States Air Force. Whilst he was in jail the school superintendent refused him permission to take his high school final examinations, and as a result he did not graduate.
While in the Air Force, Thompson had his first professional writing job as sports editor of the The Command Courier, where he covered the Eglin Eagles football team. Thompson was discharged from the Air Force in June 1958 as an Airman First Class, having been recommended for an early honorable discharge by his commanding officer. “In summary, this airman, although talented, will not be guided by policy”, Col. William S. Evans, chief of information services wrote to the Eglin personnel office. “Sometimes his rebel and superior attitude seems to rub off on other airmen staff members.” In a mock press release Thompson wrote about the end of his duty, he claimed to have been issued a status of “totally unclassifiable”.
After the Air Force, he worked as sports editor for a newspaper in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania before relocating to New York City. There he attended the Columbia University School of General Studies part-time on the G.I. Bill, taking classes in creative writing. During this time he worked briefly for Time, as a copy boy for $51 a week. In 1959, Time fired him for insubordination.
In 1960 Thompson moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to take a job with the sporting magazine El Sportivo, which folded soon after his arrival. Thompson worked for the New York Herald Tribune and a few stateside papers on Caribbean issues. After returning to the States, Hunter hitchhiked across the United States along U.S. Hwy 43, eventually ending up in Big Sur, California working as a security guard. While there, he was able to publish his first magazine feature in the nationally distributed Rogue magazine on the culture of Big Sur. Thompson had a rocky tenure as caretaker of the hot springs, and the unwanted publicity generated from the article finally got him fired.
During this period, Thompson wrote two novels, Prince Jellyfish and The Rum Diary, and submitted many short stories to publishers with little success. The Rum Diary, which fictionalized Thompson’s experiences in Puerto Rico, was eventually published in 1998, long after Thompson had become famous.
He travelled and worked through Rio, Brazil; Aspen, Colorado before moving to Glen Ella, California, where Thompson continued to write for the National Observer on an array of domestic subjects, including a story about his 1964 visit to Ketchum, Idaho, in order to investigate the reasons for Ernest Hemingway’s suicide. Thompson then moved to San Francisco, immersing himself in the drug and hippie culture that was taking root in the area. About this time. he began writing for the Berkley underground paper The Spyder.
In 1965, Thompson wrote a story based on his experience with the California-based Hells Angels motorcycle club for The Nation.
July 18, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966), Kentucky, Louisville, National Observer, Prince Jellyfish, ralph Steadman, Rolling Stone magazine, The Rum Diary, The Spyder, Time Magazine | 1 Comment
William “Bill” Boyd Watterson II (born July 5, 1958) is an American cartoonist and the author of the legendary comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, which was syndicated from 1985 to 1995. Watterson stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes at the end of 1995 with a short statement to newspaper editors and his readers that he felt he had achieved all he could in the medium. Watterson is known for his views on licensing and comic syndication, as well as for his reclusive nature.
Watterson was born in Washington, D.C., before the family moved to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, when he was 6 years old. Watterson, drew his first cartoon at the age of eight, occupying his time with drawing and cartooning. This continued throughout his primary and secondary schooling years when he drew cartoons for the school newspaper and yearbook. During this time he discovered comic strips like Pogo, Krazy Kat, and Charles Schultz’ Peanuts which subsequently inspired and influenced his desire to become a professional cartoonist.
From 1976 to 1980, Watterson attended Kenyon College and completed a degree in political science, all the while developing his artistic skills and contributing cartoons for the college newspaper. Many of the cartoons and pieces of artwork Watterson created at Kenyon can now be found online. These comics were the original “Spaceman Spiff” cartoons.
Later, when Watterson was coming up with names for the characters of his comic strip, he decided upon Calvin (after the Protestant reformer John Calvin) and Hobbes (after the social philosopher Thomas Hobbes) as a “tip of the hat” to the political science department at Kenyon, though since he has never directly cited this inspiration publicly, although in “The Complete Calvin And Hobbes,” Watterson does not explicitly name the inspiration for Calvin’s character, he does state that Calvin is named for “a 16th-century theologian who believed in predestination.”
In 1980, Watterson graduated from Kenyon with a B.A. in political science. Immediately, The Cincinnati Post offered him a job drawing political cartoons for a six-month trial period. During the early years of his career he produced several drawings and additional contributions for Target: The Political Cartoon Quarterly. He designed grocery advertisements for four years prior to creating Calvin and Hobbes.
Watterson has said he works for personal fulfillment. As he told the graduating class of 1990 at Kenyon College, “It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves.” Calvin and Hobbes was first published on November 18, 1985.
Like many artists, Watterson incorporated elements of his life, interests, beliefs and values into his work—for example, his hobby as a cyclist, memories of his own father’s speeches about ‘building character’, and his views on merchandising and corporations. Watterson’s cat, Sprite, very much inspired the personality and physical features of Hobbes.
Watterson spent much of his career trying to change the climate of newspaper comics. He believed that the artistic value of comics was being undermined, and that the space they occupied in newspapers continually decreased, subject to arbitrary whims of shortsighted publishers. Watterson battled against pressure from publishers to merchandise his work, something he felt would cheapen his comic. He refused to merchandise his creations on the grounds that displaying Calvin and Hobbes images on commercially sold mugs, stickers and T-shirts would devalue the characters and their personalities.
Watterson was awarded the National Cartoonists Society’s Humor Comic Strip Award in 1988 and the society’s Reuben Award in 1986; he was the youngest person ever to receive the latter award. In 1988, Watterson received the Reuben Award a second time. He was nominated a third time in 1992.
Watterson announced the end of Calvin and Hobbes on November 9, 1995, with the following letter to newspaper editors:
Dear Reader:
I will be stopping Calvin and Hobbes at the end of the year. This was not a recent or an easy decision, and I leave with some sadness. My interests have shifted, however, and I believe I’ve done what I can do within the constraints of daily deadlines and small panels. I am eager to work at a more thoughtful pace, with fewer artistic compromises. I have not yet decided on future projects, but my relationship with Universal Press Syndicate will continue.
That so many newspapers would carry Calvin and Hobbes is an honor I’ll long be proud of, and I’ve greatly appreciated your support and indulgence over the last decade. Drawing this comic strip has been a privilege and a pleasure, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity.
Sincerely,
Bill Watterson
The last strip of Calvin and Hobbes was published on December 31, 1995. Since the conclusion of Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson has taken up painting, at one point drawing landscapes of the woods with his father.
In early 2010, Watterson was interviewed by The Plain Dealer on the 15th anniversary of the end of Calvin and Hobbes. Explaining his decision to discontinue the strip, he said:
This isn’t as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of ten years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say. It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, ten, or twenty years, the people now “grieving” for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them. I think some of the reason Calvin and Hobbes still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it. I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.
July 5, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes, Chagrin Falls, Kenyon College, Krazy Kat, National Cartoonists Society, Ohio, Peanuts, Pogo, The Cincinnati Post | 6 Comments
Maurice Bernard Sendak (June 10, 1928 – May 8, 2012) was an American writer and illustrator of children’s literature. He was best known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, first published in 1963.
Sendak was born in Brooklyn, to Polish Jewish immigrant parents Sadie and Philip Sendak. Sendak described his childhood as a “terrible situation” because of his extended family’s dying in The Holocaust, which he says exposed him at an early age to death and the concept of mortality. His love of books began at an early age when he developed health problems and was confined to his bed. He decided to become an illustrator after watching Walt Disney’s film Fantasia (1940), at the age of twelve.
One of his first professional commissions was to create window displays for the toy store F.A.O. Schwarz. His illustrations were first published in 1947 in a textbook titled Atomics for the Millions by Dr. Maxwell Leigh Eidinoff. He spent much of the 1950s illustrating children’s books written by others before beginning to write his own stories. His older brother Jack Sendak also became an author of children’s books, two of which were illustrated by Maurice in the 1950s.
Sendak gained international acclaim after writing and illustrating Where the Wild Things Are. The book tells the story of Max, who one evening plays around his home making “mischief” in a wolf costume. As punishment, his mother sends him to bed without supper. In his room, a mysterious, wild forest and sea grows out of his imagination, and Max sails to the land of the Wild Things. The Wild Things are fearsome-looking monsters, but Max proves to be the fiercest, conquering them by “staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once”, and he is made “the king of all wild things”, dancing with the monsters in a “wild rumpus”. However, he soon finds himself lonely and homesick and returns home to his bedroom where he finds his supper waiting for him, still hot. The book’s depictions of fanged monsters concerned some parents when it was first published, as his characters were somewhat grotesque in appearance.
The story was supposed to be that of a child who, after a tantrum, is punished in his room and decides to escape to the place that gives the book its title, the “land of wild horses”. Shortly before starting the illustrations, Sendak realized he did not know how to draw horses and, at the suggestion of his editor, changed the wild horses to the more ambiguous “Wild Things”, a term inspired by the Yiddish expression “Vilde chaya”, used to indicate boisterous children. He replaced the horses with caricatures of his aunts and uncles, whom he had spent much time creating in his youth as an escape from their chaotic weekly visits to his family’s Brooklyn home.
In 1983, the Walt Disney Studio conducted a series of CGI tests created by Glen Keane and John Lassiter using as their subject Where the Wild Things Are. The live-action film version was directed by Spike Jonze, and was released on October 16, 2009. Sendak was one of the producers for the film.
Sendak died in the morning of May 8, 2012, in Danbury, Connecticut, from complications of a stroke. In its obituary, The New York Times called Sendak “the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century.” Author Neil Gaiman remarked, “He was unique, grumpy, brilliant, gay, wise, magical and made the world better by creating art in it.”
June 10, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Animation, Author, Childrens Literature, illustration, Maurice Sendak, Movie Adaptation, Spike Jonze, Where the Wild Things Are | Leave a comment
Aaron Sorkin (born June 9, 1961) is an award winning American screenwriter, producer, and playwright, whose works include A Few Good Men, The West Wing, The Social Network, and Moneyball.
After graduating from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Musical Theatre in 1983, Sorkin spent much of the 1980s in New York as a struggling, sporadically employed actor. He found his passion in writing plays, and quickly established himself as a promising young playwright. His stage play A Few Good Men caught the attention of Hollywood producer David Brown, who bought the film rights before the play even premiered.
Castle Rock Entertainment hired Sorkin to adapt A Few Good Men for the big screen. The film, directed by Rob Reiner, became a box office success. Sorkin spent the early 1990s writing two other screenplays at Castle Rock, Malice and The American President. In the mid-1990s he worked as a script doctor on films such as Bulworth. In 1998 his television career began when he created the comedy series Sportsnight for the ABC network. The second season of Sports Night was its last and in 1999 overlapped with the debut of Sorkin’s next TV series, the political drama The West Wing, this time for the NBC network. The West Wing won multiple Emmy Awards, and continued for three more seasons after he left the show at the end of its fourth season in 2003. He returned to television in 2006 with the dramedy Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, about the backstage drama at a late-night sketch comedy show, once again for the NBC network. While Sorkin’s return was met with high expectations and a lot of early online buzz before Studio 60′s premiere, NBC did not renew it after its first season in which it suffered from low ratings and mixed reception in the press and on the Internet.
Sorkin’s next jaunt back into film occurred when he was commissioned by Universal to adapt 60 Minutes producer George Crile’s nonfiction book Charlie Wilson’s War for Tom Hanks’ production company. Charlie Wilson’s War is about the colorful Texas congressman who funded the CIA’s secret war against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Sorkin completed the screenplay and the film was released in 2007 starring Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, directed by Mike Nichols.
In August 2008, Sorkin announced that he had agreed to write a script for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was founded. The film, directed by David Fincher, The Social Network, based on Ben Mezrich’s novel The Accidental Billionaires, was released on October 1, 2010. Sorkin won the Academy, BAFTA and Golden Globe Awards for The Social Network. One year later, Sorkin received nominations for the same awards for co-writing the screenplay to the Brad Pitt film Moneyball.
Sorkin’s trademark is rapid-fire dialogue and extended monologues of characters engaged in “walk and talk”. These sequences consist of single tracking shots of long duration involving multiple characters engaging in conversation as they move through the set; he has characters enter and exit the conversation as the shot continues without any cuts. It’s since been copied by almost everyone over the last few years.
June 9, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: A Few Good Men, Charlie Wilson's War, Facebook, Moneyball, Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Accidental Billionaires, The American President, The Social Network, The West Wing | Leave a comment
Joseph Hillstrom King (born June 4, 1972), better known by the pen name Joe Hill, is an American author and comic book writer. He has published two novels – Heart Shaped Box and Horns, and a collection of short stories entitled 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the author of the excellent comic book series Locke & Key. Hill’s parents are authors Stephen and Tabitha King.
At age 9, Hill appeared in the 1982 film Creepshow, directed by George A. Romero, which co-starred and was written by his father.
Hill chose to use an abbreviated form of his given name (a reference to executed labor leader Joe Hill, for whom he was named) in 1997, out of a desire to succeed based solely on his own merits rather than as the son of Stephen King. After achieving a degree of independent success, Hill publicly confirmed his identity in 2007 after an article the previous year in Variety broke his cover.
Hill’s first book, the limited edition collection 20th Century Ghosts (published in 2005 by PS Printing), showcases fourteen of his short stories and won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection, together with the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection and Best Short Story for “Best New Horror”.
When he began writing, King was well-aware of the inevitable comparisons that would arise between his own work and that of his father, Stephen, the world’s best-selling and, arguably, most-recognized living novelist. Stephen King had himself used a pen-name, Richard Bachman, after he had become well-established, explaining later in the short essay, “Why I was Bachman” that he felt he had to know whether he could “re-achieve” success as an author purely through the quality of his writing, as opposed to what perceived as the “brand” that had become established through his own name. Joseph King chose to take the same approach; although many readers (and most reviewers) are now aware of the connection, his fiction has been widely praised, and a number of critics have stressed their own objectivity and lack of preconceptions when reviewing his works.
Hill’s first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, was published in the U.S. on February 13, 2007 and in the UK in March 2007. The novel reached number 8 on the New York Times bestseller list on April 1, 2007. Hill’s second novel, Horns, was released on February 16, 2010.
Hill is also the author of Locke & Key, a comic book series published by IDW Publishing. The first issue, released on February 20, 2008, sold out of its initial publication run in one day. A collection of the series in limited form from Subterranean Press sold out within 24 hours of being announced.
The narrative of Locke & Key is structured in three acts, with each act consisting of two six-issue storylines. Act One’s first story arc, Welcome To Lovecraft, was a six-issue limited series. The first issue of Welcome To Lovecraft sold out in a single day, requiring a second printing to be done immediately. The second arc of Act One, entitled Head Games, commenced with the release of the first issue on January 22, 2009. The actual Head Games story was printed in four issues, with a standalone prologue (“Intermission” or “The Joe Ridgeway Story”) and a standalone conclusion (“Army Of One”).
Act Two of the Locke & Key story consists of two limited, six-issue miniseries; the first storyline of Act Two, Crown of Shadows, began in the fall of 2009. The second storyline, Keys to the Kingdom, began in August 2010. The first storyline of Act Three was initially announced as Time & Tide, but is now titled Clockworks; this series has just completed it’s six-part series on May 16th, 2012.
June 4, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: 20th Century Ghosts, Fantasy, Head Games, Heart-Shaped Box, Horror, Locke & Key, Stephen King, Welcome to Lovecraft | 3 Comments
Poppy Z. Brite (born Melissa Ann Brite on May 25, 1967 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and now using the name Billy Martin in daily life) is an American author. Brite initially achieved notoriety in the gothic horror genre of literature in the early 1990s after publishing a string of successful novels and short story collections. Brite’s recent work has moved into the related genre of dark comedy, of which many are set in the New Orleans restaurant world. Brite’s novels are typically standalone books but may feature recurring characters from previous novels and short stories. Much of Brite’s work features openly bisexual and gay characters.
Brite is still primarily best known for writing gothic and horror novels and short stories. Brite’s trademarks have included using gay men as main characters, graphic sexual descriptions in the works, and an often wry treatment of gruesome events. Some of Brite’s better known novels include the exceptional debut novel Lost Souls (1992), Drawing Blood (originally titled Birdland) (1993), and the horrifically macabre Exquisite Corpse (1996); she has also released short fiction collections: Swamp Foetus (also published as Wormwood,1993), Are You Loathsome Tonight? (also published as Self-Made Man, 1998), Wrong Things (with Caitlin R. Kiernan, 2001), and The Devil You Know (2003). Brite’s “Calcutta: Lord of Nerves” was selected to represent the year 1992 in the story collection The Century’s Best Horror Fiction.
The vampires in Brite’s novel Lost Souls are quite dissimilar to those of traditional lore. Rather than being transformed humans, they are a separate species who are born vampires. While most feed on blood, some find alternative sustenance (e.g., love and beauty). There are also distinct differences between older and younger vampires. Older vampires have naturally sharp teeth, are sensitive to sunlight, and cannot eat or drink. Younger vampires have normal human teeth that must be filed, are insensitive to sunlight, and can both eat and drink. Brite’s vampires also seem to lack many supernatural powers beyond quick healing, heightened sense, and abnormal strength. They can be killed if the heart or brain is destroyed. Female vampires can also be killed by childbirth because vampiric infants kill their mothers in the womb.
In Exquisite Corpse, the third horror novel by Brite, the protagonist of the story is Andrew Compton, an English convicted homosexual serial killer, cannibal and necrophiliac… the book caused a minor stir when first released and has been compared unfavourably with the Bret Easton Ellis classic, American Psycho, but Brite’s novel is a different beast, less satire, more horror for those interested.
Brite has also written a biography of singer Courtney Love (1996) that was officially “unauthorized”, but Brite acknowledges that the work was done at Love’s suggestion and with her cooperation, including access to Love’s personal journal and letters.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s Brite moved away from horror fiction and gothic themes while still writing about gay characters. The critically acclaimed Liquor novels—Liquor (2004), Prime (2005), and Soul Kitchen (2006)—are dark comedies set in the New Orleans restaurant world.The Value of X (2002) depicts the beginning of the careers of the protagonists of the Liquor series. I haven’t read those, however I have read Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, Exquisite Corpse and her short story collections Swamp Foetus and Self-Made Man and if you like your horror gothic and erotic, these are great examples of that genre.
Brite is a transgender man and prefers to be referred to with male pronouns and terms. Brite has written and talked extensively about his gender dysphoria and gender identity issues. He self-identifies with gay males, and as of August 2010, has begun the process of gender reassignment.
May 25, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Drawing Blood, Erotica, Exquisite Corpse, Gothic Literature, Horror Novel, Lost Souls, New Orleans, Poppy Z. Brite, Self-Made Man, Vampire, Wormwood | 1 Comment
Georges Prosper Remi (22 May 1907 – 3 March 1983), known by the pen name Hergé, was a Belgian comics writer and artist. His best known and most substantial work is the 23 completed comic books in The Adventures of Tintin series, which he wrote and illustrated from 1929 until his death in 1983, although he was also responsible for other well-known comic book series such as Quick & Flupke (1930–1940) and Jo, Zette and Jocko (1936–1957).
Born into a middle-class family in Etterbeek, Brussels, he took a keen interest in Scouting in early life, something that would prove highly influential on his later work. Initially producing illustrations for Belgian Scouting magazines, in 1927 he began working for the conservative newspaper Le XXe Siècle, where he adopted the pen name “Hergé”, based upon the French pronunciation of “RG”, his initials reversed. It was here, in 1929, that he began serialising the first of the Adventures of Tintin, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.
Set during a largely realistic 20th century, the hero of the series is Tintin, a young Belgian reporter. He is aided in his adventures by his faithful fox terrier dog Snowy (Milou in the original French edition). Later, popular additions to the cast included the brash and cynical Captain Haddock, the highly intelligent but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (Professeur Tournesol) and other supporting characters such as the incompetent detectives Thompson and Thompson (Dupont et Dupond). Hergé himself features in several of the comics as a background character, as do his assistants in some instances.
The notable qualities of the Tintin stories include their vivid humanism, a realistic feel produced by meticulous and wide ranging research, and Hergé’s ligne claire drawing style. Adult readers enjoy the many satirical references to the history and politics of the 20th century. The Blue Lotus, for example, was inspired by the Mukden incident that resulted in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. King Ottokar’s Sceptre could be read against the background of Hitler’s Anschluss or in the context of the struggle between the Romanian Iron Guard and the King of Romania, Carol II; whilst later albums such as The Calculus Affair depict the Cold War.
The early Tintin adventures each took about a year to complete, after which they were released in book form by Le Petit Vingtième and, from 1934, by the Casterman publishing house. Hergé continued to revise these stories in subsequent editions, including a later conversion to colour.
Hergé is a prominent national hero in his native country, to the extent where he has been described as the actual “personification of Belgium”. The long-awaited Hergé Museum was opened in Louvain-La-Neuve on 2 June 2009. Designed by architect Christian de Portzamparc, the museum reflects Hergé’s huge corpus of work which has, until now, been sitting in studios and bank vaults.
His work remains a strong influence on comics, particularly in Europe. He was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2003.
Check out the official website HERE for more news, articles, images and of course, an online store.
May 22, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Belgium, Comic Book Hall of Fame, Georges Prosper Remi, Jo Zette and Jocko, National Hero, Quick & Flupke, Steven Spielberg, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, Tintin | Leave a comment
Terry Southern (1 May 1924 – 29 October 1995) was an American author, essayist, screenwriter and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style. Part of the Paris postwar literary movement in the 1950s and a companion to Beat writers in Greenwich Village, Southern was also at the center of Swinging London in the sixties and helped to change the style and substance of American films in the 1970s.
Southern’s dark and often absurdist style of satire helped to define the sensibilities of several generations of writers, readers, directors and film goers. He is credited by journalist Tom Wolfe as having invented New Journalism with the publication of “Twirling at Ole Miss” in Esquire in 1962, and his gift for writing memorable film dialogue was evident in Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid, Easy Rider, and The Magic Christian.
Born in Alvarado, Texas, Southern left to serve as a lieutenant in the US Army during World War II. He returned to the States to study at the University of Chicago and subsequently Northwestern University, where he graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1948. From there Southern lived in Paris for a four-year stint. His time there was a crucial formative influence, both on his development as a writer and on the evolution of his “hip” persona. During this period he made many important friendships and social contacts as he became a central figure in the expatriate American café society of the 1950s. He became close friends with Mason Hoffenberg (with whom he subsequently co-wrote the novel Candy), and leading French intellectuals Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus.
In 1953 Southern returned to the US and settled in Greenwich Village in New York City. As he had in Paris, Southern quickly became a prominent figure in the artistic scene that flourished in the village in the late 1950’s. Through Mason Hoffenberg, who made occasional visits from Paris, he was introduced to leading writers including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Southern returned to Europe in October 1956, for three years, living in Geneva, Switzerland. He made trips to Paris, where he visited Mason Hoffenberg, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and to London, where Southern met Henry Green and Kenneth Tynan.
After moving back to the US, Southern bought a rural retreat in East Canaan, Connecticut, close enough to New York to allow him to commute there. In the summer of 1962 Southern worked for two months as a relief editor at Esquire, and during this period he interviewed rising filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who had just completed his controversial adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita.
Southern’s life and career changed irrevocably on November 2, 1962, when he received a telegram inviting him to come to London to work on the screenplay of Kubrick’s new film, which was then in pre-production.
The major change Southern and Kubrick made was to recast the script as a black comedy. Kubrick, (author of the book on which the film was based Red Alert) Peter George, and Southern shared the screenplay credits, but competing claims about who contributed what led to confusion and some conflict between the three men after the film’s release. The credit question was further confused by Sellers’ numerous ab-libbed contributions—he would often improvise wildly on set, so Kubrick made sure that Sellers had as much camera ‘coverage’ as possible during his scenes, in order to capture these spontaneous inspirations.
His work on Dr Strangelove opened the doors to lucrative work as a screenwriter and script doctor. During the latter half of the 1960s Southern worked on the screenplays of a string of ‘cult’ films. His credits in this period include Tony Richardson’s The Loved One (1965), The Collector (1965), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Casino Royale (1967), Barbarella (1967), and Easy Rider (1968). His work on Easy Rider helped create the independent film movement of the 1970’s.
It is alleged that Southern introduced Stanley Kubrick to the Anthony Burgess novel, A Clockwork Orange, and encouraged Stanley Kubrick to make his film version of the book after MGM refused to back Kubrick’s planned film on Napoleon.
Southern, Peter Fonda, and Dennis Hopper met in New York City in November 1967 to develop their ideas for a road trip movie. These brainstorming sessions formed the basis of the Easy Rider screenplay that Southern then wrote from December 1967 to April 1968. On the basis of Southern’s treatment, Raybert Productions, agreed to finance the film with a budget of US$350,000 (in return for one-third of the profits), with Columbia Pictures agreeing to distribute the film.
Southern would eventually share the writing credit with Hopper and Fonda, but there has been dispute over their various contributions to the screenplay. Hopper and Fonda later tried to downplay Southern’s input, claiming that many sections of the film (such as the graveyard scene) had been improvised, whereas others involved in the production (including Southern himself) have asserted that most of these scenes were fully scripted and primarily written by him.
Southern’s pre-eminence waned rapidly in the 1970s—his screen credits decreased, his book and story output dwindled, and he acquired a reputation as an out-of-control substance abuser. He drank heavily and took various drugs, and his growing dependence on Dexamyl badly affected his health as he aged.
Throughout the 70’s and 80′ he took work as a lecturer of screenwriting at various universities, and continued to write, although nothing approaching the success of his 60’s output. On October 25, 1995, Southern collapsed on the steps of Dodge College at Columbia where he worked as a lecturer. He was taken to St Luke’s Hospital, where he died four days later, on October 29.
May 1, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Barbarella, Beat Generation, Casino Royale, Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, jean paul sartre, The Cincinnati Kid, The Loved One | 1 Comment
Nelle Harper E. Lee (born April 28, 1926) is an American author known for her 1960 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which deals with the issues of racism that were observed by the author as a child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.
Nelle Harper Lee, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee, was born and raised in Monroeville. Her mother’s maiden name was Finch. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who served in the Alabama State Legislature. As a child, Lee was a tomboy, a precocious reader, and best friends with her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote.
While enrolled at Monroe County High School, Lee developed an interest in English literature. After graduating in 1944, she went to the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery. Lee stood apart from the other students—she could not have cared less about fashion, makeup, or dating. Instead, she focused on her studies and on her writing. Transferring to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, Lee was known for being a loner and an individualist. Pursuing her interest in writing, Lee contributed to the school’s newspaper and its humor magazine, the Rammer Jammer, where she eventually became editor.
In her junior year, Lee was accepted into the university’s law school, which allowed students to work on law degrees while still undergraduates. The demands of her law studies forced her to leave her post as editor of the Rammer Jammer. After her first year in the law program, Lee began expressing to her family that writing—not the law—was her true calling. She went to Oxford University in England that summer as an exchange student. Returning to her law studies that fall, Lee dropped out after the first semester. She soon moved to New York City to pursue her hopes to become a writer.
In 1949, a 23-year-old Lee arrived in New York City. She struggled for several years, working as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines and for the British Overseas Air Corp (BOAC). While in the city, Lee was reunited with old friend Truman Capote, one of the literary rising stars of the time. She also befriended Broadway composer and lyricist Michael Brown and his wife, Joy. Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. The following month at the Browns’ East 50th townhouse, she received a gift of a year’s wages from them with a note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” She quit her job and devoted herself to her craft. Within a year, she had a first draft. Working with J. B. Lippincott & Co. editor Tay Hohoff, she completed To Kill a Mockingbird in the summer of 1959. Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate bestseller and won great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize fr Fiction in 1961. It remains a bestseller with more than 30 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted “Best Novel of the Century” in a poll by the Library Journal.
Despite being Lee’s only published book, it led to her being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom of the United States for her contribution to literature in 2007. Lee has also been the recipient of numerous honorary degrees but has always declined to make a speech.
Her other significant literary contribution was assisting her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood. If you haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird, you’re not qualified to class yourself as a reader; it’s the best American novel ever.
April 28, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Atticus Finch, Harper Lee, In Cold Blood, Legendary, Pulitzer Prize, Scout, To Kill a Mockingbird, Truman Capote | 6 Comments
Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”, both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus. Irving also served as the U.S. Ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846.
He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819. He continued to publish regularly—and almost always successfully—throughout his life, and completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death, at age 76, in Tarrytown, New York.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, was written while he was living in Birmingham, England, and first published in 1820. The story is set circa 1790 in the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town, in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow. It tells the story of Ichabod Crane, who is a lean, lanky, and extremely superstitious schoolmaster from Connecicut, who competes with Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, the town rowdy, for the hand of 18-year-old Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and sole child of a wealthy farmer, Baltus Van Tassel. As Crane leaves a party he attended at the Van Tassel home on an autumn night, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, who is supposedly the ghost of a Hessian trooper who had his head shot off by a stray cannonball during “some nameless battle” of the American Revolutionary War, and who “rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head”. Ichabod mysteriously disappears from town, leaving Katrina to marry Brom Bones, who was “to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related”. Although the nature of the Headless Horseman is left open to interpretation, the story implies that the Horseman was really Brom in disguise.
The story has been filmed in various guises over the years, but rarely as it was written. As usual with these things, Hollywood seems to think it knows better than best-selling authors.
Irving, along with James Fenimore Cooper, was among the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving encouraged American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving was also admired by some European writers, including Lord Byron and Charles Dickens, high praise indeed. As America’s first genuine internationally best-selling author, Irving advocated for writing as a legitimate profession, and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement.
On the evening of November 28, 1859, only eight months after completing the final volume of his Washington biography, Washington Irving died of a heart attack in his bedroom at Sunnyside at the age of 76. Legend has it that his last words were: “Well, I must arrange my pillows for another night. When will this end?” He was buried under a simple headstone at Sleepy Hollow cemetery on December 1, 1859.
April 3, 2012 | Categories: Biography, Biography: AUTHORS | Tags: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ichabod Crane, James Fenimore Cooper, Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon Gent | 1 Comment
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