Happy birthday, Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott

It is the birthday of writer Louisa May Alcott (1832), who is best remembered for her novels Little Women (1868), Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886), a trilogy set in Concord, Massachusetts, in the late 19th century. The books were loosely based on Alcott's life with her three sisters. Alcott never set out to write a trilogy but the books are linked by characters who appear in all three.

Alcott's family struggled financially throughout her childhood. She was educated primarily by her father as well as family friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. To help support the family, Alcott worked as a teacher, governess, seamstress, and domestic helper. Writing became an emotional outlet to relieve the stress of her life.

Alcott's first published work, Flower Fables (1854) was a collection of stories she wrote for Emerson's daughter Ellen. She received about $35 after it was published. In her late 20s, Alcott's work was published in the Atlantic Monthly. She volunteered as a nurse at a Union hospital at the beginning of the Civil War. Her letters home were published in an abolitionist newspaper in Boston and later collected as Hospital Sketches (1863). Alcott wrote impassioned political pieces under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard.

Little Women chronicles the lives of the four March sisters in their family home in Concord. It was based on Alcott's home, Orchard House. The initial book was such a success that she wrote a second volume titled Good Wives that also was well received. Later the two books were combined under the Little Women title. The book gave Alcott financial independence.

Little Men follows the main character, Jo, as she teaches at the unorthodox Plumfield Estate School. The school is mentioned at the end of Little Women. It is financed by Jo's inheritance. The youngsters are taught lesson by running their own businesses and tending their own gardens. For fun, they have pillow fights on Saturdays.

Jo's Boys carries the subtitle How They Turned Out: A Sequel to Little Men. The boys at the school are now grown up and they face the challenges of adulthood. They enter various professions, fall in love and travel in Europe.

Alcott died in 1888 at age 55. Scholars think she died of lupus, though her earliest biographers attributed her death to mercury poisoning received in treatment for typhoid fever during the Civil War.

Happy birthday, John Bunyan

John Bunyan

It is the birthday of English writer John Bunyan (1628), who is best remembered for his book The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), a sweeping allegorical tale that takes the protagonist (an everyman named Christian) from the road to perdition to the feet of the Lord. Bunyan's use of simple imagery (taken from his Bedfordshire homeland north of London) gives the book its wide appeal. it was reprinted in the Puritan colonies and distributed throughout colonial America only three years after its initial publication.

When he was a youth, Bunyan led a decidedly impious life, by his own admission laced with profanity, dancing, and bell  ringing. Then, in his early 20s, he married a young woman and settled down. As a young man, Bunyan joined a nonconformist sect that refused to abide by the teachings of the Church of England. He started preaching in his late 20s. The Puritans were in power and Bunyan had considerable freedom to preach. Bunyan's first book, Some Gospel Truths, was published in 1656. The following year, his second book, Vindication, came out.

His first wife died, leaving him with four children. He married again and had two more children. In the meantime, Charles II restored the monarchy in England and the Church of England became the mandatory church of the land. He was arrested for preaching without a license.

Still, Bunyan refused to conform and continued to preach in private meetings not part of the Anglicans. He was taken to court where he told magistrates "If you release me today, I will preach tomorrow." The judges had no choice but to put him in jail, where he remained for some time. He was finally released again in 1672, was licensed to preach under a new law. But then the law was withdrawn and he landed in jail again. Scholars think he began writing The Pilgrim's Progress while he was in jail, though there is some disagreement whether he began it during the first term or the second.

Bunyan also wrote an imaginary biography, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), another allegory, The Holy War (1682), and a spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666).

The Pilgrim's Progress, along with the Bible, was once the among most widely read and translated books in the English language. In all, Bunyan wrote about 60 books and pamphlets. Rudyard Kipling considered him the father of the novel and "salvation's first Defoe."

Happy birthday, James Agee

James Agee

It is the birthday of writer James Agee (1909), whose autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1958. Agee was a journalist, film critic, screenwriter, and poet. He wrote his most well known book. Let us now Praise Famous Men (1941), as a magazine article but it wasn't published.

Agee and photographer Walker Evans spent two months at the height of the Great Depression during the summer of 1936 among sharecroppers in Alabama to do an article for Fortune magazine but editors decided not to run it. Agee and Evans turned their work into the book, Let us now Praise Famous Men. It contained 31 of Evans photographs.

The book was initially a miserable failure. Only 600 copies were sold. However, the book was republished in 1960 with the 62 photographs Evans originally intended. It found an enthusiastic audience and has been lauded by critics, who cited Agee's poetic writing and his unusual practice of inserting himself into the story as he agonizes about spying on the sharecropper families and exposing their private lives the the world. The title is from a biblical quotation in the Wisdom of Sirach: "Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us."

Agee wrote for Time and Fortune magazines as well as The Nation. He was considered a brilliant and perceptive film critic. He thought of film an art form. He lavished praise on Chaplin's hugely unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947). It has since become viewed as a classic. His article for Life magazine about silent film stars Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, and Buster Keaton is credited with reviving Keaton's career. The two-volume Agee on Film (1958) collects his reviews from various magazines. It has been republished.

Agee wrote screenplays for The African Queen (1951), based on the E.M. Forester book, and for The Night of the Hunter (1955), based on the Davis Grubb novel. For The African Queen, Agee is credited along with two other writers and the director, John Huston. Agee's script for The Night of the Hunter was originally  293 pages. At director Charles Laughton's request, Agee cut it in half.

A Death in the Family is based on the sudden death in a car accident of Agee's father in 1915 when Agee was six years old. It is considered one of the best English-language novels in the 20th century. It was adapted as a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, All the Way Home (1961) by Tad Mosel and later as a movie starring Robert Preston, Jean Simmons and Pat Hingle.

Agee died in 1955 at age 45 from a heart attack in a taxi on the way to a doctor's appointment. His publisher released A Death in the Family as a way to help support his widow and children.

Eugene Ionesco, absurdist playwright

Eugene Ionesco

It is the birthday of Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionesco (1909), one of the leading absurdist writers of the 20th century. Among his best known plays are The Bald Soprano (1950), The Lesson (1951), The Chairs (1952), Jack or The Submission (1955), The Killer (1958), Rhinoceros (1959), Exit the King (1962), A Stroll in the Air (1963), and Macbett (1972).

Ionesco was born in Romania but grew up in France, and though he moved back to Romania for a period and attended the University of Bucharest, he eventually moved back to France and remained there during World War II, settling in Paris in 1944.

At the age of 40, he decided to learn English. He copied sentences from an English text book with the idea of memorizing them. But soon he found  himself carefully reading the sentences and absorbing the meaning. He discovered amazing truths: The floor was down, ceiling was up. The week had seven days. Though he already knew these things, they suddenly took on new meaning.

The text became more complex. Two characters, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, had a complete back story. They lived near London, had several children and a servant who was also English. Mr. Smith was a clerk. Mrs. Smith was methodical in her quest for truth. Apparently this amazing text had a profound effect on Ionesco.

"A strange phenomenon took place," he wrote later. "I don't know how--the text began imperceptibly to change before my eyes. The very simple, luminously clear statements I had copied so diligently into my notebook, left to themselves, fermented for a while, lost their original identity, expanded and overflowed. The clichés and truisms of the conversation primer, which had once made sense gave way to pseudo-clichés and pseudo-truisms; these disintegrated into wild caricature and parody, and in the end language disintegrated into disjointed fragments of words."

Ionesco translated the experience into his first play, The Bald Soprano, which opened in Paris in 1950 and was roundly ignored until drama critic Jaques Lemarchand and writers Raymond Queneau and Jean Anouilh saw it and began to champion it. Ionesco wrote more than 20 plays in which he rejected the conventions of traditional drama such as character development and plot. His anarchic comedy portrays the meaningless of existence in the modern world.