WHAT'S NEW @ LIGHTHOUSE BOOKS: No. 1 -- The Old Man and the Sea

Welcome to our new series -- What's New @ Lighthouse Books. We'll share some of the exciting volumes that have arrived at the books store. This time we're featuring a beautiful copy of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952). It's a first edition and it comes in a slipcover.

We hope you'll come by and visit us and take a look at other volumes newly arrived as well. Look for our series on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Share each episode with your friends. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel so you'll know when we publish new episodes.

In case you're just discovered us, we're a family-run book shop specializing books of a scholarly nature, particularly Florida history, Americana, and military history. We also have a broad range of general antiquarian books, used and secondhand books, as well as a small collection of prints and maps. 

For decades, we were located in St. Petersburg. Now we're Dade City, just a little bit north of Tampa in Pasco County. We're at the corner of Church Avenue and 5th Street: 14046 5th Street, Dade City, FL 33525.

You can learn more about us at oldfloridabookstore.com. 

Theme Song: You're The Cream in My Coffee (1929), Ben Selvin and his Orchestra.

Beautiful Franklin Library volumes

THIS JUST IN: This is first in our new series This Just In, featuring volumes we've just acquired. In this collection, more than 170 Franklin Library beautiful leather-bound editions of classic literature. Here are such diverse works as Dante's Divine Comedy, Joyce Carol Oates' Them, Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Winston Churchill's Their Finest Hour, Eugene O'Neill's Plays, and the Collected Poems of W.H. Auden. Come see them today.

A documentary tribute to Hemingway

For Ernest Hemingway's birthday, pause to view this amazing documentary. It's worth the time. Then take some time to read or reread Hemingway's books.

A.E. Hotchner: pals to Hemingway, Newman

Hotchner (right) with Ernest and Mary Hemingway at a bullfight in 1957.

It is the birthday of writer A.E. Hotchner (1920), who is best known for his 1966 biography of Ernest Hemingway, Papa Hemingway. The two writers met in 1948 and became close friends. Hotchner adapted some of Hemingway’s works for theater and television. Hotchner also wrote Papa Hemingway: The Ecstacy and Sorrow (1983) and Hemingway and His World (1989). With his friend and neighbor Paul Newman, Hotchner founded Newman’s Own, Inc. in 1982. Profits from the food products line go to the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for children and other charities. With Newman, Hotchner wrote Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good: the Madcap Business Adventure of the Truly Oddest Couple (2003). Hotchner also wrote Paul and Me: 53 Years of Adventures and Misadventures with My Pal Paul Newman (2010). Steven Soderbergh made a film, King of the Hill (1993), based on Hotchner’s memoir of the same name about growing up in St. Louis. Hotchner lives in Connecticut.

Happy birthday, Gertrude Stein

It is the birthday of writer and arts patron Gertrude Stein (1874), who is most famous for nurturing painters such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, as well as writers Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Thornton Wilder in her Paris salon in the 1920s. Much of her writing reflected the abstract art she collected and was virtually unintelligible, even to well educated readers. Nevertheless, she achieved stylistic notoriety with such quotes as “A rose is a rose is a rose,” perhaps her version of the more recent “It is what it is.” She also wrote the oft quoted “There is no there there,” to describe her hometown of Oakland, California. Her one great commercial success was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), written in the voice of her lifelong companion but really about herself and the artists and writers she knew. She also wrote the librettos for two Virgil Thomson operas, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947).

Happy birthday, Max Eastman

It is the birthday of writer and radical activist Max Eastman (1883), a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and co-founder of the radical magazine The Liberator in 1919. Earlier, as editor of the socialist magazine The Masses, Eastman stood trial twice on charges of sedition for editorials critical of U.S. participation in World War I. He was acquitted both times. The Liberator published works of John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and E.E. Cummings. Eastman visited Russia in the 1920s and later wrote critically of Joseph Stalin, though he supported Leon Trotsky. Later in life, he became fiercely anti-socialist and anti-communist, and an outspoken conservative.

Happy birthday, Willa Cather

It is the birthday of writer Willa Cather (1873), who may be best known for her Prairie Trilogy — O Pioneers (1912), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918), her stories of ordinary people of the Midwestern plains. Critics such as H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis praised them, and readers loved them. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1923 for One of Ours (1922), the tale of a young man from a Midwestern farm who seeks purpose on the battlefield in France during World War I. Ernest Hemingway wasn't impressed with One of Ours. He snipped that the battle scenes clearly came from D.W. Griffith's 1915 silent epic Birth of a Nation.

Happy birthday, Col. John Mosby

It is the birthday of colorful Civil War figure John Singleton Mosby (1833), who commanded a Confederate unit in Virginia known as Mosby's Rangers, which gained a reputation for its lightning-fast raids and its ability to elude Union troops and disappear into the countryside among farmers and ranchers. Mosby became known as The Gray Ghost. After the war, Mosby worked in the presidential campaign of Ulysses S. Grant and served as U.S. consul to Hong Kong. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway called Mosby the best cavalry officer of the Civil War. Does anybody remember the TV show based on Mosby's exploits?

Happy birthday, Mark Twain

Not only is it Small Business Saturday, but it is also the birthday of writer and humorist Mark Twain (1835), whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway considered him the father of American literature. His Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is hailed as the epitome of the Great American Novel. Twain was born when Halley's Comet was appearing. He predicted he'd go out with the comet as well. He did—the day after the comet's return.

Happy birthday, artist Edward Hopper

Detail from Nighthawks (1942); inset: self-portrait

It is the birthday of realist painter Edward Hopper (1882), who is most well known for his oil painting Nighthawks (1942), though he also worked in watercolor as well as etchings and pen and ink sketches. Nighthawks features four people in an all-night diner on what appears to be a lonely street corner. It suggests a film noir setting and, indeed, is said to have been inspired by Ernest Hemingway's short story The Killers (1927) or, perhaps, his story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (1933). Hopper said of the paint that there is the possibility of danger outside the dark. Hopper's subjects tended to be typical everyday scenes, many capturing contemporary urban life. Among his other well-known paintings are Girl at Sewing Machine (1921), Automat (1927), Chop Suey (1929), Early Sunday Morning … (1930), and Office at Night (1940), a sensually charged scene of a young woman and a slightly older man, apparently working in an office after hours.

Happy birthday, Charles Scribner Jr.

It is the birthday of Charles Scribner Jr. (1921), who succeeded his father as head of the publishing company Charles Scribner's Sons and ran it for 34 years. His great-grandfather, Charles I, founded the company in 1846. He was Ernest Heminway's personal editor at the end of the famed writer's career. In his memoir, In the Company of Writer: A Life in Publishing (1991), Scribner noted that in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' book The Secret River (1955) she never revealed the race of the main character, Calpurnia. It was published after her death, so she couldn't be consulted about her intention. It was published at a time when white publishers didn't do books with African American themes, and it was likely school boards would reject such books. Scribner decided to leave Calpurnia's race unstated but use dark paper to suggest her race. He said it was "one of my silent contributions to dissolving the color barrier in the 1950s." The book won the Newbery Honor Award. Scribner also wrote The Enduring Hemingway: An Anthology of a Lifetime in Literature (1974), The Devil's Bridge: A Legend (1978), and In the Web of Ideas (1993).

Happy birthday, Archibald MacLeish

It is the birthday of writer Archibald MacLeish (1892), who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, for his collection Conquistador (1933), and for his collection Collected Poems 1917-1952 (1953) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1959 for his free-verse play J.B., a modern version of the biblical story of Job. JB also won a Tony Award for best play. MacLeish was greatly influenced by poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and is considered a traditional modernist. His best-known poem is Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry). It includes a line that states the modernist poetic philosophy: "A poem should not mean/but be." As a young man, MacLeish left the law firm he worked for and went to Paris in 1923, joining literary and artistic expatriates such as John Dos Passos, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, John O'Hara, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Librarian of Congress in 1939. He reorganized the library, making it more efficient and enabling it to meet the needs of the nation. He expanded the library's budget and helped focus its mission to collect materials expressing the life an achievements of the people of the United States. During the 1940s and 1950s, he was the target of such anti-Communists as Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. To detractors he said, "No one would be more shocked to learn I am a Communist than the Communists themselves."

Glenway Wescott was 1920s Paris expatriate

Portrait of Glenway Wescott by George Platt Lynes

It is the birthday of writer Glenway Wescott (1901), whose best novel, the Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (1940), tells the story of a failed American writer and a wealthy English-Irish couple at an afternoon luncheon at an estate outside Paris in the 1920s. Wescott was part of the contingent of artistic American ex-pats in Paris in those days. He was the inspiration for Ernest Hemingway's character Robert Prentiss in The Sun Also Rises (1926). Wescott's brother, Lloyd, married heiress and avant-garde publisher Barbara Harrison (Harrison of Paris), and Wescott established a lifelong relationship with Harrison's publishing partner, book designer Monroe Wheeler. Later, they all lived together (along with photographer George Platt Lynes) on a farm in New Jersey.

Ring Lardner wrote You Know Me Al

Ring Lardner

It is the birthday of writer Ring Lardner (1885), who is remembered for his novel You Know Me Al (1916), a collection of satirical vernacular letters by a fictional bush league baseball player to his friend back home in Indiana. The series first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1914. Lardner also wrote many short stories, including The Golden Honeymoon (1922), an amusing tale of a retired couple who travels by train to St. Petersburg for vacation.

For many years, Lardner wrote the nationally syndicated column In the Wake of the News for the Chicago Tribune. The column appeared in more than 100 newspapers around the country and made Lardner a household name. When the Black Sox scandal broke in 1919, Lardner felt betrayed by his beloved Chicago White Sox. Some White Sox players, it developed, had taken bribes to make sure the Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series that year.

Lardner was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald and other contemporary writers. Famed editor Max Perkins worked with both of them. Perkins introduced Lardner to Ernest Hemingway, who had tried to emulate Lardner's style back in high school. However, no friendship developed between Lardner and Hemingway. English writer Virginia Woolf admired Lardner's writing, and he was considered one of the best humorists in America in his time.

Lardner collaborated with Broadway playwright George S. Kaufman to write June Moon, a comedy love story with lyrics and music by Lardner. It was a Tin Pan Alley romance based on Lardner's short story Some Like Them Cold. It was adapted for a 1937 film called Blonde Trouble. It was adapted for the live CBS television anthology program Studio One in 1949 and again, in 1974, for PBS.

Lardner got started as a sports reporter by stealing a job from his brother. Ring was working as a bookkeeper for a gas company in South Bend, Indiana, where his brother worked while moonlighting as a corespondent for The South Bend Times. A man from the paper came to offer the brother a staff job but Ring intercepted the message, told the man that his brother was locked in a contract he couldn't break, and offered himself as an alternative. Ring Lardner was hired and began his career in the newspaper business.

Van Wyck Brooks was top literary critic

Van Wyck Brooks on Time cover in 1944

It is the birthday of literary historian Van Wyck Brooks (1886), whose detailed study of early American literature, The Flowering of New England (1936), won the Pulitzer Prize for history and the National Book Award. It is notable for placing such writers as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau into historical context, examining the social, religious, and political forces of the nation and the region that affected these literary icons.

The book was part of his Finders and Makers series that covered American literary history from 1800 to 1915. Books from the series also include New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1916 (1940), The World of Washington Irving (1944), The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947), and The Confident Years: 1885-1915 (1952). Indian Summer was well received and was a best seller. Brooks was hailed for his vivid style and clarity. He drew from the letters and other contemporary documents to paint clear pictures of the men and their times.

Brooks' volume, On Literature Today (1941), harshly criticized the likes of Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway, whose dim views of humankind were in direct conflict with Brooks' desire for literature of affirmation rooted in an abiding faith in human nature.

Brooks graduated from Harvard University in 1908. While he was a student, he published with a friend his first collection of poetry, Verses by Two Undergraduates. He followed that with The Wine of the Puritans (1909), his first book of literary criticism. Brooks wrote that Puritanism had a profound effect on the formation of American culture and ideas.

Brooks also wrote a detailed study of the great American author Samuel L. Clemens in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920). He blamed the author's shortcomings on Twain's mother and wife.

Happy birthday, James Joyce

It is the birthday of Irish novelist James Joyce (1892), who is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. One of his masterpieces, Finnegans Wake (1939), is considered to be one of the most difficult pieces in the English language. It is, however, a delight to hear him read a portion of it in this rare recording. Enjoy! Below: We couldn't resist this rare footage of James Joyce in Paris. The voice over is priceless. Happy birthday, James Joyce.

Happy birthday, Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov

It is the birthday of Russian playwright and writer Anton Chekhov (1860), who is best remembered for his numerous short stories as well as four plays, The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904), which continue to be produced by theater companies around the world. Chekhov is considered a master of the modern short story. He pioneered use of stream-of-consciousness, abandoning tradition story structure.

The comedy The Seagull concerns four characters, an ingenue, a fading star, a playwright and a writer, all of whom speak in subtext that suggests their inner turmoil. The play was such a departure from the melodrama popular at the time that the audience booed on opening night. Chekhov declared that night that he was finished writing plays. Later performances, however, were well received, though Chekhov did not attend them. Friends told him later that subsequent performances were more successful but he did not believe them.

The great Russian director Stanislavski eventually did a production of The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. Stanislavski produced a detailed outline for actors with actions that sought to reveal the inner action hidden beneath the characters' lines. Later, when he saw the play, Chekhov suggested that Stanislavski's outline be published with his play. The collaboration of the two artists is said to have been a key factor in the creative development of both of them.

The Lady with the Dog (1899) may be Chekhov's best short story. Writer Vladimir Nabokov said it was among the greatest short stories ever written. The story is set in Yalta and Moscow and tells of an affair between a woman from a small town and a Moscow banker who meet on vacation in Yalta.

Chekhov also wrote the novellas The Shooting Party (1884), The Steppe (1888), The Duel (1891), The Anonymous Story (1893), Three Years (1895), and My Life (1896). He also wrote a travelogue, A Journey to Sakhalin (1895). Many of Chekhov's letters to family and friends have been collected into several books.

Among his admirers were James Joyce (who emulated his stream-of-consciousness style), George Bernard Shaw (who noted the similarity between the Russian gentry about which Chekhov wrote and the English gentry), Tennessee Williams (who adapted The Seagull for a work of his own, The Notebook of Trigorin), and Ernest Hemingway (who called him an amateur but credited him with writing "about six good stories.")

Max Eastman was left before he was right

Max Eastman

It is the birthday of writer Max Eastman (1883), who was a prominent political activist, first for left-wing causes, then later for right-wing, anti-Communist movements. In later life, he described himself as a radical conservative. He was an avid supporter of the Harlem Renaissance. When he was 30, Eastman became editor of the socialist magazine The Masses. In his late 50s, he became a roving editor for Reader's Digest. In his 70s, he was a contributing editor to the conservative National Review.

Eastman was born in upstate New York to parents who were protestant ministers. He graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts in 1915 and pursued a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University but withdrew before accepting it. He studied under pragmatic philosopher John Dewey. Eastman lived in Greenwich Village with his sister and became active in the women's suffrage movement.

As editor of The Masses, he published the work of novelist Sherwood Anderson, Marxist Louise Bryant, poets Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg, and Taos arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan. He advocated free love and birth control, denounced America's participation in World War I, and supported socialist Jack Reed's trip to Russia to report on the Bolshevik Revolution. He created, with his sister, The Liberator magazine and published the work of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and Helen Keller. He lived for almost two years in the Soviet Union and watched the power plays between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. He became Trotsky's friend. But his views of socialism began to change after his visit to Soviet Russia.

During the Depression, Eastman became critical of such socialist thinkers Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He became friends with British economist Friedrich Hayek and arranged for his book The Road to Serfdom (1943) to be serialized in Reader's Digest. At first, he supported Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist activism, but later criticized him as being too reactionary. Nevertheless, he grew to believe the Bolshevik Revolution had produced tyranny instead of freedom. Eastman was among the first contributing editors for the National Review and served on its Board of Associates but he eventually resigned because the magazine's pro-Christian leanings didn't jibe with his atheism. Eastman opposed the Vietnam War.

Among his books and articles are Enjoyment of Poetry (1913), The Sense of Humor (1921), Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth (1925), Since Lenin Died (1925), Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution (1927), Enjoyment of Laughter (1936), Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), and Seven Kinds of Goodness (1967).

Louis Bromfield won Pulitzer Prize

Louis Bromfield

It is the birthday of writer and conservationist Louis Bromfield (1896), whose novel Early Autumn  (1926) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927. It is the story of a wealthy, upper class, old line Massachusetts family experiencing rapid change just after the end of World War I.

Bromfield's father was from New England and his mother's family were Ohio pioneers. Louis Bromfield grew up in Mansfield, Ohio. He studied agriculture at Cornell University, then journalism at Columbia University but left before completing a degree to served in the American Field Service in France during World War I. He received the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre for his service. After the war, he worked as a reporter in New York.

He first novel, The Green Bay Tree (1924), drew immediate attention. It tells the story of a mysterious man who builds an estate outside a midwestern town, fueling speculation about his intentions and his endeavors. After the man's death, his widow and daughters continue to be the topic of fascination in the town. Eventually, steel mills surround the estate.

In 1925, Bromfield and his family visited France, a country Bromfield had become fascinated with during the war. They remained there until just before World War II. He became associated with the literary American ex-patriate community in Paris, making friends with Natalie Barney, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein, and Edith Wharton, among others.

Bromfield wrote 30 books, both fiction and non-fiction. Among them were A Good Woman (1927), about a woman who thinks of herself as righteous but ruins her son's life; The Rains Came (1937), a romance set in India; and Mrs. Parkington (1943), the story of a chambermaid who became a society matron; The Rains Came was adapted for a film in 1939, starring Tyrone Power, Myrna Loy, George Brent, and Brenda Joyce. Mrs. Parkington was produced as a film in 1944, starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon.

Bromfield bought a 1,000-acre farm near his hometown in Ohio and pursued his studies in agriculture, becoming an early advocate of organic and self-sustaining gardening. He banned pesticide use on his farm.

Ford Madox Ford wrote The Good Soldier

Ford Madox Ford

It is the birthday of innovative English novelist Ford Madox Ford (1873), whose book, The Good Soldier (1915), a story of two marriages, friendship and betrayal, is considered to be among the greatest literature of all time. He once wrote that a friend called his book "the finest French novel in the English language."

He was a friend and writing collaborator of Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway. He was born Ford Hermann Hueffer but changed his name to honor his grandfather, painter Ford Madox Brown. Hemingway wrote that he changed it because it sounded too German.

At the beginning of World War I, he worked in the British War Propaganda Bureau with popular writers such as G.K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, and Hilaire Belloc. Ford enlisted in the Welch Regiment in 1915, and was sent to France. His four-part work, Parade's End 1924-1928) was inspired by his wartime activities. It is set in England and not he Western Front before, during, and after the war.

He was editor of two literary magazines, The English Review (which published works of Conrad, Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, and H.G. Wells) and The Transatlantic Review (which published works of Hemingway, Jean Rhys, and Gertrude Stein, as well as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake).

Ford also wrote The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906-1908), about Henry VIII fifth wife, Catherine Howard. Critics say Ford went far beyond the known facts and even beyond reasonable probability, to create a fictional, and highly imaginative, account of Catherine as a beautiful, honest, stubborn, and saintly woman. Admirers say he captured the atmosphere of Tudor English life in a highly impressionistic work.

Ford was a prolific writer, who produced dozens of novels, essays, poetry, memoirs, and literary criticism. He collaborated with Joseph Conrad on The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), and The Nature of a Crime (1924). He also wrote Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911), which was inspired by Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Unlike Twain's hero, though, Ford's protagonist hasn't a clue about how to make himself more powerful than kings. The details of Medieval life, however, are presented much more realistically.