Happy birthday, novelist Thomas Wolfe

It is the birthday of writer Thomas Wolfe (1900), who is remembered for his autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929), based on his childhood and teen years in Asheville, North Carolina. It describes his family and friends, guests at his mother's boarding house, and other residents of the town. It was originally 1,100 pages long, and was trimmed to publishable length by Scribner's famous book editor Maxwell Perkins. The book caused such an uproar in Asheville that Wolfe moved away and didn't return for eight years.

Happy birthday, William Faulkner

William Faulkner

It is the  birthday of writer William Faulkner (1897), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 for work that included The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light in August (1932); and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice, first for A Fable (1954) and then for The Reivers (1962).

The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Light in August are considered among the best 20th century novels in the English language. Faulkner is regarded among the most important writers in Southern literature, including Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, and Mark Twain.

Faulkner (originally spelled Falkner) grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, the great-grandson of a Confederate colonel who'd excelled at business, law, agriculture, railroading, and writing. After a childhood sweetheart married someone else, Faulkner went to stay with a lawyer friend in Connecticut, where he worked briefly in a firearms factory.

Faulkner tried to join the U.S. Army Air Force during World War I, but was rejected because he was too short. Instead, he lied his way into the Royal Air Force in Canada, claiming to be British. He changed the spelling of his name to Faulkner because he thought it seemed more British. Faulkner went through training in Toronto, but World War I ended before he ever saw duty at the front.

This didn't keep him from obtaining an officer's uniform and returning home to Oxford in December 1918 to a hero's welcome, regaling friends with his wartime adventures, most of them completely untrue. He even invented injuries he did not have, including a plate in his head.

Faulkner's penchant for telling a good story regardless of the facts was evident in his first published novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), the tale of a wounded flyer who returns home to a small Georgia town after World War I, escorted by a war widow and a war veteran. The aviator's injury has left him blind and dying, and his fiance had been unfaithful. The drama includes the widow's desire to marry him. Some characters in the novel, through circumstance, were robbed of the opportunity to see combat, just as with Faulkner.

The book received mixed reviews, some writers calling it mediocre and full of uneven characters. Nevertheless, most critics found it worthy of praise. A critic wrote in The New Statesman: "I can remember no first novel of such magnificent achievement in the last thirty years."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 93 today

Photo by Voxtheory

It is the birthday of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919), who founded City Lights Bookstore (the first U.S. all paperback bookstore) in San Francisco in 1953, published Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and befriended Jack Kerouac, with whom he bonded. Both were Thomas Wolfe fans, both went to Columbia University, both lived in France and both spoke French to their mothers. Ferlinghetti spearheaded the naming of the alley next to his bookstore Jack Kerouac Alley in 1988. He was a mentor of Beat poets and writers of the 1950s, including Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, William S. Burroughs, Michael McClure, Bob Kaufman, and Diane diPrima, though he always considered himself the last of the Bohemians instead of the first of the Beats. Publication of Ginsberg's Howl landed him in court charged with selling obscene material in a landmark First Amendment case that ended in acquittal for both him and Ginsberg, and established precedent for publishing controversial work with redeeming social value. Ferlinghetti wrote the best-selling poetry collection Coney Island of the Mind (1958) as well as more than 50 other poetry collections, journals, plays and fiction.

See you in South Carolina this weekend

We're taking a vanload of great volumes to South Carolina.

We’re off to the South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia, S.C., at the end of the week.  It is a great show and we enjoy going each year. This is the fifteenth year of the festival, which started fifteen years after our own Florida Antiquarian Book Fair in St. Petersburg.

We’ll look forward to seeing some of our friends from the St. Petersburg show who also exhibit in Columbia.

The show draws from neighboring states. It’s a reasonable drive from Atlanta, Augusta and Savannah, Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh-Durham and even Knoxville and Chattanooga, so there’s a great mix of visitors. About 6,000 attend each year.

Festivalgoers there tend to like history, especially Southern history, so we always take along plenty of choices, including Civil War books. We also pack plenty of the works of  Southern writers, mostly dead ones. Literature by the likes of Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren still draw plenty of devotees. We’ll also have our collection of prints and maps and some of our rare and unusual books.

Of course, this is the land where such living and breathing luminaries as Pat Conroy and Sue Monk Kidd are spoken of in reverential tones, and though it's unlikely that they'll show up, the show always features what must be a legion or so of living authors.

Among our favorites appearing this year is Roy Blount, Jr., the humorist and panelist on the NPR quiz show, Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me! Many still consider him a southern writer (raised in Decatur, Ga.) even though he was born in Indianapolis and now lives in Massachusetts. Must be that Southern sensibility hewn in his formative years.

If you’re going to be in Columbia on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, May 13-15, stop by and see us. The show is in the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center. You’ll find us in Booth 408.