Category: Literarti

Is the Astrology Book and the Poet the same man?

Anton Chekhov was a medical doctor and a writer of plays. One of his first plays was the Seagull available here on Gutenberg, about the artistic clashes and melancholy ala Shakespeare’s Hamlet (which is slyly alluded to), that Sir Tom Stoppard wrote “You can’t have too many English Seagulls: for , the Russian one will […]

Charles Olson was a postmodern poet, sort of a Jack Kerouac, in verse. Separated by twelve years, both men came from Central Massachusetts, — Olson from Worcester, Kerouac from nearby Lowell – a twenty-mile distance probably shorter if the crow flies. Both men went to Harvard, but Olson was huge: six foot six in his […]

Prof. Rectenwald, formerly of New York University, where he had the Twitter nickname “The Deplorable Prof”  has hit the circuit in the past year discussing his  book, Springtime of Snowflakes, Social Justice and its Postmodern Parentage  a mad cap view of what’s going down in Academia these days.  His premise is universities have become  hot […]

Emmanuel Kant was born April 22, 1724 in Königsberg, near the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Today Königsberg is Kaliningrad, Russia, sandwiched between Lithuania in the north and Poland to the south, with the Baltic Sea on the west and Belarus to the east. It has no history with the Slavic Republics. During Kant’s […]

Ursula LeGuin wrote many popular sci-fiction works like her City of Illusions and the ever popular Left Hand of Darkness. With her very angular chart there was no doubt that Ms. LeGuin would be very active in her career and live a long time — she managed to do both before reposing on January 22, […]

Lillian Ross, who became known as the consummate fly-on-the-wall reporter in more than six decades at The New Yorker, whether writing about Ernest Hemingway, Hollywood or a busload of Indiana high school seniors on a class trip to New York. Ms. Ross preached unobtrusive reporting and practiced what she preached. She outlined her credo in […]

Constantine P. Cavafy, was the pseudonym of Konstantínos Pétrou Kaváfis. He was born April 29, 1863, in Alexandria, Egypt, and died 70 years later on his birthday, April 29, 1933, in Alexandria. His parents were both from the Greek community in Constantinople (now Istanbul) Turkey. Historically, this was Anatolia.

Our header image is William Blake’s rendition of Paradise Lost — written for the poem.

Jane Austen born December 16, 1775, during the Revolutionary War in Winchester, England. She was a great writer of mystery romances. — Pride and Prejudice is a good intro because it is short. Sense and Sensibility is the better effort. Emma and the great Persuasion are solid literary efforts with the latter her best. Northanger […]

Allcox, Alcott and May AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT AND ABIGAIL MAY WERE MARRIED after an unhurried engagement on Sunday, May 23, 1830, at King’s Chapel on Tremont Street, Germantown, Pennsylvania, the outskirts even then of Philadelphia. Bronson noted the day in his journal writing:

Vogue Magazine, December 1926 Photograph by Edward Steichen THE history of Sherwood Anderson is the history of a man groping painfully for an understanding of his own ideas. They flash before him out of the void, and he contemplates them with a sort of wonder, seeking to penetrate their significance, and sometimes not succeeding. Here […]