Vonnegut's Last (Published) Story

Since Vonnegut's death in 2007, four volumes of unpublished work have been released, three of which are primarily or exclusively comprised of short stories.  Fans of Vonnegut know that his last published short story appeared in 1972 in the second installment of Harlan Ellison's genre-defining Dangerous Visions anthology series.  In his introduction to "The Big Space Fuck," Ellison claimed that it might be the last piece of fiction anyone would ever get from Vonnegut.  At the time, Vonnegut was working on Breakfast of Champions, but claimed he was abandoning the project. Many reviewers and fans took Breakfast of Champions, published in 1973, as Vonnegut's declaration of retirement.  While fans of Vonnegut know that he published seven more novels, and plenty of non-fiction, they also know that he never published another short story during his lifetime.

Except for "Merlin."

It was published in 1996, and appeared exclusively on the label of a specialty beer in Denver.  (Making Chipotle's cups a couple decades late to the party.)  This wouldn't be worth remarking on if it weren't for the fact that this was the only short story Vonnegut published for the last thirty-five years of his life.  The best background on the beer (called Kurt's Mile High Malt) comes from sports columnist Woody Paige's obituary of Vonnegut for the Denver Post.  The recipe is Vonnegut's grandfather's from before prohibition.  And while it seems the beer is being brewed again, there's no indication that new bottles/cans include the story.

As with the few other blog posts I've found about "Merlin," I'll end by requesting that anyone out there with the text of the story please send me a copy (or tell me where to find it).

Five of the Best Author/Director Cameos

#5: Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall

Probably one of the most famous film cameos for a writer, Marshall McLuhan's appearance in Annie Hall is still one of the great moments of film comedy.

#4: Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now

Coppola's appears briefly as a tv director during a battle scene. 

#3: Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Johnny Depp, as Thompson alter-ego Raoul Duke, drops enough acid to break down the fourth wall and see the real Thompson.

#2: Thomas Pynchon on The Simpsons

I was unfortunately unable to find any video of the appearance.  As far as cameos go, this is one of the most bizarre.  You have to remember that, until this point, there were no extant recordings of Pynchon.  Literally zero recordings of one of the most notable living American writers.  And then, in 2004, after nearly forty years of silence, he appears on the Simpsons.

#1: Kurt Vonnegut in Back to School

Back to School is a great 80s college movie starring Rodney Dangerfield and a before-he-was-famous Robert Downey Jr.  It also has one of the best used cameos I've ever seen.  (Also, I'm a huge Vonnegut fan, so I'm a little biased in my choice of #1.)

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons by Kurt Vonnegut

NOTE: The review of Allen Drury's Advise and Consent will run next Monday, at which point the bestseller reviews will resume their weekly update schedule.

I'm a pretty big Kurt Vonnegut fan.  I've written about him on my blog before.  I recently finished reading a collection of articles, essays, and speeches, titled Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974).  The title comes from his novel Cat's Cradle, specifically from the imaginary religion Bokononism.  If you didn't already know that, this collection isn't for you.  The collection contains five speeches, nineteen articles, and one short science fiction script.  While some are worth reading even if you've never read a page of Vonnegut before (especially "There's a Maniac Out There", Biafra: A People Betrayed, and In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself).  But many of the articles and speeches assume a knowledge of Vonnegut's work, history, and philosophy on life, or, at the very least, are weakened without it.

One of the great things about Vonnegut is that his works illuminate each other.  Though they often tread similar ground, they take different paths.  So, frequently when reading Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, I'll come across sections that illustrate or define a concept dealt with in one of Vonnegut's novels, often there will be long passages explicitly about the novels themselves and their backgrounds.  

One thing that surprised me about this collection was it's cynicism.  Don't get me wrong, I don't read Vonnegut when I'm looking for an uplifting, optimistic outlook.  But a couple of the pieces in the collection were very cynical, nihilistic even.

Overall, I'd recommend this book to fans of Kurt Vonnegut's other work, but I'd argue against this as an introduction to Kurt Vonnegut or even to his non-fiction specifically (for that, I'd recommend Palm Sunday (1981).

Overall Rating: 3.5 stars

Truman Capote and David Frost Talk About Sex, Love, and Friendship

I just finished reading Breakfast at Tiffany's (an excellent novella (and A Christmas Memory is one of the saddest stories I've ever read)), so I thought I'd find leave you all with a little Capote today.  

Some Ramblings on Borges, Calvino, and Barth

            I just finished reading if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino (tranlsated by William Weaver).  A great book, certainly, and one that I would have enjoyed in any circumstances, yet I was fortunate enough to, for no reason other than my own gratification, also be reading the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Andrew Hurley).  The effect is complementary.     

            In the introduction to his collection, The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), Borges writes: “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.  The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them… A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books.”   

            And so Calvino has wrote the openings to imaginary books, with their own contexts and authors and influences.  But what struck me was a line from Borges’ story, A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain, in which the narrator  states: “For those ‘writers manqués,’ whose name is legion, Quain wrote the eight stories of Statements.  Each of them prefigures, or promises, a good plot, which is then intentionally frustrated by the author.”      

            Not only is my reading of Calvino enriched by this, so too is my reading of Borges enriched by knowledge of its influence (or at least reflection) in Calvino’s novel.  Another connection that springs immediately to mind, tying the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges in 1941, to the Italian Italo Calvino in 1979, is the American John Barth in 1967, who states in his famous essay, The Literature of Exhaustion:  “I suppose the distinction is between things worth remarking and things worth doing.  ‘Somebody ought to make a novel with scenes that pop up, like the old children’s books,’ one says, with the implication that one isn’t going to bother doing it oneself.”     

            This essay (obviously including the majority of which not reproduced here) not only unites these two novels in a particular sense, that of suggestion and execution, but also connects them to that movement we call postmodernism, retroactively or in its future.  Which is all a really long way of getting to the fact that influence and interpretation work retroactively.  Borges himself said, in his essay Kafka and His Precursors: “the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem "Fears and Scruples" by Browning foretells Kafka's work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics' vocabulary, the word 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

Kurt Vonnegut couldn't write Kurt Vonnegut fan fiction

My thoughts on fan fiction are mixed.  There have been a few good examples of works directly based on extant fiction (e.g. Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Robert Coover's A Political Fable, John Gardner's Grendel), but these are almost always professional, talented writers using the existing worlds and characters to go in a new direction.  And, in the examples mentioned above, two are based on works no less than 400 years old, and the other uses a children's book character to emphasize satire.  Furthermore, these were artists who felt that the best way to say what they had to say was through these characters.

Amazon's concerns are purely monetary.  That's to be expected; it's a business.  Here's a quote from the L.A. Times article on the subject:    

"We've been very pleased with the success of the Kurt Vonnegut backlist on Kindle," said Donald C. Farber, a trustee of the Kurt Vonnegut Trust, in a statement. "With Kindle Worlds we have an opportunity to further his reach with today's readers." 

Referring to the protagonist of "Slaughterhouse-Five," Farber continued, "Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time, is going to quickly become a Kindle Worlds favorite."

Slaughterhouse-Five is on Modern Library and Time Magazine's lists of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.  This may sound silly to the people at Amazon, but Vonnegut's works are, quite frankly, art.  More than that, they have become a unique and important part of our literary heritage.  I'm not saying that his ideas or even his characters should never be used, but there is a difference between considering the merit of a submitted work and actively soliciting fan fiction.  Simply put, if it were good enough to find a publisher, it wouldn't be published through your fan fiction program.  If you write a story about Tralfamadorians and, after changing the name of their species and physical description, you can't sell that story to as SF magazine, it's not good enough to be published.      

In case you were wondering, here are the rules for the Vonnegut fan fiction project.  Pretty much anything the man ever wrote would be prohibited under these rules.    

One rule is: "We don’t accept offensive content, including but not limited to racial slurs, excessively graphic or violent material, or excessive use of foul language."

This is a man who has  a story called "The Big Space Fuck."  Breakfast of Champions  has a drawing of an asshole on page five.  From God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: "Now Eliot came out of the lavatory, all naked and hairy, drying himself with a tea towel... Eliot now began to play unconsciously with his pubic hair.  It was nothing extravagant.  He would simply uncoil a tight spring of it, let it snap back into place."    

Vonnegut's books have been burned because people have found the content offensive!  His novels frequently end with the protagonist committing suicide!  He routinely draws assholes in his books! And what counts as offensive content?  He writes about World War 2.  One of his novel's main characters is a Nazi propagandist.  Try that without risking offending anybody.  You've figured out how I feel about this, but maybe I should let Vonnegut speak for himself.   

From Palm Sunday (page 221):

"I did want to make the Americans in my book talk as Americans really do talk.  I wanted to make jokes about our bodies.  Why not? Why not, I ask again, especially since Riah Fagan Cox [his ex-mother-in-law], God rest her soul, assured me that she herself was not wobbled by dirty words.  

"If I had gone to Riah's friends...they would have insisted that the words should not be published anyway.  It was bad manners to use such words.  Bad manners should be punished.  

"But even when I was in grammar school, I suspected that warnings about words that nice people never used were in fact lessons in how to keep our mouths shut not just about our bodies, but about many, many things -- perhaps too many things."

Films Written by Famous Novelists

The relationship between cinema and literature is a complex give and take.  One thing I've learned from my project is that the two forms of media are inextricably linked.  So it comes as no surprise that novelists will sometimes write film scripts.  What does come as a surprise are the specific examples I've dug up.


#1 The Big Sleep                                                          

The Big Sleep is one of the most famous film noir movies ever made.  Starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the 1946 film is based on the 1939 novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler.  Set in Los Angeles, California, The Big Sleep (the book and movie) is largely responsible for defining the the hard-boiled crime novel.  So, who did the studios get to write it?  Chandler?  Dashiell Hammett? James Cain?

                                                   ...Written by William Faulkner

William Faulkner, known and acclaimed for his novels about the post-Civil War South.  While the subject matter may seem a surprising departure from Faulkner's usual area of interest, the complex (perhaps even convoluted) manner of storytelling is right up Faulkner's alley


#2 Pride and Prejudice                                               

The 1940 version of Jane Austen's 1813 novel of the same name, starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier is considered a masterpiece.  At the same time a love story and a criticism of the society she lived in, Austen's novel could draw any number of screenwriters.

                                                  ...Written by Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley, best known for Brave New World, seems an unlikely, if appropriate, choice for screenwriter.  The exaggeration stylistically inherent in romantic era literature leads people to forget that, like Huxley, Austen was a satirist.  And while people think of Huxley in terms of futurism, other novels of his (like Crome Yellow), are contemporary critiques on British society.  Huxley also wrote the screenplay for the 1943 version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine.

#3 Moby Dick                                              

There have only been a couple film versions of Melville's 1851 novel.  In fact, putting aside the Made-for-TV movies, only three film version have been theatrically released: the 1926 silent film, The Sea Beast, a 1930 version that is only very loosely connected to the novel, and the 1956 version starring Gregory Peck as Ahab.  Who would you get to write something like this?  Hemingway, maybe?  

                                                       ...Written by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, best known as a science fiction/fantasy writer, and author of works including Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, is not what anyone would expect for a project like this.  But hey, you can't argue with results.


#4 Sex and the Single Girl                                 

In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown published the non-fiction advice book, Sex and the Single Girl, advocating sexual freedom for women.  The 1964 film is a farce centering around Dr. Helen Gurley Brown (the fictional version having apparently earned a PhD.) played by Natalie Wood, also starring Tony Curtis, Henry Fonda, and Lauren Bacall.  So, a raunchy sex comedy (by 1960's standards).  Maybe Jacqueline Susann?  Sidney Sheldon won an Oscar for this kind of thing (1947's The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer).

                                                         ...Written by Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller!?  The man is famous for his gallows humor!  He wrote Catch-22, one of the finest novels of his generation.  That said, he didn't seem to get the same critical respect for the films he worked on.  Sex and the Single Girl was a financially successful critical failure.  As was 1967's Peter Seller's spy spoof, Casino Royale (for which Heller remained uncredited).  His only other screenplay, 1970's Dirty Dingus Magee, seems to have not really gained any traction.


#5 You Only Live Twice                              

Ninjas! Space Kidnappings! Evil Cat-Guy!  It's got the crazy over the top action of a Roger Moore Bond Movie, but the suavity of Sean Connery!  While a pretty serious departure from Ian Fleming's novel, it must have been written by some action/espionage writer, right?

                                                                  ...Written by Roald Dahl

The man who brought the world Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, and James and the Giant Peach, also brought us an awesome spy/action/adventure movie.  This isn't only time Dahl adapted one of Fleming's novels.  Ian Fleming wrote a novel titled Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car.  Roald Dahl added the Child Catcher, a villain who kidnaps the protagonists.  Just to reiterate, Ian Fleming wrote a novel about a magical flying car, and Roald Dahl added a diabolical villain.  Something seems backwards here.


#6 Superman and Superman 2                 

The two best Superman movies. Ah, Superman.  A character so morally unambiguous that a gritty reboot just can't cut it.  These two films have action, adventure, romance, and are a lot of fun.

                                                                 ...Written by Mario Puzo

Really? That Mario Puzo?  Someone, at some point actually said, "Hey, you know who would be great to right this light-hearted superhero movie?  The guy who wrote The Godfather."  I'm not arguing with the results, I'm just a bit surprised at how random this seems.

Public TV Interview with Ray Bradbury

1940: How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn

The Author:

            Richard Daffyd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd (1906-1983) was born in London, England to Welsh parents, a fact only discovered after his death.  Throughout his life, he claimed that he had been born in Pembrokeshire, Wales.  He was, for much of his life, considered one of the preeminent literary figures of Welsh culture.

            At the age of sixteen, he “was sent to Italy to learn hotel management” and “studied painting and sculpture in [his] spare time.”  While there, he worked with Italian filmmakers and was first introduced to the cinema.  After spending several years in the army, he got a job playing film extras, and was first introduced to professional writing as “a reporter on a penny film paper.”  In 1938, his first play (Poison Pen) was produced.  In 1939, he published his first novel, How Green Was My Valley, which became an international bestseller (and the subject of this post). 

            Llewellyn served with the Welsh Guards in World War Two.  He proceeded to have a long career in the arts, writing many novels, as well as several plays and screenplays.  He passed away in 1983. 

The Book: 

1st edition cover

         How Green Was My Valley tells the life story of Huw Morgan as he prepares to leave the Welsh valley where he'd lived much of his life.  Coming from a family of coal miners, Huw's family deals with the ramifications of a changing economy and way of life, as disaster, politics, and relationships slowly dismantle the Morgan family.

       As sad as that last paragraph sounded, the story is generally nostalgic, as Huw pines for a lost time when the world was simpler, or as the case may be, when the Welsh coal miners could go about their life without interference from the outside world.  The story is told through the lens of Huw's nostalgia, which gives it a tone of sadness and warmth throughout.

      There are certain peculiarities in style due to the Welsh background of the story.  There is a list of name pronunciations on the last page of the edition I used, explaining names like Meirddyn (Mire-rr-thin) and Cynlais (Kunn-lice).  Likewise, there are certain turns-of-phrase that I haven't seen elsewhere, e.g., "There is good were those nights..."  ("There is [adjective] is/were the [noun]" appears frequently throughout the novel.)

      Even with the foreign setting, How Green Was My Valley was an immediate success in the U.S.  Like The Grapes of Wrath, The Yearling, Gone with the Wind, and The Good Earth, How Green Was My Valley focuses on an idyllic vision of rural life, a vision that was shattered by the changing industry in America. But like Gone with the Wind, the 1941 movie (directed by Grapes of Wrath director John Ford), is largely responsible for most of the notoriety the books still maintains.

     How Green Was My Valley is an emotionally compelling story, and while it does deal with important social and political issues, those issues are less to the forefront than they are in Grapes of Wrath.  (e.g., unionization is important to the story primarily in how it causes a schism between members of the Morgan family).  It's a good read, but if you don't like heavy nostalgia, you might be better off with something else.

Also published in 1940:

Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls
Carson McCullers - The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Richard Wright - Native Son

Sources:
Kunitz, Stanley. Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company. 1942. Print.

Llewellyn, Richard. How Green Was My Valley. New York: Macmillan Company. 1940. Print.

BBC Website

  

1982 Round Table Discussion with Isaac Asimov, Gene Wolfe, and Harlan Ellison

A half-hour syndicated talk program, covering the nature and marketing of science-fiction (or speculative-fiction) works.   The hosts are named Studs Terkel and Calvin Trillin (which are not, in fact, porn pseudonyms).

A bit of interesting background to the interview can be found in the archives of Harlan Ellison's website. (Check the post for November 1, 2008 11:13:15)

Interview with Joseph Heller

An interview from the late 70s with from the Bill Boggs show, where he talks about Catch-22, Good as Gold, and the writing process.

Hunter S. Thompson and Conan O'Brien Drink Hard Liquor and Shoot Big Guns

As the over-long title of this post suggests, the following video includes Hunter S. Thompson in full-on over-the-top guns blazing insanity.

David Foster Wallace talking about Perfectionism

Check out this animated PBS interview with David Foster Wallace: 

The Shape of Stories

I'm a big Kurt Vonnegut fan.  Here's a little bit of a lecture he gave about the shape of stories:

50th Anniversary of La Planète des Singes

            Several modern classics were published fifty years ago.  1963 saw the publication of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Thomas Pynchon’s V.  It also saw the publication of a science fiction novel by the French author Pierre Boulle La Planète des Singes, released in England as Monkey Planet.  In the United States, the very underwhelming book cover deems calls the book Planet of the Apes.

           

            After looking at that book cover, some of you may be wondering why a science fiction author penned a war novel.  What you should be asking is why a former secret agent wrote a sci-fi novel.  During World War II, Boulle assumed a false identity and helped support resistance forces in Asia but was eventually captured by enemy forces.  Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï is only semi-fictional. 

            Not only did Boulle write two bestselling novels that were adapted into critically acclaimed films (both Planet and Bridge have been added to the National Film Registry), but Boulle won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Bridge on the River Kwai.  This is a particularly remarkable achievement when you take into account that Boulle did not know English.  The actual screenwriters, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, had been blacklisted in the Second Red Scare.  The Academy attributed the award to them in 1984.  

1926: The Private Life of Helen of Troy by John Erskine

Who?

John Erskine (1879 – 1951) was born in New York City. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1903 and honorary doctorates from nine other universities since then, in subjects ranging from music to education. He was an English professor at Amherst College then Columbia University. He was also a concert pianist, and the first president of the Julliard School of Music. Erskine’s literature program at Columbia is widely accepted to have been the groundwork for the “Great Books” movement.

So What's this book about?

       The Private Life of Helen of Troy takes place after the events in The Iliad, with Menelaus bringing Helen back to Sparta after sparing her life at the behest of Agamemnon.  Once home, they have to deal with their daughter Hermione’s potential engagement to Orestes, their maid Adraste’s relationship with Damastor, the son of a ‘good family,’ and scandal over Helen’s flight to Troy with Paris.  Other figures from Greek mythology play a part in the story, Achilles’s son, Pyrrhus, Clytemnestra, and Telemachus all have impact on the story.

Unfortunately, it turns into a particularly slow-paced domestic drama.  One thing I noticed when reading is that a vast majority of the book is dialogue, or rather, characters aiming monologues at each other.  Most of the characters seem to exist solely so Helen can explain her philosophies to them.  And in almost every scene where Helen is absent, other characters are discussing Helen’s philosophy.  While her ideas are interesting, they are expressed in a repetitive manner that causes the story to drag.

As far as the story itself goes, it seems like a soap opera, except all the back-stabbing and evil plotting goes on off-screen, or in the case of the novel, the characters are later told about it instead of actually seeing it done. (NOTE: I am aware that this was a common method of presenting action in ancient Greek drama.  Erskine does have a good knowledge of the Greeks, but the conventions of two-thousand year-old theater do not work too well in this novel.)  The problem I had with this novel is essentially the same problem I had with Sense and Sensibility: The characters’ ideologies are well explained at the beginning of the novel, so we know exactly what they’re going to say each of the hundred times they say it.

Why was it so popular?

John Erskine had a number of non-fiction and fiction books published prior to the publication of The Private Life of Helen of Troy, so he was not a newcomer to the publishing world.  As far as what made Helen popular, the protagonist’s philosophies are contradictory to the ‘traditional values’ of the time, without being too controversial. A combination of soap-opera drama and classical setting would garner a large audience.

Why haven't I heard of it?

The philosophies put forward in the novel are no longer controversial, rather they seem in many ways pretty standard in how they regard love, responsibility, honesty, etc.  Whereas an audience that is held captive by new ideas would be enthralled, a modern audience would probably just be bored.

Should I read it?
              No.  It isn't 'bad' so much as it is uninteresting.


Published in 1926:

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

The Castle - Franz Kafka

Winnie the Pooh - A. A. Milne



Sources: 


Erskine, John. The Private Life of Helen of Troy. 1925. New York: F. Ungar Publishing      Company. 1957. Print.

Kunitz, Stanley. Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern      Literature. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company. 1942. Print.



1925: Soundings by A. Hamilton Gibbs

Who?

            Arthur Hamilton Gibbs (1888 – 1964) was born in London.  He was the youngest of three brothers who all had successful careers in writing (his brothers were Cosmo Hamilton, whose success was mainly as a playwright, and Sir Philip Hamilton Gibbs, who was knighted in response to his reporting on the first world war).  Arthur served in World War One as an artillery officer in Egypt, France, and Serbia.  In 1919 he married Bostonian attorney Jeanette Phillips, and in 1920 moved permanently to the United States.  He became a naturalized American citizen soon after.

So what's this book about?         
         Soundings tells the story of Nancy Hawthorne, an artist’s daughter from a small town in England as she emerges into adulthood.  Her father, who has raised her to operate outside pointless convention, decides she should spend a year travelling abroad to discover herself.  In France, she befriends an American girl.  When the American girl’s brother and his roommate, Bob, come to visit, she falls in love with Bob. 

            The story is, by and large, pretty melodramatic.  This, among other aspects of the story, really undermines the themes of not shaming sexuality and overthrowing unfair conventions.  It’s this inconsistency that was my biggest problem with Soundings. It seems to revel in the conventions it criticizes. It's stuck half-way between a critique of society and a potboiler romance, but refuses to commit itself to either role.

Why was it so popular?
            Soundings is unconventional enough to be controversial, but inoffensive enough to be popular. It embraces some of the newly popular (at the time) ideas about women’s freedom and sexuality, without letting the characters benefit by it. 

Why haven't I heard of it? 
           The reasons I listed for its popularity above are the same reasons it can’t be popular now.  The ‘new ideas’ have become old ideas.  If the story were more about how society were enforcing these conventions on the protagonist, it may have held up better, but almost everyone she meets is supportive of her and her ideology. 

Should I read it?
          Not unless you really like romance novels.  Even taking into account the inconsistencies in the story's message(s), it is a decent, well-written, romance.  The criticisms of societal conventions are valid, but they are no longer as revolutionary as they once were.  There are certainly worse romance novels out there, but there are better, as well.

Also published in 1925:
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald  
The Trial  - Franz Kafka  
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf  
The Hollow Men - T. S. Eliot

Sources:  

Gibbs, A. Hamilton.  Soundings. Little Brown and Company. 1925. Print.

Kunitz, Stanley.  Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern       Literature. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company. 1942. Print.

1924: So Big by Edna Ferber

Who?

Edna Ferber (1885-1968) was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to a Jewish family.  In her childhood, her family moved across the Midwest.  After graduating high school, she briefly worked as a journalist for the Appleton Daily Crescent and the Milwaukee Journal.  Her writing career was strong, winning the Pulitzer Prize for So Big (1924) and was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, performers, and critics that met daily at the Algonquin hotel in New York which included the likes of Dorothy Parker and Harpo Marx. 

            Ferber never married nor had children.  Most reports of serious romantic relationships are based largely on speculation and rumor.  But she had a career that spanned over fifty years.  In 1931, her novel Cimarron (1929) became the fourth film to win an Oscar for best picture.  Giant (1952) is probably her best known work at present, due in no small part to the film version starring James Dean. 

So what's this book about?           

            So Big is titled after the protagonist’s son’s nickname.  The protagonist is Selina De Jong nee Peake, a young woman who goes to the Dutch faming community on the outskirts of Chicago as a schoolteacher.  Despite the culture shock, she soon falls for and marries the farmer Pervus De Jong.  When Pervus dies, Selina raises her son while taking over the farm.

            While the story as I’ve described it so far may not seem particularly special, Selina De Jong is an incredibly well-drawn character.  Her relationship with the town and, more importantly, her relationship with her son as a child and when he becomes a successful bond broker, is beautifully rendered. 
            So Big is as much a portrait of Dutch farming communities at the turn of the century as it is a record of how the world changed from the 1890s to the 1920s. 

Why was it so popular?

            So Big, like Main Street, and to one extent or another, many of the books so far on the list, deals with role of immigrants and the poor in society, and more specifically, the undeserved disdain they receive from those that are better off.  But not just anyone that is ‘better off.’  So Big isn’t taking a stance against wealth, but against wealth for the sake of wealth.  One of the novel’s supporting characters is a packing industry tycoon, one of the many of his kind that sprung into existence in the before the anti-trust laws dissolved their empires.  This character is shown favorably.  He built his company from the ground up and, as evidenced by his continued friendship with his low-level employees and personal affectations, has never forgotten where he came from.  His children and grandchildren are not represented as well and it is these characters (and those of their ilk) that are seen as being disdainful to the poor.

        Also, within the year of 1924, a silent film version was made featuring the extremely popular Colleen Moore.

If you wanted to see the film, you're out of luck.  It's considered a lost film, with only copies of the trailer existing.

           

Why haven't I heard of it?
           While the topic of poor migrant workers is as valid today as it was ninety years ago, the nature of the topic has changed.  We no longer have large numbers of immigrant independent small farm owners.  Additionally, the subject of “turn of the century Dutch immigrant farming community” does not sound interesting.

Should I read it?
          Yes.  Well-written with a good story, the best thing about So Big is the characters.  Even the bit characters are complex enough to dig into.  Even if you’re like me, and the subject is not an enticement, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.      

Also published in 1924:

The Land That Time Forgot - Edgar Rice Burroughs
Billy Budd, Sailor - Herman Melville

Sources:

Ferber, Edna. So Big. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & co. 1924.

Gilbert, Julie Goldsmith.  Ferber, a biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 1978.

1921: Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

Who?

            Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), better know as ‘Sinclair Lewis,’ was born in the village of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, which would later become the basis for Main Street.  In 1903, he began attending Yale University, taking time off in 1906 to join (as a janitor) Helicon Hall, a cooperative living community created and run by The Jungle novelist, Upton Sinclair.  He graduated from Yale in 1908, and lived briefly in New York and California before settling in Washington D.C.  He occasionally sold story plots to Jack London and in 1914 he married Grace Livingston Hegger.  In 1917, Sinclair and Grace had a son named Wells, who was killed in World War Two.  In 1925, Grace and Lewis divorced.  Lewis married Dorothy Thompson in 1928, and had another son, Michael.  The two divorced in 1942.

            Between 1912 and 1920, Lewis wrote several novels, none of which were very successful.  Main Street, published in 1920, became his first huge success, followed by Babbit (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), and Elmer Gantry (1927).    In 1930, Lewis became the first American author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.  In the following years, he wrote eleven more novels, none of which “equalled the success or stature of hischeifworks of the twenties.”  After his divorce from Thompson, Lewis lived mainly in Europe.  He had an ongoing problem with alcohol which was a major contributing factor in fatal heart attack.  He died in a clinic on the outskirts of Rome.

So what's this book about?

            Main Street tells the story of Carol Milford, an intelligent and idealistic librarian from Saint Paul, Minnesota.  She falls in love with small-town doctor, Will Kennicott, and agrees to marry and moves with him to his small hometown of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.  She plans to improve the town, but finds a town ensnared in pettiness, arrogance, and conceit.  The only people she can connect with are the poor immigrants, whom the elite of Gopher Prairie are dependent on and disdainful of.     

            This novel is a scathing satire of the American small town.  In Main Street, Lewis strips away the mythology of the kind and gentle Midwesterner and shows the crooked and self-involved power struggles within the town of Gopher Prairie and all those like it.  The protagonist tries to circumvent the web of jealousy and pride that makes up the town’s mentality, but finds this to be as much a part of the town as the dilapidated buildings. 

            The portrait Lewis paints of Gopher Prairie is exhaustive: in the sense of its completeness and in the sense of its frequently overwhelming, if not superfluous, detail.  Lewis’s prose leaves much to be desired.  Mark Schorer, in his painstakingly researched, tomeful biography Sinclair Lewis, an American Life, concludes that “He was one of the worst writers in modern American Literature, but without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature” (813).    I wouldn’t go so far as to use the superlative “worst,” but compared to the other ‘greats’ of early 20^th century American literature, Lewis is conspicuously lacking in style.  

Why was it so popular? 

           As opposed to the other novels so far reviewed, Main Street is incredibly critical of not only American mentalities but specifically rural America.  Whereas the others either  praised the rustic (e.g., The Eyes of the World, Zane Grey’s novels) or found fault in industrialization (e.g. The Inside of the Cup, The Turmoil), Lewis spends over four hundred pages pointing out the hypocrisy of middle America. 

            There are, of course, contemporary issues raised in the course of the novel.  Woman’s suffrage and the role of women in society was dealt with frequently, as was the role of immigrants and labor unions.  Consider that this was published in 1920, the year the United States ratified the 19^th amendment, guaranteeing the women’s right to vote.  This was also written and published at the height of the First Red Scare.  The federal government had been called out to violently end labor strikes.  Anti-immigrant and anti-anarchist sentiment was at a peak; the Immigration Act of 1918 gave the government the ability to deport any immigrants with anarchist connections or ideals.     

            To one extent or another, Main Street calls the American people out on all these issues. 

So why haven't I heard of it?

            It seems that some high schools do (or at least used to) have Main Street as compulsory reading.  Main Street is a slow book.  That isn’t to say the pacing drags, just that it requires a good amount of patience.  And, as I mentioned earlier, Lewis’s prose is not particularly elegant or forceful.  As a study of the small town mentality, currently as well as in the early 20^th century, Main Street is fantastic, but that may not be enough to get people to take the time and effort to read it.

Should I read it?

            Yes.  Despite my griping about the prose, the story is strong.  It presents a sometimes infuriating picture of small town politics and the social and economic challenges that grow from that, challenges that are still relevant today.

You can read Main Street on Project Gutenberg.  

Also published in 1921:    

John Galsworthy - To Let (last part of the Forsyte Saga)

George Moore - Heloise and Abelard

Sources:
     Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street. 1920. Mattituck, New York: Amereon House, 1948. Print.
     Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. Print.

              

1918: The U. P. Trail by Zane Grey

Who?
            Pearl Zane Grey (1872-1939) was born in Zanesville, Ohio, a city named after his maternal great-grandfather.  As an adult, he dropped his first name, and is still better known as Zane Grey. Even someone like me (whose entire knowledge of the Western genre comes from The Wild Bunch, the Coen brother’s True Grit, and Back to the Future: Part Three), considers Zane Grey synonymous with Westerns.  Grey grew up in Columbus, Ohio and attended the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship.  After graduation, he followed in his father’s footsteps and became a dentist, opening his practice in New York City.  With the help of his soon to be wife, Lina (better known as Dolly), Grey self-published his first novel, Betty Zane, in 1903.  He published eight more books before 1912, when he published his most famous and commercially successful book, Riders of the Purple Sage.  In all, he published over sixty books in his lifetime and more than thirty posthumously.

So what's this book about?
            The U. P. Trail takes place in the late 1860’s during the building of the Union Pacific Railroad, the first to connect the east coast to the west.  The story centers on Warren Neale, a railroad engineer, his gunslinger friend Larry King (who is fortunately referred to as “Red,” although the image of a bespectacled, suspendered fast-draw artist is entertaining), and the love interest, Allie Lee.  While laying out the course of the railroad, a trapper named Slingerland arrives looking for help.  Neale and Red come to the aid of a wagon caravan heading east that had been attacked by a Sioux Indian war party.  With the exception of Allie, who had been heading east with her mother to escape her gambler step-father, all the travelers had been killed.  Neale falls for Allie, who, when she comes out of shock, feels the same. 

            The characters are all archetypical Westerners.  The mysterious gunslinger; the plucky damsel in distress; the lone woodsman; the chivalrous hero; the heartless gambler, etc.  Within their roles as characters in a Western, they are consistent and have enough individuality to make them barely three dimensional (usually). 

            Grey’s description of the land is probably the best part of the book.  He writes with a lot of emotion, some of which invariably impresses itself on the reader.  Unfortunately, the events in the story seem contrived.  There are series of chance encounters and coincidences that stretch too far into the realm of implausibility.

            While I can’t speak from a background in Westerns, The U.P. Trail seems like pretty standard fare for the genre.

Why was it so popular?
            Zane Grey had appeared in the top ten on the bestsellers list twice before the publication of The U.P. Trail. Since the publication of Riders of the Purple Sage in 1912, his popularity had been increasing.  If one thing is certain, it’s that previous popularity is a strong force for getting to the top of the bestsellers list.  Likewise, a history in film helps.  His work has been adapted for the screen over 100 times, since 1911.  

It’s possible, too, that a purely escapist story set in a different time period would appeal to a populace engaged in one of the largest wars in history. 

Why haven't I heard of it?
           Zane Grey is more famous than any one of his novels individually.  With the exception of Riders of the Purple Sage, there doesn’t seem to be any specific Zane Grey novel that has become, and remained, remarkably notable.  Zane Grey’s work overall is still significant as a large part of the foundation for the Western genre. 

Should I read it? 
         The U.P. Trail is pure escapism with a little bit of history.  As someone who isn’t a fan of Westerns, I can’t say I enjoyed it much.  But if you enjoy Westerns and are looking for escapism, The U.P. Trail seems like a good choice.      

You can read The U. P. Trail on Project Gutenberg. 

Also published in 1918:  
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

Sources:  
Grey, Zane. The U. P. Trail. 1918. Roslyn, New York : W. J. Black. 1946. Print.
Gruber, Frank. Zane Grey: A Biography. Roslyn, New York: W. J. Black. Print.
Zane Grey on imdb.com