John Tenniel illustrated Alice in Wonderland

John Tenniel

It is the birthday of British illustrator Sir John Tenniel (1820), who is best remembered as the artist who illustrated Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). He also served as the principal political cartoonist for the weekly satire magazine Punch for more than half a century. Queen Victoria knighted him in 1893.

When he was 16 years old, Tenniel entered a competition to create a mural for the Palace of Westminster, which had just been completed. Tenniel received 200 pounds and a commission to paint a fresco for the Hall of Poets in the House of Lords. He studied at the Royal Academy. When he was 20, Tenniel received a severe wound to his right eye while fencing with his father. He never told his father how bad it was but he eventually lost sight in his eye.

In 1850, the founding editor of the humor magazine Punch, Mark Lemon, invited Tenniel to be a cartoonist for the magazine. Over the years, Tenniel's work came to represent the collective social conscience of the British public. For instance, when the citizens of India rebelled against British rule, people in Britain were outraged. Retribution was swift and bloody. Tenniel's cartoons represented the situation as the British Lion savagely attacking the Bengal Tiger.

Originally, Lewis Carroll (Dr. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) illustrated his book himself but eventually warmed to the suggestion from his engraver that he seek professional help. Carroll was an avid reader of Punch magazine, so he knew Tenniel's work. The two had numerous discussions before Tenniel finally illustrated Alice. Dr. Dodgson, ever the perfectionist, provided Tenniel with detailed instructions on how to draw the characters in the story, much to Tenniel's chagrin. However, by May 1865, Tenniel had completed 42 illustrations.

Tenniel didn't like the printing quality of the first 2,000-copy run so it was recalled. All but about 20 or so were recovered. That first printing was donated to children's hospitals. A second first printing was published in November 1865 but carried an 1866 date. The earliest copies of Alice in Wonderland are extremely rare and bring handsome sums at auction. Tenniel initially tried to avoid doing the illustrations for Through the Looking-Glass but Dodgson persisted and finally Tenniel agreed to do them.

Longfellow wrote The Children's Hour

It is the birthday of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807), who was the most popular poet in America during his lifetime. Here is one of his most enduring poems, The Children's Hour.

Happy birthday, John Steinbeck

It is the birthday of writer John Steinbeck (1902), who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), his novel about a Dust Bowl family during the Great Depression. For his body of work, which included Of Mice and Men (1937) and East of Eden (1952), and a total of 27 books, both fiction and non-fiction, Steinbeck receded the Nobel Prize for Literature in1962. In this this video, Steinbeck's older son, Thom, talks about his father's work. 

Frank Slaughter wrote medical novels

Frank Slaughter

It is the birthday of Florida physician and writer Frank G. Slaughter (1908), whose immensely popular medical adventures and historical tales were bestsellers for decades beginning in the 1950s. For nine years, he was a surgeon at Riverside Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1930s and early 1940s but he eventually left the profession to devote full time to writing. He lived in Florida for 50 years and set many of his books in the region. His novels always combined some medical aspect and romance. They weren't considered literary masterpieces but they were widely read.

His historical novel Fort Everglades (1951) was set during the Second Seminole War at a fort on the Miami River. U.S. Army troops were planning to invade the Everglades. Warner Brothers was so intrigued with the story that the studio began making a feature film that liberally borrowed scenes from Slaughter's book. The film was the 1951 feature Distant Drums starring Gary Cooper and directed by Raoul Walsh. Only later, after it was challenged, did the studio buy the movie rights to the novel. Oddly, the film was shot in and around Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, a Spanish fort of an entirely different era.

Fernando Lamas starred in the 1953 film version of Slaughter's novel Sangaree (1952), which was set during the American Revolution. It tells the story of an indentured servant who rises in stature and power in the state of Georgia. Gene Hackman and Dyan Cannon starred in a 1971 movie based on Slaughter's Doctors' Wives (1967), in which high powered doctors neglect their wives in pursuit of their careers.

Slaughter wrote 56 books and they sold about 60 million copies. They were translated into all major languages. In addition to the then-modern medical dramas and historical fiction, Slaughter wrote novels based on biblical stories set in the Holy Land and also in Europe during the Renaissance. Curiously, Slaughter rarely traveled. He visited Europe once when he was in his 60s but never went to the Middle East. His first novel, That None Should Die (1941) offered a young doctor's view of socialized medicine. His last novel, No Greater Love (1984) was also a medical story. Slaughter died in 2001 at the age of 93.