Happy birthday to four authors

From left, Sherwood Anderson, Alain Locke, J.B. Priestley, Roald Dahl.

It is the birthday of writers Sherwood Anderson (1876), Alain Locke (1885), J.B. Priestley (1894), and Roald Dahl (1916).

Novelist Sherwood Anderson is best remembered for his collection of short stories Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life (1919), which were based on Sherwood's childhood. It is ranked among the best English-language novels of the 20th century, and is considered one of the earliest examples of Modernist literature. The stories focus on the loneliness and isolation of the people in the fictional town. When he was 36, Anderson was settled with a wife and three children in Ohio. He ran a mail-order business and a paint manufacturing firm. Then he had a nervous breakdown and disappeared for four days. When he was found, he left his family and his previous life and set out to be a writer. He encouraged William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe.

Writer and educator Alain Locke was the first African American Rhodes scholar. He is considered the dean of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1925, Locke served as editor of one issue of the magazine The Survey Graphic, which focused on life in Harlem. Later, he expanded it into an anthology, The New Negro. The book became a declaration of the principles of the movement that grew into the Harlem Renaissance. He is credited with encouraging Zora Neale Hurston's development as a writer. Locke earned a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard University and taught for many years at Howard University.

Novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley is best remembered for his novel The Good Companions (1929), which tells the stories of a troupe of traveling performers between World War I and World War II. Priestley also wrote theatrical pieces. His best known play is An Inspector Calls (1945), the story of a young working-class woman who commits suicide after exploitation, abandonment and social ruin by members of a prosperous middle-class family. During World War II, Priestley served as a broadcaster for the BBC and became nearly as popular as Winston Churchill.

Novelist and screenwriter Roald Dahl wore for children as well as adults. Among his children's books, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Twits, George's Marvellous Medicine, and The BFG, the amazing story of a Big Friendly Giant who collects good dreams and distributes them to children. He also wrote the screenplays for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice and for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Dahl served as a fighter pilot for the RAF in World War II, and later as an intelligence officer. He was married to actress Patricia Neal for 30 years. They had five children. Blood vessels burst in Patricia Neal's brain and she could no longer walk or talk. Dahl directed her rehabilitation and eventually  she regained her health was able to resume her acting career. Dahl wrote the screenplay for the film The Patricia Neal Story, which starred Glinda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde. Dahl and Neale divorced in 1983. He died in 1990.

Happy birthday, Alice B. Toklas

Toklas (behind) and Stein in Venice in 1908,
from What is Remembered, by Alice B. Toklas

It is the birthday of Alice B. Toklas (1877), who hosted a salon in Paris (along with her companion Gertrude Stein) for writers and painters in the 1920s and 1930s. Toklas served as Stein's secretary, editor, muse and confidante for 39 years, until Stein's death in 1947. Stein's 1933 book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, was her bestselling volume. In their salon, Toklas and Stein received the likes of Matisse, Picasso and Braque as well as Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. Stein left most of her estate to Toklas, including Picasso masterpieces, but their relationship had no legal standing and Stein's family took them from Toklas' home while she was away on vacation. Toklas' own memoir, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), contains her recollections of the Paris years and recipes, including one contributed by a friend for Haschich Fudge that contained spices, nuts, fruit and marijuana. Alice B. Toklas Brownies gained popularity in certain circles, especially in the 1960s. In her later years, Toklas wrote articles for The New York Times and The New Republic. She published her own autobiography, What is Remembered, in 1963. Late in life, Toklas became a Roman Catholic. She died in poverty at age 89 in 1967. She is buried in Paris next to Gertrude Stein.

Carl Sandburg, working class reporter

Autobiography and novel of Carl Sandburg.

At an age when many men settle down to daily golf games or fishing trips in the golden haze of retirement, Carl Sandburg kept right on working. He started his novel, Remembrance Rock, a sweeping saga of the American experience from the landing at Plymouth Rock to the beginning of World War II, when he was sixty-five years old.

Sandburg was already remarkably accomplished; he had received Pulitzer Prizes both for his book of poetry, Cornhuskers, and for his biography, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. Remembrance Rock was published when he was seventy. (A third Pulitzer, for another poetry book, Compete Poems, would come three years later.) He had worked all his life and he wasn't about to stop.

A signed and numbered first edition of Sandburg’s Remembrance Rock is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA, along with a signed first edition of Sandburg’s autobiography, Always the Young Strangers. The autobiography was published when Sandburg was seventy-five.

Carl Sandburg

Sandburg worked hard all his life. He was the son of Swedish immigrants, who instilled in him an Old World work ethic. His father worked as a blacksmith’s assistant on the railroad. After graduating from the eighth grade, Sandburg quit school to help support the family. He held an array of jobs in his early years, driving a milk wagon, harvesting ice, threshing wheat and shining shoes in the Union Hotel in his hometown, Galesburg, Illinois. With his working class sensibilities, it is small wonder he became involved in Socialist politics in college.

Eventually he came to be a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, where he covered labor union news and wrote editorials and features. Playwright Robert Sherwood, a colleague and drinking buddy, said later, “Carl Sandburg is one of our great natural resources and I am proud to have walked with him, no matter how many years it may have taken off my life.”

Publisher Alfred Harcourt, founder of Harcourt, Brace and Company, knew Sandburg as a friend for forty years. He encouraged Sandburg to write the Lincoln biography. The project, however, was to have been a 400-page “Boy’s life of Lincoln” for teens, not the four volumes it eventually became. After it was published, Sandburg noted that, “It is probably the only book ever written by a man whose father couldn't write his name, about a man whose mother couldn't write hers.”

Signed and numbered first edition of Remembrance Rock.

Richard Finnegan, who was editor and publisher of the Chicago Times and later a top executive of the Chicago Sun-Times, described Sandburg as a reporter first and foremost, and a man who understood the working class because he was part of it.

In a tribute years Finnegan wrote regarding Sandburg, he shares a story of Sandburg in the early to mid-1930s, during the Great Depression.  Sandburg had joined lunching group of doctors, lawyers, merchants and bankers, artists and writers, and even a priest and a rabbi. The conversation came around to the millions of people out of work. Somebody suggested that most of them didn’t want to work—they were the new leisure class, someone said.

“Suddenly Carl Sandburg let out a series of those great braying hee-haws of his,” Finnegan wrote,  “ Ten million bums!’ he roared. ‘Yes, they're just ten million good for nothing lazy bums.’ Then, Sandburg began giving case histories: of a fellow he met in Duluth; of the guy coming out of Roswell, New Mexico, on a day coach; the Connecticut Yankee family, husband and wife and two teen-age daughters — all of the women posing as men” to obtain jobs.

“Carl had been bumping into the people—on the breadlines, on the roads, on the town. And now, as a reporter, he was reporting. Yes, Carl's a poet and a historian. Yes, he's a philosopher. Yes, he plays at the guitar and tries his best at singing—those old ballads and cowboy songs. But first he's a reporter. A reporter, yes. His Lincoln is reporting. He was right at Lincoln's heels, up and down and across the prairies. His War Years is reporting. And so is Remembrance Rock.”

And so, too, is his autobiography, Always the Young Strangers, which covers those first tough 20 years with the mastery and vivid imagery, of those other works. A reporter, yes. And a man of the working class.