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15,746 | Jacques Mayol | Jacques Mayol (1 April 1927 – 22 December 2001) was a French diver and the holder of many world records in free diving. The 1988 film The Big Blue, directed by Luc Besson, was inspired by his life story and that of his friend, Enzo Maiorca. Mayol was one of the screenwriters and authored the book Homo Delphinus: the Dolphin Within Man of his philosophy about the aquatic origins of humans.
Jacques Mayol was a French national born in Shanghai, China. Mayol spent his summer holidays in Karatsu (Japan) every year as a child. When he was 7, he would skin dive with his older brother in seas around Nanatsugama (ja:七つ釜)(Karatsu, Japan), where he saw a dolphin for the first time. Mayol described the fateful encounter in his book, "Homo Delphinus: The Dolphin Within Man".
On 23 November 1976, at 49, he became the first free diver to descend to 100 metres (330 ft), and when he was 56 he managed to descend to 105 metres (344 ft). During the scientific research phase of his career, Mayol tried to answer the question of whether man had a hidden aquatic potential that could be evoked by rigorous physiological and psychological training.
Mayol's lifelong passion for diving was based on his love for the ocean, his personal philosophy, and his desire to explore his own limits. During his lifetime, he helped introduce the then-elitist sport of free-diving into the mainstream. His diving philosophy was to reach a state of mind based on relaxation and yoga breathing, with which he could accomplish apnea. He also contributed to technological advances in the field of free-diving, particularly improving assemblies used by no-limits divers. He was also instrumental in the development of scuba diving's octopus regulator, which was invented by Dave Woodward at UNEXSO in 1965 or 1966. Woodward believed that having safety divers carry two second stages would be a safer and more practical approach than buddy breathing in the event of an emergency.
Mayol was already an experienced free diver when he met the Sicilian Enzo Maiorca, who was the first person to dive below 50 metres (160 ft). Mayol reached 60 metres (200 ft) depth. A friendship, as well as rivalry, between the two men ensued. Their most famous records were set in the no-limits category, in which divers are permitted to use weighted sleds to descend and air balloons for a speedy ascent. Between 1966 and 1983, Mayol was the no-limits world champion eight times. In 1981 he set a world record of 61 metres (200 ft) in the constant weight discipline, using fins. In 1976, Mayol broke the 100 metres (330 ft) barrier with a no-limits 101 metres (331 ft) dive off Elba, Italy. Tests showed that during this dive his heart beat decreased from 60 to 27 beats/min, an aspect of the mammalian diving reflex, a reflex more evident in whales, seals, and dolphins. Mayol's last deep dive followed in 1983 when he reached the depth of 105 metres (344 ft), at the age of 56.
Mayol's fascination with dolphins started in 1955 when he was working as a commercial diver at an aquarium in Miami, Florida. There he met a female dolphin called Clown and formed a close bond with her. Imitating Clown, he learned how to hold his breath longer and how to behave and integrate himself underwater. It is the dolphins that became the foundation of Mayol's life philosophy of "Homo Delphinus".
Throughout his book L'Homo Delphinus (2000 published in English as Homo Delphinus: The Dolphin within Man by Idelson Gnocchi Publishers Ltd.) Mayol expounds his theories about man's relationship with the sea, and explores the aquatic ape hypothesis of human origins. He felt man could reawaken his dormant mental and spiritual faculties and the physiological mechanisms from the depths of his psyche and genetic make-up to develop the potential of his aquatic origins, to become a Homo delphinus.
Jacques Mayol predicted that within a couple of generations, some people would be able to dive to 300 metres (980 ft) and hold their breath for up to ten minutes. Today the no-limits record stands at 253 m (Herbert Nitsch, June 2012). Serbian Branko Petrović holds the record for Static Apnea at 11 minutes and 54 seconds (October 2014). Croatian Goran Čolak holds the record for static apnea on pure oxygen at 23 minutes 1 second (June 2014).
The film The Big Blue, directed by Luc Besson in 1988, was inspired by his life story and the life story of the Italian diver Enzo Maiorca and their friendship. Mayol was one of the screenwriters.
Mayol was the subject of the 2017 documentary film Dolphin Man (L'Homme dauphin, sur les traces de Jacques Mayol), directed by Lefteris Charitos.
On 22 December 2001 at the age of 74, suffering depression, Mayol committed suicide by hanging himself at his villa in Elba, Italy. His ashes were spread over the Tuscany coast. Friends have erected a monument to him in the southeast of Elba at 16 metres (52 ft) depth. | [
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"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jacques Mayol (1 April 1927 – 22 December 2001) was a French diver and the holder of many world records in free diving. The 1988 film The Big Blue, directed by Luc Besson, was inspired by his life story and that of his friend, Enzo Maiorca. Mayol was one of the screenwriters and authored the book Homo Delphinus: the Dolphin Within Man of his philosophy about the aquatic origins of humans.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Jacques Mayol was a French national born in Shanghai, China. Mayol spent his summer holidays in Karatsu (Japan) every year as a child. When he was 7, he would skin dive with his older brother in seas around Nanatsugama (ja:七つ釜)(Karatsu, Japan), where he saw a dolphin for the first time. Mayol described the fateful encounter in his book, \"Homo Delphinus: The Dolphin Within Man\".",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "On 23 November 1976, at 49, he became the first free diver to descend to 100 metres (330 ft), and when he was 56 he managed to descend to 105 metres (344 ft). During the scientific research phase of his career, Mayol tried to answer the question of whether man had a hidden aquatic potential that could be evoked by rigorous physiological and psychological training.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Mayol's lifelong passion for diving was based on his love for the ocean, his personal philosophy, and his desire to explore his own limits. During his lifetime, he helped introduce the then-elitist sport of free-diving into the mainstream. His diving philosophy was to reach a state of mind based on relaxation and yoga breathing, with which he could accomplish apnea. He also contributed to technological advances in the field of free-diving, particularly improving assemblies used by no-limits divers. He was also instrumental in the development of scuba diving's octopus regulator, which was invented by Dave Woodward at UNEXSO in 1965 or 1966. Woodward believed that having safety divers carry two second stages would be a safer and more practical approach than buddy breathing in the event of an emergency.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Mayol was already an experienced free diver when he met the Sicilian Enzo Maiorca, who was the first person to dive below 50 metres (160 ft). Mayol reached 60 metres (200 ft) depth. A friendship, as well as rivalry, between the two men ensued. Their most famous records were set in the no-limits category, in which divers are permitted to use weighted sleds to descend and air balloons for a speedy ascent. Between 1966 and 1983, Mayol was the no-limits world champion eight times. In 1981 he set a world record of 61 metres (200 ft) in the constant weight discipline, using fins. In 1976, Mayol broke the 100 metres (330 ft) barrier with a no-limits 101 metres (331 ft) dive off Elba, Italy. Tests showed that during this dive his heart beat decreased from 60 to 27 beats/min, an aspect of the mammalian diving reflex, a reflex more evident in whales, seals, and dolphins. Mayol's last deep dive followed in 1983 when he reached the depth of 105 metres (344 ft), at the age of 56.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Mayol's fascination with dolphins started in 1955 when he was working as a commercial diver at an aquarium in Miami, Florida. There he met a female dolphin called Clown and formed a close bond with her. Imitating Clown, he learned how to hold his breath longer and how to behave and integrate himself underwater. It is the dolphins that became the foundation of Mayol's life philosophy of \"Homo Delphinus\".",
"title": "Dolphins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Throughout his book L'Homo Delphinus (2000 published in English as Homo Delphinus: The Dolphin within Man by Idelson Gnocchi Publishers Ltd.) Mayol expounds his theories about man's relationship with the sea, and explores the aquatic ape hypothesis of human origins. He felt man could reawaken his dormant mental and spiritual faculties and the physiological mechanisms from the depths of his psyche and genetic make-up to develop the potential of his aquatic origins, to become a Homo delphinus.",
"title": "Dolphins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Jacques Mayol predicted that within a couple of generations, some people would be able to dive to 300 metres (980 ft) and hold their breath for up to ten minutes. Today the no-limits record stands at 253 m (Herbert Nitsch, June 2012). Serbian Branko Petrović holds the record for Static Apnea at 11 minutes and 54 seconds (October 2014). Croatian Goran Čolak holds the record for static apnea on pure oxygen at 23 minutes 1 second (June 2014).",
"title": "Dolphins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The film The Big Blue, directed by Luc Besson in 1988, was inspired by his life story and the life story of the Italian diver Enzo Maiorca and their friendship. Mayol was one of the screenwriters.",
"title": "Film"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Mayol was the subject of the 2017 documentary film Dolphin Man (L'Homme dauphin, sur les traces de Jacques Mayol), directed by Lefteris Charitos.",
"title": "Film"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "On 22 December 2001 at the age of 74, suffering depression, Mayol committed suicide by hanging himself at his villa in Elba, Italy. His ashes were spread over the Tuscany coast. Friends have erected a monument to him in the southeast of Elba at 16 metres (52 ft) depth.",
"title": "Death"
}
]
| Jacques Mayol was a French diver and the holder of many world records in free diving. The 1988 film The Big Blue, directed by Luc Besson, was inspired by his life story and that of his friend, Enzo Maiorca. Mayol was one of the screenwriters and authored the book Homo Delphinus: the Dolphin Within Man of his philosophy about the aquatic origins of humans. | 2001-05-14T10:06:04Z | 2023-12-03T17:45:25Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Mayol |
15,747 | Josef Terboven | Josef Antonius Heinrich Terboven (23 May 1898 – 8 May 1945) was a Nazi Party official and politician who was the long-serving Gauleiter of Gau Essen and the Reichskommissar for Norway during the German occupation.
Terboven was born in Essen, Germany, and attended Volksschule and Realschule before he volunteered for military service during the First World War. After the war, he studied law and political science at the University of Munich and the University of Freiburg, where he first got involved in politics. Terboven joined the Nazi Party in 1923, participated in the Beer Hall Putsch and eventually rose through the ranks to become the Gauleiter of Essen and the editor of various Nazi newspapers. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Terboven was promoted to SA-Gruppenführer and was made a member of the Prussian State Council.
In 1940, he was appointed Reichskommissar for Norway, a position that granted him significant power and control. Terboven established multiple concentration camps in Norway, ruthlessly persecuted the Jewish population and focused on crushing the Norwegian resistance movement. His actions led to numerous atrocities, such as the Beisfjord massacre in which hundreds of Yugoslavian political prisoners and prisoners-of-war were murdered.
As the tide of the war turned against Germany, Terboven implemented a scorched earth policy in northern Norway that resulted in the forced evacuation of 50,000 Norwegians and widespread destruction. He hoped to turn Norway into a fortress for the Nazi regime's last stand. However, after Adolf Hitler's suicide, his successor, Großadmiral Karl Dönitz, dismissed Terboven from his post as Reichskommissar on 7 May 1945.
On 8 May 1945, the day of Germany's surrender, Terboven committed suicide by detonating 50 kg of dynamite in a bunker on the Skaugum compound in Norway. His family survived him in West Germany, and his wife, Ilse (Stahl) Terboven died in 1972.
Terboven was born in Essen, the son of minor landed gentry. The family name comes from the Low German dar boven ("up there"), referring to a farmstead on a hill. Josef Terboven attended volksschule and realschule in Essen until 1915 and then volunteered for military service in the First World War. He served with Feldartillerie Regiment 9 and then with the nascent air force. He was awarded the Iron Cross, 1st and 2nd class, and attained the rank of Leutnant before being discharged on 22 December 1918. He studied law and political science at the University of Munich and the University of Freiburg, where he first got involved in politics. He dropped out of the university in 1922 without earning a degree and trained as a bank official in Essen, working as a bank clerk through June 1925.
Terboven joined the Nazi Party in November 1923 with membership number 25,247 and participated in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. When the Party subsequently was outlawed, he continued to work at the bank until after the ban was lifted in February 1925. In August 1925 Terboven went to work full-time for the Party, becoming the head of a small Nazi newspaper and book distributorship in Essen. At this time he also founded the Ortsgruppe (Local Group) in Essen, becoming its first Ortsgruppenleiter. He also joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) becoming the SA-Führer in Essen. He formally re-enrolled in the Party on 15 December 1925. From 1927 to December 1930, Terboven was the editor of the weekly Nazi newspaper “The New Front: The Weekly Sheet of the Working People.” By 1927 he had advanced to Bezirksleiter (District Leader) of the Essen district in the Großgau Ruhr. In the 20 May 1928 election, Terboven failed in his attempt to be elected to the Prussian Landtag.
On 1 October 1928 upon the dissolution of the Großgau Ruhr, the Essen district became an independent unit subordinated to the central Party headquarters in Munich. However, on 1 August 1930 the Essen district officially was raised to Gau status and Terboven was named Gauleiter. He would retain this post throughout the Nazi regime.
In 1930 Terboven also became a City Councilor in Essen and a member of the Provincial Landtag of the Rhine Province. On 14 September 1930, Terboven was elected to the Reichstag from electoral constituency 23, Dusseldorf-West; he would serve as a Reichstag deputy until the end of the Nazi regime. From 15 December 1930, Terboven was also the editor of the National-Zeiting in Essen.
After the Nazi seizure of power, Terboven was promoted to SA-Gruppenführer on 1 March 1933 and made a member of the Prussian State Council on 10 July 1933. On 28 June 1934, Terboven married Ilse Stahl, Joseph Goebbels's former secretary and mistress. Adolf Hitler was a witness at the wedding, and while in Essen put into play preparations for the Night of the Long Knives. On 5 February 1935, Terboven was appointed Oberpräsident (High President) of Prussia's Rhine Province which included Gau Essen and three other Gaue. He thus united under his control the highest party and governmental offices within his jurisdiction. On 27 April 1935 Terboven received the Golden Party Badge. He was promoted to the rank of SA-Obergruppenführer on 9 November 1936. On the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939, he was named Reich Defense Commissioner for Wehrkreis (Military District) VI, which included his Gau together with Gau Dusseldorf, Gau Cologne-Aachen, most of Gau Westphalia-North and Gau Westphalia-South and part of Gau Weser-Ems. On 16 November 1942, the jurisdiction of the Reich Defense Commissioners was changed from the Wehrkreis to the Gau level and Terboven remained Commissioner for only his Gau of Essen.
Terboven was named Reichskommissar for Norway on 24 April 1940 even before the military invasion's completion on 10 June. He moved into Skaugum, the official residence of Crown Prince Olav, in September 1940 and made his headquarters in the Norwegian Parliament building. Nothing in Terboven's background and training particularly qualified him for that post, but he had Hitler's full confidence. He was responsible to no one but Hitler, and within the Nazi governmental hierarchy, his office stood on the same level as the Reich Ministries. Terboven regarded himself as virtually an autonomous viceroy with what he termed “limitless power of command”. His conception of his role resulted in his attempting to ignore any directives not issued by Hitler himself.
Reichskommissar Terboven had supervisory authority over only the German civilian administration, which was very small and did not rule Norway directly. Day-to-day governmental affairs were managed by the existing seven-member Norwegian Administrative Council, which had been set up by the Norwegian Supreme Court after the king and cabinet fled into exile. On 25 September 1940, Terboven dismissed the Administrative Council and appointed a thirteen-member Provisional State Council to administer affairs. All the members were Terboven's hand-picked appointees and worked under his control and supervision. A proclamation was issued deposing King Haakon VII, outlawing the government-in-exile, disbanding the Storting and banning all political parties except Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling. Terboven therefore remained in ultimate charge of Norway until the end of the war in 1945, even after he had permitted the formation of a Norwegian puppet regime on 1 February 1942 under Quisling as minister-president, the so-called Quisling government.
Terboven also did not have authority over the 400,000 regular German Army forces that were stationed in Norway which were under the command of Generaloberst Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, but he commanded a personal force of around 6,000 men of whom 800 were part of the secret police. In contrast to the military forces commanded by Falkenhorst, which aimed to reach an understanding with the Norwegian people and were under orders by Falkenhorst to treat Norwegians with courtesy, Terboven behaved in a petty and ruthless way and was widely disliked not only by the Norwegians but also by many Germans. Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, expressed annoyance in his disques about what he called Terboven's "bullying tactics" against the Norwegians, as they alienated the population against the Germans. Terboven's relations with the army commander were strained, but his relations with the Higher SS and Police Leader, Wilhelm Rediess, were very good, and he co-operated in providing Rediess's staff a free hand with their policies of repression.
Terboven established multiple concentration camps in Norway, including Falstad concentration camp near Levanger and Bredtvet concentration camp in Oslo in late 1941. At one of those camps on 18 July 1942 the Beisfjord massacre took place, the murder of hundreds of Yugoslavian political prisoners and prisoners-of-war by German and Norwegian concentration camp guards. Some 288 prisoners were shot to death, and many others were burned to death when the barracks were set on fire. Terboven had ordered the massacre a few days earlier. In July 1942, at least one German guard assigned to the Korgen prison camp was killed. The commandant ordered retribution: execution by gunfire for "39 prisoners at Korgen and 20 at Osen";. In the days that followed, Terboven also ordered retribution, and around 400 prisoners shot and killed in various camps.
From 1941, Terboven increasingly focused on crushing the Norwegian resistance movement, which engaged in acts of sabotage and assassination against the Germans. On 17 September, Terboven decreed that special SS and Police Tribunals would have jurisdiction over Norwegian citizens who violated his decrees. They were summary proceedings with the accused provided no adequate defense. The trials were not open to the public, and the proceedings were not published. Sentences were carried out shortly after they were pronounced with no right of appeal. It is estimated that some 150 individuals were sentenced to death by these tribunals. Many more were sentenced to long terms of hard labour.
On 26 April 1942, the Nazis learned that two members of the resistance were being sheltered by the inhabitants of Telavåg, a small fishing village. When the Gestapo arrived, shots were exchanged, and two Gestapo agents were killed. Terboven was outraged and personally led a reprisal raid on 30 April that was quick and brutal. All buildings were burned to the ground, all boats were sunk or confiscated and all livestock taken away. All men in the village were either executed or sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in Germany. Of the 72 who were deported from Telavåg, 31 were murdered in captivity. The women and the children were imprisoned for two years. Another 18 Norwegian prisoners unrelated to Telavåg, who were held at the Trandum internment camp, were also executed as reprisals. In another incident, the shooting of two German police officials on 6 September 1942 led to Terboven personally declaring martial law in Trondheim from 5 to 12 October 1942. He imposed a curfew from 8:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. and suppressed all newspapers, public assemblies and railroad transportation. On Terboven's orders, ten prominent citizens were executed in reprisal, and their assets were confiscated. In addition, Terboven set up an ad hoc extrajudicial tribunal to try Norwegians considered “hostile to the state”. An additional 24 men were tried and summarily executed over the next three days.
Despite the small number of Jews in Norway's population (around 1,800), Terboven persecuted them relentlessly. Some 930 managed to escape to neighboring Sweden, but some 770 were rounded up and deported to Germany. The main deportation occurred on 26 November 1942, when 532 Jews were shipped to Stettin aboard the SS Donau. From there, they were transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and only 9 survived the war. On 25 February 1943, another 158 were similarly deported aboard the MS Gotenland, and only 6 survived.
On 25 September 1944, Terboven, in his capacity as Gauleiter of Essen, was named commander of the Volkssturm units in the Gau. In reality, it was his Deputy Gauleiter, Fritz Schlessmann, who executed those duties as he had been Acting Gauleiter in Essen during Terboven's absence in Norway since 1940. In October 1944, in response to the Red Army advance in to the Finnmark region of northern Norway, Terboven instituted a scorched earth policy that resulted in the forced evacuation of 50,000 Norwegians and widespread destruction, including the burning of 10,000 homes; 4700 farms; and hundreds of schools, churches, shops and industrial buildings.
As the tide of the war turned against Germany, Terboven's personal aspiration was to organise Festung Norwegen (Fortress Norway) for the Nazi regime's last stand. However, after Hitler's suicide, his successor, Großadmiral Karl Dönitz, summoned Terboven to his headquarters in Flensburg on 3 May 1945 and ordered him to cooperate with winding down hostilities. Terboven expressed his desire to continue fighting. Consequently, Dönitz dismissed Terboven from his post as Reichskommissar on 7 May and transferred his powers to General der Gebirgstruppe Franz Böhme.
With the announcement of Germany's surrender, Terboven committed suicide on 8 May 1945 by detonating 50 kg of dynamite in a bunker on the Skaugum compound. He died alongside the body of Obergruppenführer Rediess, who had shot himself earlier. Terboven's family survived in West Germany, although in an event in 1964 unrelated to her father's history, Josef Terboven's daughter, Inga, killed her two-year old daughter, by strangulation. Josef Terboven's wife, Ilse (Stahl) died in 1972. | [
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"title": ""
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{
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"text": "Terboven was born in Essen, Germany, and attended Volksschule and Realschule before he volunteered for military service during the First World War. After the war, he studied law and political science at the University of Munich and the University of Freiburg, where he first got involved in politics. Terboven joined the Nazi Party in 1923, participated in the Beer Hall Putsch and eventually rose through the ranks to become the Gauleiter of Essen and the editor of various Nazi newspapers. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Terboven was promoted to SA-Gruppenführer and was made a member of the Prussian State Council.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "In 1940, he was appointed Reichskommissar for Norway, a position that granted him significant power and control. Terboven established multiple concentration camps in Norway, ruthlessly persecuted the Jewish population and focused on crushing the Norwegian resistance movement. His actions led to numerous atrocities, such as the Beisfjord massacre in which hundreds of Yugoslavian political prisoners and prisoners-of-war were murdered.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "As the tide of the war turned against Germany, Terboven implemented a scorched earth policy in northern Norway that resulted in the forced evacuation of 50,000 Norwegians and widespread destruction. He hoped to turn Norway into a fortress for the Nazi regime's last stand. However, after Adolf Hitler's suicide, his successor, Großadmiral Karl Dönitz, dismissed Terboven from his post as Reichskommissar on 7 May 1945.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "On 8 May 1945, the day of Germany's surrender, Terboven committed suicide by detonating 50 kg of dynamite in a bunker on the Skaugum compound in Norway. His family survived him in West Germany, and his wife, Ilse (Stahl) Terboven died in 1972.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Terboven was born in Essen, the son of minor landed gentry. The family name comes from the Low German dar boven (\"up there\"), referring to a farmstead on a hill. Josef Terboven attended volksschule and realschule in Essen until 1915 and then volunteered for military service in the First World War. He served with Feldartillerie Regiment 9 and then with the nascent air force. He was awarded the Iron Cross, 1st and 2nd class, and attained the rank of Leutnant before being discharged on 22 December 1918. He studied law and political science at the University of Munich and the University of Freiburg, where he first got involved in politics. He dropped out of the university in 1922 without earning a degree and trained as a bank official in Essen, working as a bank clerk through June 1925.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Terboven joined the Nazi Party in November 1923 with membership number 25,247 and participated in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. When the Party subsequently was outlawed, he continued to work at the bank until after the ban was lifted in February 1925. In August 1925 Terboven went to work full-time for the Party, becoming the head of a small Nazi newspaper and book distributorship in Essen. At this time he also founded the Ortsgruppe (Local Group) in Essen, becoming its first Ortsgruppenleiter. He also joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) becoming the SA-Führer in Essen. He formally re-enrolled in the Party on 15 December 1925. From 1927 to December 1930, Terboven was the editor of the weekly Nazi newspaper “The New Front: The Weekly Sheet of the Working People.” By 1927 he had advanced to Bezirksleiter (District Leader) of the Essen district in the Großgau Ruhr. In the 20 May 1928 election, Terboven failed in his attempt to be elected to the Prussian Landtag.",
"title": "Nazi Party career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "On 1 October 1928 upon the dissolution of the Großgau Ruhr, the Essen district became an independent unit subordinated to the central Party headquarters in Munich. However, on 1 August 1930 the Essen district officially was raised to Gau status and Terboven was named Gauleiter. He would retain this post throughout the Nazi regime.",
"title": "Nazi Party career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1930 Terboven also became a City Councilor in Essen and a member of the Provincial Landtag of the Rhine Province. On 14 September 1930, Terboven was elected to the Reichstag from electoral constituency 23, Dusseldorf-West; he would serve as a Reichstag deputy until the end of the Nazi regime. From 15 December 1930, Terboven was also the editor of the National-Zeiting in Essen.",
"title": "Nazi Party career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "After the Nazi seizure of power, Terboven was promoted to SA-Gruppenführer on 1 March 1933 and made a member of the Prussian State Council on 10 July 1933. On 28 June 1934, Terboven married Ilse Stahl, Joseph Goebbels's former secretary and mistress. Adolf Hitler was a witness at the wedding, and while in Essen put into play preparations for the Night of the Long Knives. On 5 February 1935, Terboven was appointed Oberpräsident (High President) of Prussia's Rhine Province which included Gau Essen and three other Gaue. He thus united under his control the highest party and governmental offices within his jurisdiction. On 27 April 1935 Terboven received the Golden Party Badge. He was promoted to the rank of SA-Obergruppenführer on 9 November 1936. On the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939, he was named Reich Defense Commissioner for Wehrkreis (Military District) VI, which included his Gau together with Gau Dusseldorf, Gau Cologne-Aachen, most of Gau Westphalia-North and Gau Westphalia-South and part of Gau Weser-Ems. On 16 November 1942, the jurisdiction of the Reich Defense Commissioners was changed from the Wehrkreis to the Gau level and Terboven remained Commissioner for only his Gau of Essen.",
"title": "Nazi Party career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Terboven was named Reichskommissar for Norway on 24 April 1940 even before the military invasion's completion on 10 June. He moved into Skaugum, the official residence of Crown Prince Olav, in September 1940 and made his headquarters in the Norwegian Parliament building. Nothing in Terboven's background and training particularly qualified him for that post, but he had Hitler's full confidence. He was responsible to no one but Hitler, and within the Nazi governmental hierarchy, his office stood on the same level as the Reich Ministries. Terboven regarded himself as virtually an autonomous viceroy with what he termed “limitless power of command”. His conception of his role resulted in his attempting to ignore any directives not issued by Hitler himself.",
"title": "Reichskommissar of Norway"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Reichskommissar Terboven had supervisory authority over only the German civilian administration, which was very small and did not rule Norway directly. Day-to-day governmental affairs were managed by the existing seven-member Norwegian Administrative Council, which had been set up by the Norwegian Supreme Court after the king and cabinet fled into exile. On 25 September 1940, Terboven dismissed the Administrative Council and appointed a thirteen-member Provisional State Council to administer affairs. All the members were Terboven's hand-picked appointees and worked under his control and supervision. A proclamation was issued deposing King Haakon VII, outlawing the government-in-exile, disbanding the Storting and banning all political parties except Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling. Terboven therefore remained in ultimate charge of Norway until the end of the war in 1945, even after he had permitted the formation of a Norwegian puppet regime on 1 February 1942 under Quisling as minister-president, the so-called Quisling government.",
"title": "Reichskommissar of Norway"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Terboven also did not have authority over the 400,000 regular German Army forces that were stationed in Norway which were under the command of Generaloberst Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, but he commanded a personal force of around 6,000 men of whom 800 were part of the secret police. In contrast to the military forces commanded by Falkenhorst, which aimed to reach an understanding with the Norwegian people and were under orders by Falkenhorst to treat Norwegians with courtesy, Terboven behaved in a petty and ruthless way and was widely disliked not only by the Norwegians but also by many Germans. Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, expressed annoyance in his disques about what he called Terboven's \"bullying tactics\" against the Norwegians, as they alienated the population against the Germans. Terboven's relations with the army commander were strained, but his relations with the Higher SS and Police Leader, Wilhelm Rediess, were very good, and he co-operated in providing Rediess's staff a free hand with their policies of repression.",
"title": "Reichskommissar of Norway"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Terboven established multiple concentration camps in Norway, including Falstad concentration camp near Levanger and Bredtvet concentration camp in Oslo in late 1941. At one of those camps on 18 July 1942 the Beisfjord massacre took place, the murder of hundreds of Yugoslavian political prisoners and prisoners-of-war by German and Norwegian concentration camp guards. Some 288 prisoners were shot to death, and many others were burned to death when the barracks were set on fire. Terboven had ordered the massacre a few days earlier. In July 1942, at least one German guard assigned to the Korgen prison camp was killed. The commandant ordered retribution: execution by gunfire for \"39 prisoners at Korgen and 20 at Osen\";. In the days that followed, Terboven also ordered retribution, and around 400 prisoners shot and killed in various camps.",
"title": "Reichskommissar of Norway"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "From 1941, Terboven increasingly focused on crushing the Norwegian resistance movement, which engaged in acts of sabotage and assassination against the Germans. On 17 September, Terboven decreed that special SS and Police Tribunals would have jurisdiction over Norwegian citizens who violated his decrees. They were summary proceedings with the accused provided no adequate defense. The trials were not open to the public, and the proceedings were not published. Sentences were carried out shortly after they were pronounced with no right of appeal. It is estimated that some 150 individuals were sentenced to death by these tribunals. Many more were sentenced to long terms of hard labour.",
"title": "Reichskommissar of Norway"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "On 26 April 1942, the Nazis learned that two members of the resistance were being sheltered by the inhabitants of Telavåg, a small fishing village. When the Gestapo arrived, shots were exchanged, and two Gestapo agents were killed. Terboven was outraged and personally led a reprisal raid on 30 April that was quick and brutal. All buildings were burned to the ground, all boats were sunk or confiscated and all livestock taken away. All men in the village were either executed or sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in Germany. Of the 72 who were deported from Telavåg, 31 were murdered in captivity. The women and the children were imprisoned for two years. Another 18 Norwegian prisoners unrelated to Telavåg, who were held at the Trandum internment camp, were also executed as reprisals. In another incident, the shooting of two German police officials on 6 September 1942 led to Terboven personally declaring martial law in Trondheim from 5 to 12 October 1942. He imposed a curfew from 8:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. and suppressed all newspapers, public assemblies and railroad transportation. On Terboven's orders, ten prominent citizens were executed in reprisal, and their assets were confiscated. In addition, Terboven set up an ad hoc extrajudicial tribunal to try Norwegians considered “hostile to the state”. An additional 24 men were tried and summarily executed over the next three days.",
"title": "Reichskommissar of Norway"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Despite the small number of Jews in Norway's population (around 1,800), Terboven persecuted them relentlessly. Some 930 managed to escape to neighboring Sweden, but some 770 were rounded up and deported to Germany. The main deportation occurred on 26 November 1942, when 532 Jews were shipped to Stettin aboard the SS Donau. From there, they were transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and only 9 survived the war. On 25 February 1943, another 158 were similarly deported aboard the MS Gotenland, and only 6 survived.",
"title": "Reichskommissar of Norway"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "On 25 September 1944, Terboven, in his capacity as Gauleiter of Essen, was named commander of the Volkssturm units in the Gau. In reality, it was his Deputy Gauleiter, Fritz Schlessmann, who executed those duties as he had been Acting Gauleiter in Essen during Terboven's absence in Norway since 1940. In October 1944, in response to the Red Army advance in to the Finnmark region of northern Norway, Terboven instituted a scorched earth policy that resulted in the forced evacuation of 50,000 Norwegians and widespread destruction, including the burning of 10,000 homes; 4700 farms; and hundreds of schools, churches, shops and industrial buildings.",
"title": "Last months of war and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "As the tide of the war turned against Germany, Terboven's personal aspiration was to organise Festung Norwegen (Fortress Norway) for the Nazi regime's last stand. However, after Hitler's suicide, his successor, Großadmiral Karl Dönitz, summoned Terboven to his headquarters in Flensburg on 3 May 1945 and ordered him to cooperate with winding down hostilities. Terboven expressed his desire to continue fighting. Consequently, Dönitz dismissed Terboven from his post as Reichskommissar on 7 May and transferred his powers to General der Gebirgstruppe Franz Böhme.",
"title": "Last months of war and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "With the announcement of Germany's surrender, Terboven committed suicide on 8 May 1945 by detonating 50 kg of dynamite in a bunker on the Skaugum compound. He died alongside the body of Obergruppenführer Rediess, who had shot himself earlier. Terboven's family survived in West Germany, although in an event in 1964 unrelated to her father's history, Josef Terboven's daughter, Inga, killed her two-year old daughter, by strangulation. Josef Terboven's wife, Ilse (Stahl) died in 1972.",
"title": "Last months of war and death"
}
]
| Josef Antonius Heinrich Terboven was a Nazi Party official and politician who was the long-serving Gauleiter of Gau Essen and the Reichskommissar for Norway during the German occupation. Terboven was born in Essen, Germany, and attended Volksschule and Realschule before he volunteered for military service during the First World War. After the war, he studied law and political science at the University of Munich and the University of Freiburg, where he first got involved in politics. Terboven joined the Nazi Party in 1923, participated in the Beer Hall Putsch and eventually rose through the ranks to become the Gauleiter of Essen and the editor of various Nazi newspapers. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Terboven was promoted to SA-Gruppenführer and was made a member of the Prussian State Council. In 1940, he was appointed Reichskommissar for Norway, a position that granted him significant power and control. Terboven established multiple concentration camps in Norway, ruthlessly persecuted the Jewish population and focused on crushing the Norwegian resistance movement. His actions led to numerous atrocities, such as the Beisfjord massacre in which hundreds of Yugoslavian political prisoners and prisoners-of-war were murdered. As the tide of the war turned against Germany, Terboven implemented a scorched earth policy in northern Norway that resulted in the forced evacuation of 50,000 Norwegians and widespread destruction. He hoped to turn Norway into a fortress for the Nazi regime's last stand. However, after Adolf Hitler's suicide, his successor, Großadmiral Karl Dönitz, dismissed Terboven from his post as Reichskommissar on 7 May 1945. On 8 May 1945, the day of Germany's surrender, Terboven committed suicide by detonating 50 kg of dynamite in a bunker on the Skaugum compound in Norway. His family survived him in West Germany, and his wife, Ilse (Stahl) Terboven died in 1972. | 2001-05-14T12:00:35Z | 2023-12-29T01:20:41Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Terboven |
15,766 | James Brown | James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American singer and musician. The central progenitor of funk music and a major figure of 20th-century music, he is referred to by various honorific nicknames, some of which include "the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business", "Godfather of Soul", "Mr. Dynamite", and "Soul Brother No. 1". In a career that lasted more than 50 years, he influenced the development of several music genres. Brown was one of the first 10 inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction in New York on January 23, 1986.
Brown began his career as a gospel singer in Toccoa, Georgia. He rose to prominence in the mid-1950s as the lead singer of the Famous Flames, a rhythm and blues vocal group founded by Bobby Byrd. With the hit ballads "Please, Please, Please" and "Try Me", Brown built a reputation as a dynamic live performer with the Famous Flames and his backing band, sometimes known as the James Brown Band or the James Brown Orchestra. His success peaked in the 1960s with the live album Live at the Apollo and hit singles such as "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", "I Got You (I Feel Good)" and "It's a Man's Man's Man's World".
During the late 1960s, Brown moved from a continuum of blues and gospel-based forms and styles to a new approach to music-making, emphasizing stripped-down interlocking rhythms that influenced the development of funk music. By the early 1970s, Brown had fully established the funk sound after the formation of the J.B.s with records such as "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" and "The Payback". He also became noted for songs of social commentary, including the 1968 hit "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud". Brown continued to perform and record until his death from pneumonia in 2006.
Brown recorded and released 17 singles that reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B charts. He also holds the record for the most singles listed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart that did not reach No. 1. Brown was posthumously inducted into the first class of the Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2013 as an artist and then in 2017 as a songwriter. He also received honors from several other institutions, including inductions into the Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In Joel Whitburn's analysis of the Billboard R&B charts from 1942 to 2010, Brown is ranked No. 1 in the Top 500 Artists. He is ranked seventh on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
Brown was born on May 3, 1933, in Barnwell, South Carolina, to 16-year-old Susie (née Behling; 1917–2004) and 21-year-old Joseph Gardner Brown (1912–1993) in a small wooden shack. Brown's name was supposed to have been Joseph James Brown, but his first and middle names were mistakenly reversed on his birth certificate. In his autobiography, Brown stated that his father was of mixed African-American and Native American descent, while his mother was of mixed African-American and Asian descent.
The Brown family lived in poverty in Elko, South Carolina, which was an impoverished town at the time. They later moved to Augusta, Georgia, when James was four or five. His family first settled at one of his aunts' brothels. They later moved into a house shared with another aunt. Brown's mother eventually left the family after a contentious and abusive marriage and moved to New York.
He began singing in talent shows as a young child, first appearing at Augusta's Lenox Theater in 1944, winning the show after singing the ballad "So Long". While in Augusta, Brown performed buck dances for change to entertain troops from Camp Gordon at the start of World War II as their convoys traveled over a canal bridge near his aunt's home. This is where he first heard the legendary blues musician Howlin' Wolf play guitar. He learned to play the piano, guitar, and harmonica during this period. He became inspired to become an entertainer after hearing "Caldonia" by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five. In his teen years, Brown briefly had a career as a boxer.
At the age of 16, he was convicted of robbery and sent to a juvenile detention center in Toccoa. There, he formed a gospel quartet with four fellow cellmates, including Johnny Terry. Brown met singer Bobby Byrd when the two played against each other in a baseball game outside the detention center. Byrd also discovered that Brown could sing after hearing of "a guy called Music Box", which was Brown's nickname at the prison. Byrd has since claimed he and his family helped to secure an early release, which led to Brown promising the court he would "sing for the Lord". Brown was released on a work sponsorship with Toccoa business owner S.C. Lawson. Lawson was impressed with Brown's work ethic and secured his release with a promise to keep him employed for two years. Brown was paroled on June 14, 1952. Brown went on to work with both of Lawson's sons, and would come back to visit the family from time to time throughout his career. Shortly after being paroled he joined the gospel group the Ever-Ready Gospel Singers, featuring Byrd's sister Sarah.
Brown eventually joined Bobby Byrd's group in 1954. The group had evolved from the Gospel Starlighters, an a cappella gospel group, to an R&B group with the name the Avons. He reputedly joined the band after one of its members, Troy Collins, died in a car crash. Along with Brown and Byrd, the group consisted of Sylvester Keels, Doyle Oglesby, Fred Pulliam, Nash Knox and Nafloyd Scott. Influenced by R&B groups such as Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the Orioles and Billy Ward and his Dominoes, the group changed its name, first to the Toccoa Band and then to the Flames. Nafloyd's brother Baroy later joined the group on bass guitar, and Brown, Byrd and Keels switched lead positions and instruments, often playing drums and piano. Johnny Terry later joined, by which time Pulliam and Oglesby had long left.
Berry Trimier became the group's first manager, booking them at parties near college campuses in Georgia and South Carolina. The group had already gained a reputation as a good live act when they renamed themselves the Famous Flames. In 1955, the group had contacted Little Richard while performing in Macon. Richard convinced the group to get in contact with his manager at the time, Clint Brantley, at his nightclub. Brantley agreed to manage them after seeing the group audition. He then sent them to a local radio station to record a demo session, where they performed their own composition "Please, Please, Please", which was inspired when Little Richard wrote the words of the title on a napkin and Brown was determined to make a song out of it. The Famous Flames eventually signed with King Records' Federal subsidiary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and issued a re-recorded version of "Please, Please, Please" in March 1956. The song became the group's first R&B hit, selling over a million copies. None of their follow-ups gained similar success. By 1957, Brown had replaced Clint Brantley as manager and hired Ben Bart, chief of Universal Attractions Agency. That year the original Flames broke up, after Bart changed the name of the group to "James Brown and His Famous Flames".
In October 1958, Brown released the ballad "Try Me", which hit number one on the R&B chart in the beginning of 1959, becoming the first of seventeen chart-topping R&B hits. Shortly afterwards, he recruited his first band, led by J. C. Davis, and reunited with Bobby Byrd who joined a revived Famous Flames lineup that included Eugene "Baby" Lloyd Stallworth and Bobby Bennett, with Johnny Terry sometimes coming in as the "fifth Flame". Brown, the Flames, and his entire band debuted at the Apollo Theater on April 24, 1959, opening for Brown's idol, Little Willie John. Federal Records issued two albums credited to Brown and the Famous Flames (both contained previously released singles). By 1960, Brown began multi-tasking in the recording studio involving himself, his singing group, the Famous Flames, and his band, a separate entity from the Flames, sometimes named the James Brown Orchestra or the James Brown Band. That year the band released the top ten R&B hit "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" on Dade Records, owned by Henry Stone, billed under the pseudonym "Nat Kendrick & the Swans" due to label issues. As a result of its success, King president Syd Nathan shifted Brown's contract from Federal to the parent label, King, which according to Brown in his autobiography meant "you got more support from the company". While with King, Brown, under the Famous Flames lineup, released the hit-filled album Think! and the following year released two albums with the James Brown Band earning second billing. With the Famous Flames, Brown sang lead on several more hits, including "Bewildered", "I'll Go Crazy" and "Think", songs that hinted at his emerging style.
In 1962, Brown and his band scored a hit with their cover of the instrumental "Night Train", becoming a top five R&B single. That same year, the ballads "Lost Someone" and "Baby You're Right", the latter a Joe Tex composition, added to his repertoire and increased his reputation with R&B audiences. On October 24, 1962, Brown financed a live recording of a performance at the Apollo and convinced Syd Nathan to release the album, despite Nathan's belief that no one would buy a live album due to the fact that Brown's singles had already been bought and that live albums were usually bad sellers.
Live at the Apollo was released the following June and became an immediate hit, eventually reaching number two on the Top LPs chart and selling over a million copies, staying on the charts for 14 months. In 1963, Brown scored his first top 20 pop hit with his rendition of the standard "Prisoner of Love". He also launched his first label, Try Me Records, which included recordings by the likes of Tammy Montgomery (later to be famous as Tammi Terrell), Johnny & Bill (Famous Flames associates Johnny Terry and Bill Hollings) and the Poets, which was another name used for Brown's backing band. During this time, Brown began an ill-fated two-year relationship with 17-year-old Tammi Terrell when she sang in his revue. Terrell ended their personal and professional relationship because of his abusive behavior.
In 1964, seeking bigger commercial success, Brown and Bobby Byrd formed the production company, Fair Deal, linking the operation to the Mercury imprint, Smash Records. King Records, however, fought against this and was granted an injunction preventing Brown from releasing any recordings for the label. Prior to the injunction, Brown had released three vocal singles, including the blues-oriented hit "Out of Sight", which further indicated the direction his music was going to take. Touring throughout the year, Brown and the Famous Flames grabbed more national attention after delivering an explosive show-stopping performance on the live concert film The T.A.M.I. Show. The Flames' dynamic gospel-tinged vocals, polished choreography and timing as well as Brown's energetic dance moves and high-octane singing upstaged the proposed closing act, the Rolling Stones.
Having signed a new deal with King, Brown released his song "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" in 1965, which became his first top ten pop hit and won him his first Grammy Award. Brown also signed a production deal with Loma Records. Later in 1965, he issued "I Got You", which became his second single in a row to reach number-one on the R&B chart and top ten on the pop chart. Brown followed that up with the ballad "It's a Man's Man's Man's World", a third Top 10 Pop hit (No. 1 R&B) which confirmed his stance as a top-ranking performer, especially with R&B audiences from that point on.
By 1967, Brown's emerging sound had begun to be defined as funk music. That year he released what some critics cited as the first true funk song, "Cold Sweat", which hit number-one on the R&B chart (Top 10 Pop) and became one of his first recordings to contain a drum break and also the first that featured a harmony that was reduced to a single chord. The instrumental arrangements on tracks such as "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" and "Licking Stick-Licking Stick" (both recorded in 1968) and "Funky Drummer" (recorded in 1969) featured a more developed version of Brown's mid-1960s style, with the horn section, guitars, bass and drums meshed together in intricate rhythmic patterns based on multiple interlocking riffs.
Changes in Brown's style that started with "Cold Sweat" also established the musical foundation for Brown's later hits, such as "I Got the Feelin'" (1968) and "Mother Popcorn" (1969). By this time Brown's vocals frequently took the form of a kind of rhythmic declamation, not quite sung but not quite spoken, that only intermittently featured traces of pitch or melody. This would become a major influence on the techniques of rapping, which would come to maturity along with hip hop music in the coming decades. Brown's style of funk in the late 1960s was based on interlocking syncopated parts: strutting bass lines, syncopated drum patterns, and iconic percussive guitar riffs. The main guitar ostinatos for "Ain't It Funky" and "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" (both 1969), are examples of Brown's refinement of New Orleans funk; irresistibly danceable riffs, stripped down to their rhythmic essence. On both recordings, the tonal structure is bare bones. The pattern of attack points is the emphasis, not the pattern of pitches as if the guitar were an African drum or idiophone. Alexander Stewart states that this popular feel was passed along from "New Orleans—through James Brown's music, to the popular music of the 1970s". Those same tracks were later resurrected by countless hip-hop musicians from the 1970s onward. As a result, James Brown remains to this day the world's most sampled recording artist, but, two tracks that he wrote, are also synonymous with modern dance, especially with house music, jungle music, and drum and bass music, (which were sped up exponentially, in the latter two genres).
"Bring it Up" has an Afro-Cuban guajeo-like structure. All three of these guitar riffs are based on an onbeat/offbeat structure. Stewart says that it "is different from a time line (such as clave and tresillo) in that it is not an exact pattern, but more of a loose organizing principle."
It was around this time as the musician's popularity increased that he acquired the nickname "Soul Brother No. 1", after failing to win the title "King of Soul" from Solomon Burke during a Chicago gig two years prior. Brown's recordings during this period influenced musicians across the industry, most notably groups such as Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Booker T. & the M.G.s as well as vocalists such as Edwin Starr, David Ruffin and Dennis Edwards from the Temptations, and Michael Jackson, who, throughout his career, cited Brown as his ultimate idol.
Brown's band during this period employed musicians and arrangers who had come up through the jazz tradition. He was noted for his ability as a bandleader and songwriter to blend the simplicity and drive of R&B with the rhythmic complexity and precision of jazz. Trumpeter Lewis Hamlin and saxophonist/keyboardist Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis (the successor to previous bandleader Nat Jones) led the band. Guitarist Jimmy Nolen provided percussive, deceptively simple riffs for each song, and Maceo Parker's prominent saxophone solos provided a focal point for many performances. Other members of Brown's band included stalwart Famous Flames singer and sideman Bobby Byrd, trombonist Fred Wesley, drummers John "Jabo" Starks, Clyde Stubblefield and Melvin Parker, saxophonist St. Clair Pinckney, guitarist Alphonso "Country" Kellum and bassist Bernard Odum.
In addition to a torrent of singles and studio albums, Brown's output during this period included two more successful live albums, Live at the Garden (1967) and Live at the Apollo, Volume II (1968), and a 1968 television special, James Brown: Man to Man. His music empire expanded along with his influence on the music scene. As Brown's music empire grew, his desire for financial and artistic independence grew as well. Brown bought radio stations during the late 1960s, including WRDW in his native Augusta, where he shined shoes as a boy. In November 1967, James Brown purchased radio station WGYW in Knoxville, Tennessee, for a reported $75,000, according to the January 20, 1968 Record World magazine. The call letters were changed to WJBE reflecting his initials. WJBE began on January 15, 1968, and broadcast a Rhythm & Blues format. The station slogan was "WJBE 1430 Raw Soul". Brown also bought WEBB in Baltimore in 1970.
Brown branched out to make several recordings with musicians outside his own band. In an attempt to appeal to the older, more affluent, and predominantly white adult contemporary audience, Brown recorded Gettin' Down To It (1969) and Soul on Top (1970)—two albums consisting mostly of romantic ballads, jazz standards, and homologous reinterpretations of his earlier hits—with the Dee Felice Trio and the Louie Bellson Orchestra. In 1968, he recorded a number of funk-oriented tracks with the Dapps, a white Cincinnati band, including the hit "I Can't Stand Myself". He also released three albums of Christmas music with his own band.
In March 1970, most of Brown's mid-to-late 1960s road band walked out on him due to financial disputes, a development augured by the prior disbandment of the Famous Flames singing group for the same reason in 1968. Brown and erstwhile Famous Flames singer Bobby Byrd (who chose to remain in the band during this tumultuous period as co-frontman, effectively serving as a proto-hype man in live performances) subsequently recruited several members of the Pacemakers, a Cincinnati-based ensemble that included bassist Bootsy Collins and his brother, guitarist Phelps "Catfish" Collins; augmented by the remaining members of the 1960s road band (including Fred Wesley, who rejoined Brown's outfit in December 1970) and other newer musicians, they would form the nucleus of the J.B.'s, Brown's new backing ensemble. Shortly following their first performance together, the band entered the studio to record the Brown-Byrd composition, "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine"; the song —with its off the beat play Brown called "The One"— and other contemporaneous singles would further cement Brown's influence in the nascent genre of funk music. This iteration of the J.B.'s dissolved after a March 1971 European tour (documented on the 1991 archival release Love Power Peace) due to additional money disputes and Bootsy Collins's use of LSD; a new lineup of the J.B.'s coalesced around Wesley, St. Clair Pinckney and drummer John Starks.
In 1971, Brown began recording for Polydor Records. Many of his sidemen and supporting players, including Fred Wesley & the J.B.'s, Bobby Byrd, Lyn Collins, Vicki Anderson and former rival Hank Ballard, released records on the People label.
During the 1972 presidential election, James Brown openly proclaimed his support of Richard Nixon for reelection to the presidency over Democratic candidate George McGovern. The decision led to a boycott of his performances and, according to Brown, cost him a big portion of his black audience. As a result, Brown's record sales and concerts in the United States reached a lull in 1973 as he failed to land a number-one R&B single that year. That year he also faced problems with the IRS for failure to pay back taxes, charging he hadn't paid upwards of $4.5 million; five years earlier, the IRS had claimed he owed nearly $2 million.
In 1973, Brown provided the score for the blaxploitation film Black Caesar. In 1974 he returned to the No. 1 spot on the R&B charts with "The Payback", with the parent album reaching the same spot on the album charts; he would reach No. 1 two more times in 1974, with "My Thang" and "Papa Don't Take No Mess".
"Papa Don't Take No Mess" would prove to be his final single to reach the No. 1 spot on the R&B charts. His other Top Ten R&B hits during this latter period included "Funky President" (R&B No. 4) and "Get Up Offa That Thing" (R&B No. 4).
Although his records were mainstays of the vanguard New York underground disco scene (exemplified by DJs such as David Mancuso and Francis Grasso) from 1969 onwards, Brown did not consciously yield to the trend until 1975's Sex Machine Today. By 1977, he was no longer a dominant force in R&B. After "Get Up Offa That Thing", thirteen of Brown's late 1970s recordings for Polydor failed to reach the Top 10 of the R&B chart, with only "Bodyheat" in 1976 and the disco-oriented "It's Too Funky in Here" in 1979 reaching the R&B Top 15 and the ballad "Kiss in '77" reaching the Top 20. After 1976's "Bodyheat", he also failed to appear on the Billboard Hot 100. As a result, Brown's concert attendance began dropping and his reported disputes with the IRS caused his business empire to collapse. In addition, several longtime bandmates (including Wesley and Maceo Parker) had gradually pivoted to Parliament-Funkadelic, which reached its critical and commercial apogee in the mid-to-late 1970s. The emergence of disco also forestalled Brown's success on the R&B charts because its slicker, more commercial style had superseded his rawer, one-chord funk productions.
By the release of 1979's The Original Disco Man, Brown seldom contributed to the songwriting and production processes, leaving most of it to producer Brad Shapiro; this resulted in the song "It's Too Funky in Here" becoming Brown's most successful single in this period. After two more albums failed to chart, Brown left Polydor in 1981. It was around this time that Brown changed the name of his band from the J.B.'s to the Soul Generals (or Soul G's). The band retained that name until his death.
Despite Brown's declining record sales, promoters Gary LoConti and Jim Rissmiller helped Brown sell out a string of residency shows at the Reseda Country Club in Los Angeles in early 1982. Brown's compromised commercial standing prevented him from charging a large fee. However, the great success of these shows marked a turning point for Brown's career, and soon he was back on top in Hollywood. Movies followed, including appearances in Doctor Detroit (1983) and Rocky IV (1985). He also guest-starred in the Miami Vice episode "Missing Hours" (1987). Previously, Brown appeared alongside a litany of other Black musical luminaries in The Blues Brothers (1980).
In 1984, he teamed with rap musician Afrika Bambaataa on the song "Unity". A year later he signed with Scotti Brothers Records and issued the moderately successful album Gravity in 1986 with a popular song "How Do You Stop". It included Brown's final Top Ten pop hit, "Living in America", marking his first Top 40 entry since 1974 and his first Top Ten pop entry since 1968. Produced and written by Dan Hartman, it was also featured prominently on the Rocky IV film and soundtrack. Brown performed the song in the film at Apollo Creed's final fight, shot in the Ziegfeld Room at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and was credited in the film as the Godfather of Soul. 1986 also saw the publication of his autobiography, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, co-written with Bruce Tucker. In 1987, Brown won the Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for "Living in America".
In 1988, Brown worked with the production team Full Force on the new jack swing-influenced I'm Real. It spawned his final two Top 10 R&B hits, "I'm Real" and "Static", which peaked at No. 2 and No. 5, respectively. Meanwhile, the drum break from the second version of the original 1969 hit "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose" (the recording included on the compilation album In the Jungle Groove) became so popular at hip hop dance parties (especially for breakdance) during the early 1980s that hip hop pioneer Kurtis Blow called the song "the national anthem of hip hop".
After his stint in prison during the late 1980s, Brown met Larry Fridie and Thomas Hart who produced the first James Brown biopic, entitled James Brown: The Man, the Message, the Music, released in 1992. He returned to music with the album Love Over-Due in 1991. It included the single "(So Tired of Standing Still We Got to) Move On", which peaked at No. 48 on the R&B chart. His former record label Polydor also released the four-CD box set Star Time, spanning Brown's career to date. Brown's release from prison also prompted his former record labels to reissue his albums on CD, featuring additional tracks and commentary by music critics and historians. That same year, Brown appeared on rapper MC Hammer's video for "Too Legit to Quit". Hammer had been noted, alongside Big Daddy Kane, for bringing Brown's unique stage shows and their own energetic dance moves to the hip-hop generation; both listed Brown as their idol. Both musicians also sampled his work, with Hammer having sampled the rhythms from "Super Bad" for his song "Here Comes the Hammer", from his best-selling album Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em. Big Daddy Kane sampled many times. Before the year was over, Brown–who had immediately returned to work with his band following his release–organized a pay-per-view concert following a show at Los Angeles' Wiltern Theatre, that was well received.
On June 10, 1991, James Brown and a star-filled line up performed before a crowd at the Wiltern Theatre for a live pay-per-view at-home audience. James Brown: Living in America – Live! was the brainchild of Indiana producer Danny Hubbard. It featured M.C. Hammer as well as Bell Biv Devoe, Heavy D & the Boys, En Vogue, C+C Music Factory, Quincy Jones, Sherman Hemsley and Keenen Ivory Wayans. Ice-T, Tone Loc and Kool Moe Dee performed paying homage to Brown. This was Brown's first public performance since his parole from the South Carolina prison system in February. He had served two-and-a-half years of two concurrent six-year sentences for aggravated assault and other felonies.
Brown continued making recordings. In 1993 his album Universal James was released. It included his final Billboard charting single, "Can't Get Any Harder", which peaked at No. 76 on the US R&B chart and reached No. 59 on the UK chart. Its brief charting in the UK was probably due to the success of a remixed version of "I Feel Good" featuring Dakeyne. Brown also released the singles "How Long" and "Georgia-Lina", which failed to chart. In 1995, Brown returned to the Apollo and recorded Live at the Apollo 1995. It included a studio track titled "Respect Me", which was released as a single; again it failed to chart. Brown's final studio albums, I'm Back and The Next Step, were released in 1998 and 2002 respectively. I'm Back featured the song "Funk on Ah Roll", which peaked at No. 40 in the UK but did not chart in his native US. The Next Step included Brown's final single, "Killing Is Out, School Is In". Both albums were produced by Derrick Monk. Brown's concert success, however, remained unabated and he kept up with a grueling schedule throughout the remainder of his life, living up to his previous nickname, "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business", in spite of his advanced age. In 2003, Brown participated in the PBS American Masters television documentary James Brown: Soul Survivor, which was directed by Jeremy Marre.
Brown performed in the Super Bowl XXXI halftime show in 1997.
Brown celebrated his status as an icon by appearing in a variety of entertainment and sports events, including an appearance on the WCW pay-per-view event, SuperBrawl X, where he danced alongside wrestler Ernest "the Cat" Miller, who based his character on Brown, during his in-ring skit with the Maestro. Brown then appeared in Tony Scott's short film Beat the Devil in 2001. He was featured alongside Clive Owen, Gary Oldman, Danny Trejo and Marilyn Manson. Brown also made a cameo appearance in the 2002 Jackie Chan film The Tuxedo, in which Chan was required to finish Brown's act after having accidentally knocked out the singer. In 2002, Brown appeared in Undercover Brother, playing himself.
In 2004, Brown opened for the Red Hot Chili Peppers at several Hyde Park concerts in London. The beginning of 2005 saw the publication of his second book, I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul, written with Marc Eliot. In February and March, he participated in recording sessions for an intended studio album with Fred Wesley, Pee Wee Ellis, and other longtime collaborators. Though he lost interest in the album, which remains unreleased, a track from the sessions, "Gut Bucket", appeared on a compilation CD included with the August 2006 issue of MOJO. He appeared at Edinburgh 50,000 – The Final Push, the final Live 8 concert on July 6, 2005, where he performed a duet with British pop star Will Young on "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag". In the Black Eyed Peas album "Monkey Business", Brown was featured on a track called "They Don't Want Music". The previous week he had performed a duet with another British pop star, Joss Stone, on the United Kingdom chat show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. In 2006, Brown continued his Seven Decades of Funk World Tour. His final major U.S. performance was in San Francisco on August 20, 2006, as headliner at the Festival of the Golden Gate (Foggfest) on the Great Meadow at Fort Mason. The following day, he performed at an 800-seat campus theatre at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. His last shows were greeted with positive reviews, and one of his final concert appearances at the Irish Oxegen festival in Punchestown in 2006 included a record crowd of 80,000 people. He played a full concert as part of the BBC's Electric Proms on October 27, 2006, at The Roundhouse, supported by the Zutons, with special appearances from Max Beasley and the Sugababes.
Brown's last televised appearance was at his induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame in November 2006, before his death the following month. Before his death, Brown had been scheduled to perform a duet with singer Annie Lennox on the song "Vengeance" for her new album Venus, which was released in 2007.
As a vocalist, Brown performed in a forceful shout style derived from gospel music. Meanwhile, "his rhythmic grunts and expressive shrieks harked back farther still to ring shouts, work songs, and field cries", according to the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (1996): "He reimported the rhythmic complexity from which rhythm and blues, under the dual pressure of rock 'n' roll and pop, had progressively fallen away since its birth from jazz and blues."
For many years, Brown's touring show was one of the most extravagant productions in American popular music. At the time of Brown's death, his band included three guitarists, two bass guitar players, two drummers, three horns and a percussionist. The bands that he maintained during the late 1960s and 1970s were of comparable size, and the bands also included a three-piece amplified string section that played during the ballads. Brown employed between 40 and 50 people for the James Brown Revue, and members of the revue traveled with him in a bus to cities and towns all over the country, performing upwards of 330 shows a year with almost all of the shows as one-nighters.
Before James Brown appeared on stage, his personal MC gave him an elaborate introduction accompanied by drumrolls, as the MC worked in Brown's various sobriquets along with the names of many of his hit songs. The introduction by Fats Gonder, captured on Brown's 1963 album Live at the Apollo is a representative example:
So now ladies and gentlemen it is "Star Time". Are you ready for "Star Time?" Thank you and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time, national[ly] and international[ly] known as "The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business", the man that sings "I'll Go Crazy"..."Try Me"..."You've Got the Power"..."Think"..."If You Want Me"..."I Don't Mind"..."Bewildered"... the million dollar seller, "Lost Someone"... the very latest release, "Night Train"... let's everybody "Shout and Shimmy"... "Mr. Dynamite", the amazing "Mr. Please Please" himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the Famous Flames!!
James Brown's performances were famous for their intensity and length. His own stated goal was to "give people more than what they came for — make them tired, 'cause that's what they came for.'" Brown's concert repertoire consisted mostly of his own hits and recent songs, with a few R&B covers mixed in. Brown danced vigorously as he sang, working popular dance steps such as the Mashed Potato into his routine along with dramatic leaps, splits and slides. In addition, his horn players and singing group (The Famous Flames) typically performed choreographed dance routines, and later incarnations of the Revue included backup dancers. Male performers in the Revue were required to wear tuxedoes and cummerbunds long after more casual concert wear became the norm among the younger musical acts. Brown's own extravagant outfits and his elaborate processed hairdo completed the visual impression. A James Brown concert typically included a performance by a featured vocalist, such as Vicki Anderson or Marva Whitney, and an instrumental feature for the band, which sometimes served as the opening act for the show.
A trademark feature of Brown's stage shows, usually during the song "Please, Please, Please", involved Brown dropping to his knees while clutching the microphone stand in his hands, prompting the show's longtime MC, Danny Ray, to come out, drape a cape over Brown's shoulders and escort him off the stage after he had worked himself to exhaustion during his performance. As Brown was escorted off the stage by the MC, Brown's vocal group, the Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Lloyd Stallworth, and Bobby Bennett), continued singing the background vocals "Please, please don't go-oh". Brown would then shake off the cape and stagger back to the microphone to perform an encore. Brown's routine was inspired by a similar one used by the professional wrestler Gorgeous George, as well as Little Richard. In his 2005 autobiography I Feel Good: A Memoir in a Life of Soul, Brown, who was a fan of Gorgeous George, credited the wrestler as the inspiration for both his cape routine and concert attire, stating, "Seeing him on TV helped create the James Brown you see on stage". Brown performs a version of the cape routine in the film of the T.A.M.I. Show (1964) in which he and the Famous Flames upstaged the Rolling Stones, and over the closing credits of the film Blues Brothers 2000. The Police refer to "James Brown on the T.A.M.I. Show" in their 1980 song "When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around".
Brown demanded extreme discipline, perfection and precision from his musicians and dancers – performers in his Revue showed up for rehearsals and members wore the right "uniform" or "costume" for concert performances. During an interview conducted by Terri Gross during the NPR segment "Fresh Air" with Maceo Parker, a former saxophonist in Brown's band for most of the 1960s and part of the 1970s and 1980s, Parker offered his experience with the discipline that Brown demanded of the band:
You gotta be on time. You gotta have your uniform. Your stuff's got to be intact. You gotta have the bow tie. You got to have it. You can't come up without the bow tie. You cannot come up without a cummerbund ... [The] patent leather shoes we were wearing at the time gotta be greased. You just gotta have this stuff. This is what [Brown expected] ... [Brown] bought the costumes. He bought the shoes. And if for some reason [the band member decided] to leave the group, [Brown told the person to] please leave my uniforms . ...
Brown also had a practice of directing, correcting and assessing fines on members of his band who broke his rules, such as wearing unshined shoes, dancing out of sync or showing up late on stage. During some of his concert performances, Brown danced in front of his band with his back to the audience as he slid across the floor, flashing hand signals and splaying his pulsating fingers to the beat of the music. Although audiences thought Brown's dance routine was part of his act, this practice was actually his way of pointing to the offending member of his troupe who played or sang the wrong note or committed some other infraction. Brown used his splayed fingers and hand signals to alert the offending person of the fine that person must pay to him for breaking his rules.
Brown's demands on his support acts could be harsh. As Fred Wesley recalled of his time as musical director of the JBs, if Brown felt intimidated by a support act he would try to "undermine their performances by shortening their sets without notice, demanding that they not do certain showstopping songs, and even insisting on doing the unthinkable, playing drums on some of their songs. A sure set killer."
Brown's main social activism was in preserving the need for education among youths, influenced by his own troubled childhood and his being forced to drop out of the seventh grade for wearing "insufficient clothes". Due to heavy dropout rates in the 1960s, Brown released the pro-education song, "Don't Be a Drop-Out". Royalties of the song were donated to dropout-prevention charity programs. The success of this led to Brown meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House. Johnson cited Brown for being a positive role model to the youth. In 1968 James Brown endorsed Hubert Humphrey, but later Brown gained the confidence of President Richard Nixon, to whom he found he had to explain the plight of Black Americans.
Throughout the remainder of his life, Brown made public speeches in schools and continued to advocate the importance of education in school. Upon filing his will in 2002, Brown advised that most of the money in his estate go into creating the I Feel Good, Inc. Trust to benefit disadvantaged children and provide scholarships for his grandchildren. His final single, "Killing Is Out, School Is In", advocated against murders of young children in the streets. Brown often gave out money and other items to children while traveling to his childhood hometown of Augusta. A week before his death, while looking gravely ill, Brown gave out toys and turkeys to kids at an Atlanta orphanage, something he had done several times over the years.
Though Brown performed at benefit rallies for civil rights organizations in the mid-1960s, Brown often shied away from discussing civil rights in his songs in fear of alienating his crossover audience. In 1968, in response to a growing urge of anti-war advocacy during the Vietnam War, Brown recorded the song, "America Is My Home". In the song, Brown performed a rap, advocating patriotism and exhorting listeners to "stop pitying yoursel[ves] and get up and fight". At the time of the song's release, Brown had been participating in performing for troops stationed in Vietnam.
On April 5, 1968, a day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, Brown provided a free citywide televised concert at the Boston Garden to maintain public order and calm concerned Boston residents (over the objections of the police chief, who wanted to call off the concert, which he thought would incite violence). The show was later released on DVD as Live at the Boston Garden: April 5, 1968. According to the documentary The Night James Brown Saved Boston, then-mayor Kevin White had strongly restrained the Boston police from cracking down on minor violence and protests after the assassination, while religious and community leaders worked to keep tempers from flaring. White arranged to have Brown's performance broadcast multiple times on Boston's public television station, WGBH, thus keeping potential rioters off the streets, watching the concert for free. Angered by not being told of this, Brown demanded $60,000 for "gate" fees (money he thought would be lost from ticket sales on account of the concert being broadcast for free) and then threatened to go public about the secret arrangement when the city balked at paying up afterwards, news of which would have been a political death blow to White and spark riots of its own. White eventually lobbied the behind-the-scenes power-brokering group known as "The Vault" to come up with money for Brown's gate fee and other social programs, contributing $100,000. Brown received $15,000 from them via the city. White also persuaded management at the Garden to give up their share of receipts to make up the differences. Following this successful performance, Brown was counseled by President Johnson to urge cities ravaged from riots following King's assassination to not resort to violence, telling them to "cool it, there's another way".
Responding to pressure from black activists, including H. Rap Brown, to take a bigger stance on their issues and from footage of black on black crime committed in inner cities, Brown wrote the lyrics to the song "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud", which his bandleader Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis accompanied with a musical composition. Released late that summer, the song's lyrics helped to make it an anthem for the civil rights movement. Brown only performed the song sporadically following its initial release and later stated he had regrets about recording it, saying in 1984, "Now 'Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud' has done more for the black race than any other record, but if I had my choice, I wouldn't have done it, because I don't like defining anyone by race. To teach race is to teach separatism." In his autobiography he stated:
The song is obsolete now ... But it was necessary to teach pride then, and I think the song did a lot of good for a lot of people ... People called "Black and Proud" militant and angry – maybe because of the line about dying on your feet instead of living on your knees. But really, if you listen to it, it sounds like a children's song. That's why I had children in it, so children who heard it could grow up feeling pride ... The song cost me a lot of my crossover audience. The racial makeup at my concerts was mostly black after that. I don't regret it, though, even if it was misunderstood.
In 1969, Brown recorded two more songs of social commentary, "World" and "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing", the latter song pleading for equal opportunity and self-reliance rather than entitlement. In 1970, in response to some black leaders for not being outspoken enough, he recorded "Get Up, Get into It, Get Involved" and "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing". In 1971, he began touring Africa, including Zambia and Nigeria. He was made "freeman of the city" in Lagos, Nigeria, by Oba Adeyinka Oyekan, for his "influence on black people all over the world". With his company, James Brown Enterprises, Brown helped to provide jobs for blacks in business in the communities. As the 1970s continued, Brown continued to record songs of social commentary, most prominently 1972's "King Heroin" and the two-part ballad "Public Enemy", which dealt with drug addiction.
During the 1968 presidential campaign, Brown endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey and appeared with Humphrey at political rallies. Brown was labeled an "Uncle Tom" for supporting Humphrey and also for releasing the pro-American funk song, "America Is My Home", in which Brown had lambasted protesters of the Vietnam War as well as the politics of pro-black activists. Brown began supporting Republican president Richard Nixon after being invited to perform at Nixon's inaugural ball in January 1969. Brown's endorsement of Nixon's campaign during the 1972 presidential election negatively impacted his career during that period with several national Black organizations boycotting his records and protesting at his concert shows; a November 1972 show in Cincinnati was picketed with signs saying, "James Brown: Nixon's Clown". Brown initially was invited to perform at a Youth Concert following Nixon's inauguration in January 1973 but bailed out due to the backlash he suffered from supporting Nixon. Brown joined fellow black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., who faced similar backlash, to back out of the concert. Brown blamed it on "fatigue". Brown later reversed his support of Nixon and composed the song, "You Can Have Watergate (Just Gimme Some Bucks And I'll Be Straight)" as a result. After Nixon resigned from office, Brown composed the 1974 hit, "Funky President (People It's Bad)", right after Gerald Ford took Nixon's place. Brown later supported Democratic President Jimmy Carter, attending one of Carter's inaugural balls in 1977. Brown also openly supported President Ronald Reagan's reelection in 1984.
Brown stated he was neither Democratic nor Republican despite his support of Republican presidents such as Nixon and Reagan as well as Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. In 1999, when being interviewed by Rolling Stone, the magazine asked him to name a hero in the 20th century; Brown mentioned John F. Kennedy and then-96-year-old U.S. Senator, and former Dixiecrat, Strom Thurmond, stating "when the young whippersnappers get out of line, whether Democratic or Republican, an old man can walk up and say 'Wait a minute, son, it goes this way.' And that's great for our country. He's like a grandfather to me." In 2003, Brown was the featured attraction of a Washington D.C. fundraiser for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Following the deaths of Ronald Reagan and his friend Ray Charles, Brown said to CNN, "I'm kind of in an uproar. I love the country and I got – you know I've been around a long time, through many presidents and everything. So after losing Mr. Reagan, who I knew very well, then Mr. Ray Charles, who I worked with and lived with like, all our life, we had a show together in Oakland many, many years ago and it's like you found the placard." Despite his contrarian political views, Brown mentored black activist Rev. Al Sharpton during the 1970s.
In 1962, Tammi Terrell joined the James Brown Revue. Brown became sexually involved with Terrell—even though she was only 17—in a relationship that continued until she escaped his physical abuse. Bobby Bennett, former member of the Famous Flames, told Rolling Stone about the abuse he witnessed: "He beat Tammi Terrell terrible", said Bennett. "She was bleeding, shedding blood." Terrell, who died in 1970, was Brown's girlfriend before she became famous as Marvin Gaye's singing partner in the mid-1960s. "Tammi left him because she didn't want her butt whipped", said Bennett, who also claimed he saw Brown kick one pregnant girlfriend down a flight of stairs.
Brown was married three times. His first marriage was to Velma Warren in 1953, and they had one son together. Over a decade later, the couple had separated, and the final divorce decree was issued in 1969. They maintained a close friendship that lasted until Brown's death. Brown's second marriage was to Deidre "Deedee" Jenkins, on October 22, 1970. They had two daughters together. By 1974 they were separated after what his daughter describes as years of domestic abuse, and the final divorce decree was issued on January 10, 1981. His third marriage was to Adrienne Lois Rodriguez (March 9, 1950 – January 6, 1996) in 1984. It was a contentious marriage that made headlines due to domestic abuse complaints. Rodriguez filed for divorce in 1988, "citing years of cruelty treatment", but they reconciled. Less than a year after Rodriguez died in 1996, Brown hired Tomi Rae Hynie to be a background singer for his band; she later claimed that she was his fourth wife.
On December 23, 2002, Brown, 69, and Hynie, 33, held a wedding ceremony that was officiated by the Rev. Larry Flyer. Following Brown's death, controversy surrounded the circumstances of the marriage, with Brown's attorney, Albert "Buddy" Dallas, reporting that the marriage was not valid; Hynie was still married to Javed Ahmed, a man from Bangladesh. Hynie claimed Ahmed married her to obtain residency through a Green Card and that the marriage was annulled but the annulment did not occur until April 2004. In an attempt to prove her marriage to Brown was valid, she provided a marriage certificate as proof of her marriage to Brown during an interview on CNN with Larry King, but she did not provide King with court records pointing to an annulment of her marriage to Brown or to Ahmed. According to Dallas, Brown was angry and hurt that Hynie had concealed her prior marriage from him and Brown moved to file for annulment from Hynie. Dallas added that though Hynie's marriage to Ahmed was annulled after she married Brown, the Brown–Hynie marriage was not valid under South Carolina law because Brown and Hynie did not remarry after the annulment. In August 2003, Brown took out a full-page public notice in Variety featuring Hynie, James II and himself on vacation at Disney World to announce that he and Hynie were going their separate ways. On January 27, 2015, a judge ruled Hynie as Brown's legal widow and that she was now Brown's widow for purposes of determining the distribution of Brown's estate. The decision was based on the grounds that Hynie's previous marriage was invalid and that James Brown had abandoned his efforts to annul his own marriage to Hynie. On June 17, 2020, a South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Hynie was not legally married to Brown due to her failure to annul her previous marriage. The court also officially ruled that she has no right to any part of his estate.
Brown had numerous children and acknowledged nine of them, including five sons—Teddy (1954–1973), Terry, Larry, Micheal Brown and James Joseph Brown Jr.—and six daughters: LaRhonda Petitt, Dr. Yamma Noyola Brown Lumar, Deanna Brown Thomas, Cinnamon Brown, Jeanette Bellinger and Venisha Brown (1964–2018). Brown also had eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Brown's eldest son, Teddy, died in a car crash on June 14, 1973. According to an August 22, 2007, article published in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, DNA tests indicate that Brown also fathered at least three extramarital children. The first one of them to be identified is LaRhonda Pettit (born 1962), a retired flight attendant and teacher who lives in Houston. Another alleged son, Michael Deon Brown, was born in September 1968 to Mary Florence Brown, and despite pleading no contest to a paternity suit brought against him in 1983, Brown never officially acknowledged Michael as his son. During contesting of Brown's will, another of the Brown family attorneys, Debra Opri, revealed to Larry King that Brown wanted a DNA test performed after his death to confirm the paternity of James Brown Jr. (born 2001)—not for Brown's sake but for the sake of the other family members. In April 2007, Hynie selected a guardian ad litem whom she wanted appointed by the court to represent her son, James Brown Jr., in the paternity proceedings. James Brown Jr. was confirmed to be his biological son.
For most of his career, Brown had a strict drug- and alcohol-free policy for any member in his entourage, including band members, and would fire people who disobeyed orders, particularly those who used or abused drugs. Although early members of the Famous Flames were fired for using alcohol, Brown often served a highball consisting of Delaware Punch and moonshine at his St. Albans, Queens, house in the mid-1960s. Some of the original members of Brown's 1970s band, the J.B.'s, including Catfish and Bootsy Collins, intentionally took LSD during a performance in 1971, causing Brown to fire them after the show because he had suspected them of being on drugs all along.
Aide Bob Patton has asserted that he accidentally shared a PCP-laced cannabis joint with Brown in the mid-1970s and "hallucinated for hours", although Brown "talked about it as if it was only marijuana he was smoking". By the mid-1980s, it was widely alleged that Brown was using drugs, with Vicki Anderson confirming to journalist Barney Hoskyns that Brown's regular use of PCP (colloquially known as "angel dust") "began before 1982". After he met and later married Adrienne Rodriguez in 1984, she and Brown began using PCP together. This drug usage often resulted in violent outbursts from him, and he was arrested several times for domestic violence against Rodriguez while high on the drug. By January 1988, Brown faced four criminal charges within a 12-month span relating to driving, PCP, and gun possession. After an April 1988 arrest for domestic abuse, Brown went on the CNN program Sonya Live in L.A. with host Sonya Friedman. The interview became notorious for Brown's irreverent demeanor, with some asserting that Brown was high.
One of Brown's former mistresses recalled in a GQ magazine article on Brown some years after his death that Brown would smoke PCP ("until that got hard to find") and cocaine, mixed with tobacco in Kool cigarettes. He also engaged in the off-label use of sildenafil, maintaining that it gave him "extra energy". Once, while traveling in a car under the influence of PCP (which he continued to procure dependent on its availability), Brown alleged that passing trees contained psychotronic surveillance technology.
In January 1998, he spent a week in rehab to deal with an addiction to unspecified prescription drugs. A week after his release, he was arrested for an unlawful use of a handgun and possession of cannabis. Prior to his death in December 2006, when Brown entered Emory University Hospital, traces of cocaine were found in the singer's urine. His widow suggested Brown would "do crack" with a female acquaintance.
Brown's personal life was marred by numerous brushes with the law. At the age of 16, he was convicted of theft and served three years in juvenile prison. During a concert held at Club 15 in Macon, Georgia, in 1963, while Otis Redding was performing alongside his former band Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, Brown, reportedly wielding two shotguns, tried to shoot his musical rival Joe Tex. The incident led to multiple people being shot and stabbed. Since Brown was still on parole at the time, he relied on his agent Clint Brantley "and a few thousand dollars to make the situation disappear". According to Jenkins, "seven people got shot", and after the shootout ended, a man appeared and gave "each one of the injured a hundred dollars apiece not to carry it no further and not to talk to the press". Brown was never charged for the incident.
On July 16, 1978, after performing at the Apollo, Brown was arrested for reportedly failing to turn in records from one of his radio stations after the station was forced to file for bankruptcy.
Brown was arrested on April 3, 1988, for assault, and again in May 1988 on drug and weapons charges, and again on September 24, 1988, following a high-speed car chase on Interstate 20 near the Georgia–South Carolina state border. He was convicted of carrying an unlicensed pistol and assaulting a police officer, along with various drug-related and driving offenses. Although he was sentenced to six years in prison, he was eventually released on parole on February 27, 1991, after serving two years of his sentence. Brown's FBI file, released to The Washington Post in 2007 under the Freedom of Information Act, related Brown's claim that the high-speed chase did not occur as claimed by the police, and that local police shot at his car several times during an incident of police harassment and assaulted him after his arrest. Local authorities found no merit to Brown's accusations.
In 1998, a woman named Mary Simons accused Brown in a civil suit of holding her captive for three days, demanding oral sex and firing a gun in his office; Simons' charge was eventually dismissed. In another civil suit, filed by former background singer Lisa Rushton alleged that between 1994 and 1999, Brown allegedly demanded sexual favors and when refused, would cut off her pay and kept her offstage. She also claimed Brown would "place a hand on her buttocks and loudly told her in a crowded restaurant to not look or speak to any other man besides himself;" Rushton eventually withdrew her lawsuit. In yet another civil suit, a woman named Lisa Agbalaya, who worked for Brown, said the singer would tell her he had "bull testicles", handed her a pair of zebra-print underwear, told her to wear them while he massaged her with oil, and fired her after she refused. A Los Angeles jury cleared the singer of sexual harassment but found him liable for wrongful termination.
The police were summoned to Brown's residence on July 3, 2000, after he was accused of charging at an electric company repairman with a steak knife when the repairman visited Brown's house to investigate a complaint about having no lights at the residence. In 2003, Brown was pardoned by the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services for past crimes that he was convicted of committing in South Carolina.
Brown was repeatedly arrested for domestic violence. On four occasions between 1987 and 1995, Brown was arrested on charges of assault against his third wife, Adrienne Rodriguez. In one incident, Rodriguez reported to authorities that Brown beat her with an iron pipe and shot at her car. Rodriguez was hospitalized after the last assault in October 1995, but charges were dropped after she died in January 1996.
In January 2004, Brown was arrested in South Carolina on a domestic violence charge after Tomi Rae Hynie accused him of pushing her to the floor during an argument at their home, where she suffered scratches and bruises to her right arm and hip. In June, Brown pleaded no contest to the domestic violence incident, but served no jail time. Instead, Brown was required to forfeit a US$1,087 bond as punishment.
In January 2005, a woman named Jacque Hollander filed a lawsuit against James Brown, which stemmed from an alleged 1988 rape. When the case was initially heard before a judge in 2002, Hollander's claims against Brown were dismissed by the court as the limitations period for filing the suit had expired. Hollander claimed that stress from the alleged assault later caused her to contract Graves' disease, a thyroid condition. Hollander claimed that the incident took place in South Carolina while she was employed by Brown as a publicist. Hollander alleged that, during her ride in a van with Brown, Brown pulled over to the side of the road and sexually assaulted her while he threatened her with a shotgun.
In her case against Brown, Hollander entered as evidence a DNA sample and a polygraph result, but the evidence was not considered due to the limitations defense. Hollander later attempted to bring her case before the Supreme Court, but nothing came of her complaint.
At the end of his life, James Brown lived in Beech Island, South Carolina, directly across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. According to his longtime manager Charles Bobbit, Brown had been living with Type 2 diabetes, which went undiagnosed for years. In 2004, Brown was successfully treated for prostate cancer. Regardless of his health, Brown maintained his reputation as the "hardest working man in show business" by keeping up with his grueling performance schedule.
On December 23, 2006, Brown became very ill and arrived at his dentist's office in Atlanta, Georgia, several hours late. His appointment was for dental implant work. During that visit, Brown's dentist observed that he looked "very bad ... weak and dazed". Instead of performing the work, the dentist advised Brown to see a physician right away about his medical condition.
The following day, Brown went to the Emory Crawford Long Memorial Hospital for medical evaluation and was admitted for observation and treatment. According to Charles Bobbit, his longtime personal manager and friend, Brown had been struggling with a noisy cough since returning from a November trip to Europe. Yet, Bobbit said, the singer had a history of never complaining about being sick and often performed while ill. Although Brown had to cancel upcoming concerts in Waterbury, Connecticut, and Englewood, New Jersey, he was confident that the doctor would discharge him from the hospital in time for his scheduled New Year's Eve shows at the Count Basie Theatre in New Jersey and the B. B. King Blues Club in New York, in addition to performing a song live on CNN for the Anderson Cooper New Year's Eve special. Brown remained hospitalized, however, and his condition worsened throughout the day.
On Christmas Day 2006, Brown died at approximately 1:45 a.m. EST (05:45 UTC), at age 73, from congestive heart failure, resulting from complications of pneumonia. Bobbit was at his bedside and later reported that Brown stuttered, "I'm going away tonight", then took three long, quiet breaths and fell asleep before dying.
In 2019, an investigation by CNN and other journalists led to suggestions that Brown had been murdered.
After Brown's death, his relatives, a host of celebrities, and thousands of fans gathered, on December 28, 2006, for a public memorial service at the Apollo Theater in New York City and, on December 30, 2006, at the James Brown Arena in Augusta, Georgia. A separate, private ceremony was held in North Augusta, South Carolina, on December 29, 2006, with Brown's family in attendance. Celebrities at these various memorial events included Michael Jackson, Jimmy Cliff, Joe Frazier, Buddy Guy, Ice Cube, Ludacris, Dr. Dre, Little Richard, Dick Gregory, MC Hammer, Prince, Jesse Jackson, Ice-T, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bootsy Collins, LL Cool J, Lil Wayne, Lenny Kravitz, 50 Cent, Stevie Wonder, and Don King. Rev. Al Sharpton officiated at all of Brown's public and private memorial services.
Brown's memorial ceremonies were all elaborate, complete with costume changes for the deceased and videos featuring him in concert. His body, placed in a Promethean casket—bronze polished to a golden shine—was driven through the streets of New York to the Apollo Theater in a white, glass-encased horse-drawn carriage. In Augusta, Georgia, his memorial procession stopped to pay respects at his statue, en route to the James Brown Arena. During the public memorial there, a video showed Brown's last performance in Augusta, Georgia, with the Ray Charles version of "Georgia on My Mind" playing soulfully in the background. His last backup band, the Soul Generals, also played some of his hits during that tribute at the arena. The group was joined by Bootsy Collins on bass, with MC Hammer performing a dance in James Brown style. Former Temptations lead singer Ali-Ollie Woodson performed "Walk Around Heaven All Day" at the memorial services. Brown was buried in a crypt at his daughter's home in Beech Island, South Carolina.
Brown signed his last will and testament on August 1, 2000, before J. Strom Thurmond Jr., an attorney for the estate. The irrevocable trust, separate and apart from Brown's will, was created on his behalf, that same year, by his attorney, Albert "Buddy" Dallas, one of three personal representatives of Brown's estate. His will covered the disposition of his personal assets, such as clothing, cars, and jewelry, while the irrevocable trust covered the disposition of the music rights, business assets of James Brown Enterprises, and his Beech Island, South Carolina estate.
During the reading of the will on January 11, 2007, Thurmond revealed that Brown's six adult living children (Terry Brown, Larry Brown, Daryl Brown, Yamma Brown Lumar, Deanna Brown Thomas and Venisha Brown) were named in the document, while Hynie and James II were not mentioned as heirs. Brown's will was signed 10 months before James II was born and more than a year before Brown's marriage to Tomi Rae Hynie. Like Brown's will, his irrevocable trust omitted Hynie and James II as recipients of Brown's property. The irrevocable trust had also been established before, and not amended since, the birth of James II.
On January 24, 2007, Brown's children filed a lawsuit, petitioning the court to remove the personal representatives from the estate (including Brown's attorney, as well as trustee Albert "Buddy" Dallas) and appoint a special administrator because of perceived impropriety and alleged mismanagement of Brown's assets. On January 31, 2007, Hynie also filed a lawsuit against Brown's estate, challenging the validity of the will and the irrevocable trust. Hynie's suit asked the court both to recognize her as Brown's widow and to appoint a special administrator for the estate.
On January 27, 2015, Judge Doyet Early III ruled that Tomi Rae Hynie Brown was officially the widow of James Brown. The decision was based on the grounds that Hynie's previous marriage was invalid and that James Brown had abandoned his efforts to annul his own marriage to Hynie.
On February 19, 2015, the South Carolina Supreme Court intervened, halting all lower court actions in the estate and undertaking to review previous actions itself. The South Carolina Court of Appeals in July 2018 ruled that Hynie was, in fact, Mr. Brown's wife. In 2020, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Hynie had not been legally married to Brown and did not have a right to his estate. It was reported in July 2021 that Brown's family had reached a settlement ending the 15-year battle over the estate.
Brown received awards and honors throughout his lifetime and after his death. In 1993, the City Council of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, conducted a poll of residents to choose a new name for the bridge that crossed the Yampa River on Shield Drive. The winning name, with 7,717 votes, was "James Brown Soul Center of the Universe Bridge". The bridge was officially dedicated in September 1993, and Brown appeared at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the event. A petition was started by local ranchers to return the name to "Stockbridge" for historical reasons, but they backed off after citizens defeated their efforts because of the popularity of Brown's name. Brown returned to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, on July 4, 2002, for an outdoor festival, performing with bands such as the String Cheese Incident.
During his long career, Brown received many prestigious music industry awards and honors. In 1983 he was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. Brown was one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction dinner in New York on January 23, 1986. At that time, the members of his original vocal group, the Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Johnny Terry, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth) were not inducted. However, on April 14, 2012, the Famous Flames were automatically and retroactively inducted into the Hall of Fame alongside Brown, without the need for nomination and voting, on the basis that they should have been inducted with him in 1986. On February 25, 1992, Brown was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 34th annual Grammy Awards. Exactly a year later, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 4th annual Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Awards. A ceremony was held for Brown on January 10, 1997, to honor him with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
On June 15, 2000, Brown was honored as an inductee to the New York Songwriters Hall of Fame. On August 6, 2002, he was honored as the first BMI Urban Icon at the BMI Urban Awards. His BMI accolades include an impressive ten R&B Awards and six Pop Awards. On November 14, 2006, Brown was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame, and he was one of several inductees to perform at the ceremony. In recognition of his accomplishments as an entertainer, Brown was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors on December 7, 2003. In 2004 Rolling Stone magazine ranked James Brown as No. 7 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. In an article for Rolling Stone, critic Robert Christgau cited Brown as "the greatest musician of the rock era". He appeared on the BET Awards June 24, 2003, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award presented by Michael Jackson, and performed with him. In 2004, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Aretha Franklin.
Brown was also honored in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, for his philanthropy and civic activities. On November 20, 1993, Mayor Charles DeVaney of Augusta held a ceremony to dedicate a section of 9th Street between Broad and Twiggs Streets, renamed "James Brown Boulevard", in the entertainer's honor. On May 6, 2005, as a 72nd birthday present for Brown, the city of Augusta unveiled a life-sized bronze James Brown statue on Broad Street. The statue was to have been dedicated a year earlier, but the ceremony was put on hold because of a domestic abuse charge that Brown faced at the time. In 2005, Charles "Champ" Walker and the We Feel Good Committee went before the County commission and received approval to change Augusta's slogan to "We Feel Good". Afterward, officials renamed the city's civic center the James Brown Arena, and James Brown attended a ceremony for the unveiling of the namesake center on October 15, 2006.
On December 30, 2006, during the public memorial service at the James Brown Arena, Shirley A. R. Lewis, president of Paine College, a historically black college in Augusta, Georgia, bestowed posthumously upon Brown an honorary doctorate in recognition and honor of his many contributions to the school in its times of need. Brown had originally been scheduled to receive the honorary doctorate from Paine College during its May 2007 commencement.
During the 49th Annual Grammy Awards presentation on February 11, 2007, James Brown's famous cape was draped over a microphone by Danny Ray at the end of a montage in honor of notable people in the music industry who died during the previous year. Earlier that evening, Christina Aguilera delivered an impassioned performance of Brown's hit "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" followed by a standing ovation, while Chris Brown performed a dance routine in honor of James Brown.
On August 17, 2013, the official R&B Music Hall of Fame honored and inducted James Brown at a ceremony held at the Waetjen Auditorium at Cleveland State University.
ART THE BOX began in early 2015 as a collaboration between three organizations: the City of Augusta, the Downtown Development Authority and the Greater Augusta Arts Council. 19 local artists were selected by a committee to create art on 23 local traffic signal control cabinets (TSCCs). A competition was held to create the James Brown Tribute Box on the corner of James Brown Blvd. (9th Ave.) and Broad St. This box was designed and painted by local artist, Ms. Robbie Pitts Bellamy and has become a favorite photo opportunity to visitors and locals in Augusta, Georgia.
"I have a lot of musical heroes but I think James Brown is at the top of the list", remarked Public Enemy's Chuck D. "Absolutely the funkiest man on Earth ... In a black household, James Brown is part of the fabric – Motown, Stax, Atlantic and James Brown."
In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Brown at No. 44 on their list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time. On April 24, 2023, James Brown was inducted into the newly established Atlantic City Walk Of Fame presented by The National R&B Music Society Inc. Brown's daughter Deanna Brown Thomas accepted the honor on his behalf. The unveiling and induction ceremony took place at Brighton Park in Atlantic City, NJ. Brown was inducted by Bowlegged Lou of the production team Full Force. Other inductees included, Little Anthony & The Imperials, The Delfonics and Grover Washington Jr.
As a tribute to James Brown, the Rolling Stones covered the song, "I'll Go Crazy" from Brown's Live at the Apollo album, during their 2007 European tour. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has remarked, "He [James Brown] was almost a musical genre in his own right and he changed and moved forward the whole time so people were able to learn from him."
On December 22, 2007, the first annual "Tribute Fit For the King of King Records" in honor of James Brown was held at the Madison Theater in Covington, Kentucky. The tribute, organized by Bootsy Collins, featured Tony Wilson as Young James Brown with appearances by Afrika Bambaataa, Chuck D of Public Enemy, the Soul Generals, Buckethead, Freekbass, Triage and many of Brown's surviving family members. Comedian Michael Coyer was the MC for the event. During the show, the mayor of Cincinnati proclaimed December 22 as James Brown Day.
Studio albums
Games
Television
Footnotes
Sources | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American singer and musician. The central progenitor of funk music and a major figure of 20th-century music, he is referred to by various honorific nicknames, some of which include \"the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business\", \"Godfather of Soul\", \"Mr. Dynamite\", and \"Soul Brother No. 1\". In a career that lasted more than 50 years, he influenced the development of several music genres. Brown was one of the first 10 inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction in New York on January 23, 1986.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Brown began his career as a gospel singer in Toccoa, Georgia. He rose to prominence in the mid-1950s as the lead singer of the Famous Flames, a rhythm and blues vocal group founded by Bobby Byrd. With the hit ballads \"Please, Please, Please\" and \"Try Me\", Brown built a reputation as a dynamic live performer with the Famous Flames and his backing band, sometimes known as the James Brown Band or the James Brown Orchestra. His success peaked in the 1960s with the live album Live at the Apollo and hit singles such as \"Papa's Got a Brand New Bag\", \"I Got You (I Feel Good)\" and \"It's a Man's Man's Man's World\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "During the late 1960s, Brown moved from a continuum of blues and gospel-based forms and styles to a new approach to music-making, emphasizing stripped-down interlocking rhythms that influenced the development of funk music. By the early 1970s, Brown had fully established the funk sound after the formation of the J.B.s with records such as \"Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine\" and \"The Payback\". He also became noted for songs of social commentary, including the 1968 hit \"Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud\". Brown continued to perform and record until his death from pneumonia in 2006.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Brown recorded and released 17 singles that reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B charts. He also holds the record for the most singles listed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart that did not reach No. 1. Brown was posthumously inducted into the first class of the Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2013 as an artist and then in 2017 as a songwriter. He also received honors from several other institutions, including inductions into the Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In Joel Whitburn's analysis of the Billboard R&B charts from 1942 to 2010, Brown is ranked No. 1 in the Top 500 Artists. He is ranked seventh on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Brown was born on May 3, 1933, in Barnwell, South Carolina, to 16-year-old Susie (née Behling; 1917–2004) and 21-year-old Joseph Gardner Brown (1912–1993) in a small wooden shack. Brown's name was supposed to have been Joseph James Brown, but his first and middle names were mistakenly reversed on his birth certificate. In his autobiography, Brown stated that his father was of mixed African-American and Native American descent, while his mother was of mixed African-American and Asian descent.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Brown family lived in poverty in Elko, South Carolina, which was an impoverished town at the time. They later moved to Augusta, Georgia, when James was four or five. His family first settled at one of his aunts' brothels. They later moved into a house shared with another aunt. Brown's mother eventually left the family after a contentious and abusive marriage and moved to New York.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "He began singing in talent shows as a young child, first appearing at Augusta's Lenox Theater in 1944, winning the show after singing the ballad \"So Long\". While in Augusta, Brown performed buck dances for change to entertain troops from Camp Gordon at the start of World War II as their convoys traveled over a canal bridge near his aunt's home. This is where he first heard the legendary blues musician Howlin' Wolf play guitar. He learned to play the piano, guitar, and harmonica during this period. He became inspired to become an entertainer after hearing \"Caldonia\" by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five. In his teen years, Brown briefly had a career as a boxer.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "At the age of 16, he was convicted of robbery and sent to a juvenile detention center in Toccoa. There, he formed a gospel quartet with four fellow cellmates, including Johnny Terry. Brown met singer Bobby Byrd when the two played against each other in a baseball game outside the detention center. Byrd also discovered that Brown could sing after hearing of \"a guy called Music Box\", which was Brown's nickname at the prison. Byrd has since claimed he and his family helped to secure an early release, which led to Brown promising the court he would \"sing for the Lord\". Brown was released on a work sponsorship with Toccoa business owner S.C. Lawson. Lawson was impressed with Brown's work ethic and secured his release with a promise to keep him employed for two years. Brown was paroled on June 14, 1952. Brown went on to work with both of Lawson's sons, and would come back to visit the family from time to time throughout his career. Shortly after being paroled he joined the gospel group the Ever-Ready Gospel Singers, featuring Byrd's sister Sarah.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Brown eventually joined Bobby Byrd's group in 1954. The group had evolved from the Gospel Starlighters, an a cappella gospel group, to an R&B group with the name the Avons. He reputedly joined the band after one of its members, Troy Collins, died in a car crash. Along with Brown and Byrd, the group consisted of Sylvester Keels, Doyle Oglesby, Fred Pulliam, Nash Knox and Nafloyd Scott. Influenced by R&B groups such as Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the Orioles and Billy Ward and his Dominoes, the group changed its name, first to the Toccoa Band and then to the Flames. Nafloyd's brother Baroy later joined the group on bass guitar, and Brown, Byrd and Keels switched lead positions and instruments, often playing drums and piano. Johnny Terry later joined, by which time Pulliam and Oglesby had long left.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Berry Trimier became the group's first manager, booking them at parties near college campuses in Georgia and South Carolina. The group had already gained a reputation as a good live act when they renamed themselves the Famous Flames. In 1955, the group had contacted Little Richard while performing in Macon. Richard convinced the group to get in contact with his manager at the time, Clint Brantley, at his nightclub. Brantley agreed to manage them after seeing the group audition. He then sent them to a local radio station to record a demo session, where they performed their own composition \"Please, Please, Please\", which was inspired when Little Richard wrote the words of the title on a napkin and Brown was determined to make a song out of it. The Famous Flames eventually signed with King Records' Federal subsidiary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and issued a re-recorded version of \"Please, Please, Please\" in March 1956. The song became the group's first R&B hit, selling over a million copies. None of their follow-ups gained similar success. By 1957, Brown had replaced Clint Brantley as manager and hired Ben Bart, chief of Universal Attractions Agency. That year the original Flames broke up, after Bart changed the name of the group to \"James Brown and His Famous Flames\".",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In October 1958, Brown released the ballad \"Try Me\", which hit number one on the R&B chart in the beginning of 1959, becoming the first of seventeen chart-topping R&B hits. Shortly afterwards, he recruited his first band, led by J. C. Davis, and reunited with Bobby Byrd who joined a revived Famous Flames lineup that included Eugene \"Baby\" Lloyd Stallworth and Bobby Bennett, with Johnny Terry sometimes coming in as the \"fifth Flame\". Brown, the Flames, and his entire band debuted at the Apollo Theater on April 24, 1959, opening for Brown's idol, Little Willie John. Federal Records issued two albums credited to Brown and the Famous Flames (both contained previously released singles). By 1960, Brown began multi-tasking in the recording studio involving himself, his singing group, the Famous Flames, and his band, a separate entity from the Flames, sometimes named the James Brown Orchestra or the James Brown Band. That year the band released the top ten R&B hit \"(Do the) Mashed Potatoes\" on Dade Records, owned by Henry Stone, billed under the pseudonym \"Nat Kendrick & the Swans\" due to label issues. As a result of its success, King president Syd Nathan shifted Brown's contract from Federal to the parent label, King, which according to Brown in his autobiography meant \"you got more support from the company\". While with King, Brown, under the Famous Flames lineup, released the hit-filled album Think! and the following year released two albums with the James Brown Band earning second billing. With the Famous Flames, Brown sang lead on several more hits, including \"Bewildered\", \"I'll Go Crazy\" and \"Think\", songs that hinted at his emerging style.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1962, Brown and his band scored a hit with their cover of the instrumental \"Night Train\", becoming a top five R&B single. That same year, the ballads \"Lost Someone\" and \"Baby You're Right\", the latter a Joe Tex composition, added to his repertoire and increased his reputation with R&B audiences. On October 24, 1962, Brown financed a live recording of a performance at the Apollo and convinced Syd Nathan to release the album, despite Nathan's belief that no one would buy a live album due to the fact that Brown's singles had already been bought and that live albums were usually bad sellers.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Live at the Apollo was released the following June and became an immediate hit, eventually reaching number two on the Top LPs chart and selling over a million copies, staying on the charts for 14 months. In 1963, Brown scored his first top 20 pop hit with his rendition of the standard \"Prisoner of Love\". He also launched his first label, Try Me Records, which included recordings by the likes of Tammy Montgomery (later to be famous as Tammi Terrell), Johnny & Bill (Famous Flames associates Johnny Terry and Bill Hollings) and the Poets, which was another name used for Brown's backing band. During this time, Brown began an ill-fated two-year relationship with 17-year-old Tammi Terrell when she sang in his revue. Terrell ended their personal and professional relationship because of his abusive behavior.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1964, seeking bigger commercial success, Brown and Bobby Byrd formed the production company, Fair Deal, linking the operation to the Mercury imprint, Smash Records. King Records, however, fought against this and was granted an injunction preventing Brown from releasing any recordings for the label. Prior to the injunction, Brown had released three vocal singles, including the blues-oriented hit \"Out of Sight\", which further indicated the direction his music was going to take. Touring throughout the year, Brown and the Famous Flames grabbed more national attention after delivering an explosive show-stopping performance on the live concert film The T.A.M.I. Show. The Flames' dynamic gospel-tinged vocals, polished choreography and timing as well as Brown's energetic dance moves and high-octane singing upstaged the proposed closing act, the Rolling Stones.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Having signed a new deal with King, Brown released his song \"Papa's Got a Brand New Bag\" in 1965, which became his first top ten pop hit and won him his first Grammy Award. Brown also signed a production deal with Loma Records. Later in 1965, he issued \"I Got You\", which became his second single in a row to reach number-one on the R&B chart and top ten on the pop chart. Brown followed that up with the ballad \"It's a Man's Man's Man's World\", a third Top 10 Pop hit (No. 1 R&B) which confirmed his stance as a top-ranking performer, especially with R&B audiences from that point on.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "By 1967, Brown's emerging sound had begun to be defined as funk music. That year he released what some critics cited as the first true funk song, \"Cold Sweat\", which hit number-one on the R&B chart (Top 10 Pop) and became one of his first recordings to contain a drum break and also the first that featured a harmony that was reduced to a single chord. The instrumental arrangements on tracks such as \"Give It Up or Turnit a Loose\" and \"Licking Stick-Licking Stick\" (both recorded in 1968) and \"Funky Drummer\" (recorded in 1969) featured a more developed version of Brown's mid-1960s style, with the horn section, guitars, bass and drums meshed together in intricate rhythmic patterns based on multiple interlocking riffs.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Changes in Brown's style that started with \"Cold Sweat\" also established the musical foundation for Brown's later hits, such as \"I Got the Feelin'\" (1968) and \"Mother Popcorn\" (1969). By this time Brown's vocals frequently took the form of a kind of rhythmic declamation, not quite sung but not quite spoken, that only intermittently featured traces of pitch or melody. This would become a major influence on the techniques of rapping, which would come to maturity along with hip hop music in the coming decades. Brown's style of funk in the late 1960s was based on interlocking syncopated parts: strutting bass lines, syncopated drum patterns, and iconic percussive guitar riffs. The main guitar ostinatos for \"Ain't It Funky\" and \"Give It Up or Turnit a Loose\" (both 1969), are examples of Brown's refinement of New Orleans funk; irresistibly danceable riffs, stripped down to their rhythmic essence. On both recordings, the tonal structure is bare bones. The pattern of attack points is the emphasis, not the pattern of pitches as if the guitar were an African drum or idiophone. Alexander Stewart states that this popular feel was passed along from \"New Orleans—through James Brown's music, to the popular music of the 1970s\". Those same tracks were later resurrected by countless hip-hop musicians from the 1970s onward. As a result, James Brown remains to this day the world's most sampled recording artist, but, two tracks that he wrote, are also synonymous with modern dance, especially with house music, jungle music, and drum and bass music, (which were sped up exponentially, in the latter two genres).",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "\"Bring it Up\" has an Afro-Cuban guajeo-like structure. All three of these guitar riffs are based on an onbeat/offbeat structure. Stewart says that it \"is different from a time line (such as clave and tresillo) in that it is not an exact pattern, but more of a loose organizing principle.\"",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "It was around this time as the musician's popularity increased that he acquired the nickname \"Soul Brother No. 1\", after failing to win the title \"King of Soul\" from Solomon Burke during a Chicago gig two years prior. Brown's recordings during this period influenced musicians across the industry, most notably groups such as Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Booker T. & the M.G.s as well as vocalists such as Edwin Starr, David Ruffin and Dennis Edwards from the Temptations, and Michael Jackson, who, throughout his career, cited Brown as his ultimate idol.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Brown's band during this period employed musicians and arrangers who had come up through the jazz tradition. He was noted for his ability as a bandleader and songwriter to blend the simplicity and drive of R&B with the rhythmic complexity and precision of jazz. Trumpeter Lewis Hamlin and saxophonist/keyboardist Alfred \"Pee Wee\" Ellis (the successor to previous bandleader Nat Jones) led the band. Guitarist Jimmy Nolen provided percussive, deceptively simple riffs for each song, and Maceo Parker's prominent saxophone solos provided a focal point for many performances. Other members of Brown's band included stalwart Famous Flames singer and sideman Bobby Byrd, trombonist Fred Wesley, drummers John \"Jabo\" Starks, Clyde Stubblefield and Melvin Parker, saxophonist St. Clair Pinckney, guitarist Alphonso \"Country\" Kellum and bassist Bernard Odum.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In addition to a torrent of singles and studio albums, Brown's output during this period included two more successful live albums, Live at the Garden (1967) and Live at the Apollo, Volume II (1968), and a 1968 television special, James Brown: Man to Man. His music empire expanded along with his influence on the music scene. As Brown's music empire grew, his desire for financial and artistic independence grew as well. Brown bought radio stations during the late 1960s, including WRDW in his native Augusta, where he shined shoes as a boy. In November 1967, James Brown purchased radio station WGYW in Knoxville, Tennessee, for a reported $75,000, according to the January 20, 1968 Record World magazine. The call letters were changed to WJBE reflecting his initials. WJBE began on January 15, 1968, and broadcast a Rhythm & Blues format. The station slogan was \"WJBE 1430 Raw Soul\". Brown also bought WEBB in Baltimore in 1970.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Brown branched out to make several recordings with musicians outside his own band. In an attempt to appeal to the older, more affluent, and predominantly white adult contemporary audience, Brown recorded Gettin' Down To It (1969) and Soul on Top (1970)—two albums consisting mostly of romantic ballads, jazz standards, and homologous reinterpretations of his earlier hits—with the Dee Felice Trio and the Louie Bellson Orchestra. In 1968, he recorded a number of funk-oriented tracks with the Dapps, a white Cincinnati band, including the hit \"I Can't Stand Myself\". He also released three albums of Christmas music with his own band.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In March 1970, most of Brown's mid-to-late 1960s road band walked out on him due to financial disputes, a development augured by the prior disbandment of the Famous Flames singing group for the same reason in 1968. Brown and erstwhile Famous Flames singer Bobby Byrd (who chose to remain in the band during this tumultuous period as co-frontman, effectively serving as a proto-hype man in live performances) subsequently recruited several members of the Pacemakers, a Cincinnati-based ensemble that included bassist Bootsy Collins and his brother, guitarist Phelps \"Catfish\" Collins; augmented by the remaining members of the 1960s road band (including Fred Wesley, who rejoined Brown's outfit in December 1970) and other newer musicians, they would form the nucleus of the J.B.'s, Brown's new backing ensemble. Shortly following their first performance together, the band entered the studio to record the Brown-Byrd composition, \"Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine\"; the song —with its off the beat play Brown called \"The One\"— and other contemporaneous singles would further cement Brown's influence in the nascent genre of funk music. This iteration of the J.B.'s dissolved after a March 1971 European tour (documented on the 1991 archival release Love Power Peace) due to additional money disputes and Bootsy Collins's use of LSD; a new lineup of the J.B.'s coalesced around Wesley, St. Clair Pinckney and drummer John Starks.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 1971, Brown began recording for Polydor Records. Many of his sidemen and supporting players, including Fred Wesley & the J.B.'s, Bobby Byrd, Lyn Collins, Vicki Anderson and former rival Hank Ballard, released records on the People label.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "During the 1972 presidential election, James Brown openly proclaimed his support of Richard Nixon for reelection to the presidency over Democratic candidate George McGovern. The decision led to a boycott of his performances and, according to Brown, cost him a big portion of his black audience. As a result, Brown's record sales and concerts in the United States reached a lull in 1973 as he failed to land a number-one R&B single that year. That year he also faced problems with the IRS for failure to pay back taxes, charging he hadn't paid upwards of $4.5 million; five years earlier, the IRS had claimed he owed nearly $2 million.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 1973, Brown provided the score for the blaxploitation film Black Caesar. In 1974 he returned to the No. 1 spot on the R&B charts with \"The Payback\", with the parent album reaching the same spot on the album charts; he would reach No. 1 two more times in 1974, with \"My Thang\" and \"Papa Don't Take No Mess\".",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "\"Papa Don't Take No Mess\" would prove to be his final single to reach the No. 1 spot on the R&B charts. His other Top Ten R&B hits during this latter period included \"Funky President\" (R&B No. 4) and \"Get Up Offa That Thing\" (R&B No. 4).",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Although his records were mainstays of the vanguard New York underground disco scene (exemplified by DJs such as David Mancuso and Francis Grasso) from 1969 onwards, Brown did not consciously yield to the trend until 1975's Sex Machine Today. By 1977, he was no longer a dominant force in R&B. After \"Get Up Offa That Thing\", thirteen of Brown's late 1970s recordings for Polydor failed to reach the Top 10 of the R&B chart, with only \"Bodyheat\" in 1976 and the disco-oriented \"It's Too Funky in Here\" in 1979 reaching the R&B Top 15 and the ballad \"Kiss in '77\" reaching the Top 20. After 1976's \"Bodyheat\", he also failed to appear on the Billboard Hot 100. As a result, Brown's concert attendance began dropping and his reported disputes with the IRS caused his business empire to collapse. In addition, several longtime bandmates (including Wesley and Maceo Parker) had gradually pivoted to Parliament-Funkadelic, which reached its critical and commercial apogee in the mid-to-late 1970s. The emergence of disco also forestalled Brown's success on the R&B charts because its slicker, more commercial style had superseded his rawer, one-chord funk productions.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "By the release of 1979's The Original Disco Man, Brown seldom contributed to the songwriting and production processes, leaving most of it to producer Brad Shapiro; this resulted in the song \"It's Too Funky in Here\" becoming Brown's most successful single in this period. After two more albums failed to chart, Brown left Polydor in 1981. It was around this time that Brown changed the name of his band from the J.B.'s to the Soul Generals (or Soul G's). The band retained that name until his death.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Despite Brown's declining record sales, promoters Gary LoConti and Jim Rissmiller helped Brown sell out a string of residency shows at the Reseda Country Club in Los Angeles in early 1982. Brown's compromised commercial standing prevented him from charging a large fee. However, the great success of these shows marked a turning point for Brown's career, and soon he was back on top in Hollywood. Movies followed, including appearances in Doctor Detroit (1983) and Rocky IV (1985). He also guest-starred in the Miami Vice episode \"Missing Hours\" (1987). Previously, Brown appeared alongside a litany of other Black musical luminaries in The Blues Brothers (1980).",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In 1984, he teamed with rap musician Afrika Bambaataa on the song \"Unity\". A year later he signed with Scotti Brothers Records and issued the moderately successful album Gravity in 1986 with a popular song \"How Do You Stop\". It included Brown's final Top Ten pop hit, \"Living in America\", marking his first Top 40 entry since 1974 and his first Top Ten pop entry since 1968. Produced and written by Dan Hartman, it was also featured prominently on the Rocky IV film and soundtrack. Brown performed the song in the film at Apollo Creed's final fight, shot in the Ziegfeld Room at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and was credited in the film as the Godfather of Soul. 1986 also saw the publication of his autobiography, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, co-written with Bruce Tucker. In 1987, Brown won the Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for \"Living in America\".",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 1988, Brown worked with the production team Full Force on the new jack swing-influenced I'm Real. It spawned his final two Top 10 R&B hits, \"I'm Real\" and \"Static\", which peaked at No. 2 and No. 5, respectively. Meanwhile, the drum break from the second version of the original 1969 hit \"Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose\" (the recording included on the compilation album In the Jungle Groove) became so popular at hip hop dance parties (especially for breakdance) during the early 1980s that hip hop pioneer Kurtis Blow called the song \"the national anthem of hip hop\".",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "After his stint in prison during the late 1980s, Brown met Larry Fridie and Thomas Hart who produced the first James Brown biopic, entitled James Brown: The Man, the Message, the Music, released in 1992. He returned to music with the album Love Over-Due in 1991. It included the single \"(So Tired of Standing Still We Got to) Move On\", which peaked at No. 48 on the R&B chart. His former record label Polydor also released the four-CD box set Star Time, spanning Brown's career to date. Brown's release from prison also prompted his former record labels to reissue his albums on CD, featuring additional tracks and commentary by music critics and historians. That same year, Brown appeared on rapper MC Hammer's video for \"Too Legit to Quit\". Hammer had been noted, alongside Big Daddy Kane, for bringing Brown's unique stage shows and their own energetic dance moves to the hip-hop generation; both listed Brown as their idol. Both musicians also sampled his work, with Hammer having sampled the rhythms from \"Super Bad\" for his song \"Here Comes the Hammer\", from his best-selling album Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em. Big Daddy Kane sampled many times. Before the year was over, Brown–who had immediately returned to work with his band following his release–organized a pay-per-view concert following a show at Los Angeles' Wiltern Theatre, that was well received.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "On June 10, 1991, James Brown and a star-filled line up performed before a crowd at the Wiltern Theatre for a live pay-per-view at-home audience. James Brown: Living in America – Live! was the brainchild of Indiana producer Danny Hubbard. It featured M.C. Hammer as well as Bell Biv Devoe, Heavy D & the Boys, En Vogue, C+C Music Factory, Quincy Jones, Sherman Hemsley and Keenen Ivory Wayans. Ice-T, Tone Loc and Kool Moe Dee performed paying homage to Brown. This was Brown's first public performance since his parole from the South Carolina prison system in February. He had served two-and-a-half years of two concurrent six-year sentences for aggravated assault and other felonies.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Brown continued making recordings. In 1993 his album Universal James was released. It included his final Billboard charting single, \"Can't Get Any Harder\", which peaked at No. 76 on the US R&B chart and reached No. 59 on the UK chart. Its brief charting in the UK was probably due to the success of a remixed version of \"I Feel Good\" featuring Dakeyne. Brown also released the singles \"How Long\" and \"Georgia-Lina\", which failed to chart. In 1995, Brown returned to the Apollo and recorded Live at the Apollo 1995. It included a studio track titled \"Respect Me\", which was released as a single; again it failed to chart. Brown's final studio albums, I'm Back and The Next Step, were released in 1998 and 2002 respectively. I'm Back featured the song \"Funk on Ah Roll\", which peaked at No. 40 in the UK but did not chart in his native US. The Next Step included Brown's final single, \"Killing Is Out, School Is In\". Both albums were produced by Derrick Monk. Brown's concert success, however, remained unabated and he kept up with a grueling schedule throughout the remainder of his life, living up to his previous nickname, \"The Hardest Working Man in Show Business\", in spite of his advanced age. In 2003, Brown participated in the PBS American Masters television documentary James Brown: Soul Survivor, which was directed by Jeremy Marre.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Brown performed in the Super Bowl XXXI halftime show in 1997.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Brown celebrated his status as an icon by appearing in a variety of entertainment and sports events, including an appearance on the WCW pay-per-view event, SuperBrawl X, where he danced alongside wrestler Ernest \"the Cat\" Miller, who based his character on Brown, during his in-ring skit with the Maestro. Brown then appeared in Tony Scott's short film Beat the Devil in 2001. He was featured alongside Clive Owen, Gary Oldman, Danny Trejo and Marilyn Manson. Brown also made a cameo appearance in the 2002 Jackie Chan film The Tuxedo, in which Chan was required to finish Brown's act after having accidentally knocked out the singer. In 2002, Brown appeared in Undercover Brother, playing himself.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 2004, Brown opened for the Red Hot Chili Peppers at several Hyde Park concerts in London. The beginning of 2005 saw the publication of his second book, I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul, written with Marc Eliot. In February and March, he participated in recording sessions for an intended studio album with Fred Wesley, Pee Wee Ellis, and other longtime collaborators. Though he lost interest in the album, which remains unreleased, a track from the sessions, \"Gut Bucket\", appeared on a compilation CD included with the August 2006 issue of MOJO. He appeared at Edinburgh 50,000 – The Final Push, the final Live 8 concert on July 6, 2005, where he performed a duet with British pop star Will Young on \"Papa's Got A Brand New Bag\". In the Black Eyed Peas album \"Monkey Business\", Brown was featured on a track called \"They Don't Want Music\". The previous week he had performed a duet with another British pop star, Joss Stone, on the United Kingdom chat show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. In 2006, Brown continued his Seven Decades of Funk World Tour. His final major U.S. performance was in San Francisco on August 20, 2006, as headliner at the Festival of the Golden Gate (Foggfest) on the Great Meadow at Fort Mason. The following day, he performed at an 800-seat campus theatre at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. His last shows were greeted with positive reviews, and one of his final concert appearances at the Irish Oxegen festival in Punchestown in 2006 included a record crowd of 80,000 people. He played a full concert as part of the BBC's Electric Proms on October 27, 2006, at The Roundhouse, supported by the Zutons, with special appearances from Max Beasley and the Sugababes.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Brown's last televised appearance was at his induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame in November 2006, before his death the following month. Before his death, Brown had been scheduled to perform a duet with singer Annie Lennox on the song \"Vengeance\" for her new album Venus, which was released in 2007.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "As a vocalist, Brown performed in a forceful shout style derived from gospel music. Meanwhile, \"his rhythmic grunts and expressive shrieks harked back farther still to ring shouts, work songs, and field cries\", according to the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (1996): \"He reimported the rhythmic complexity from which rhythm and blues, under the dual pressure of rock 'n' roll and pop, had progressively fallen away since its birth from jazz and blues.\"",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "For many years, Brown's touring show was one of the most extravagant productions in American popular music. At the time of Brown's death, his band included three guitarists, two bass guitar players, two drummers, three horns and a percussionist. The bands that he maintained during the late 1960s and 1970s were of comparable size, and the bands also included a three-piece amplified string section that played during the ballads. Brown employed between 40 and 50 people for the James Brown Revue, and members of the revue traveled with him in a bus to cities and towns all over the country, performing upwards of 330 shows a year with almost all of the shows as one-nighters.",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Before James Brown appeared on stage, his personal MC gave him an elaborate introduction accompanied by drumrolls, as the MC worked in Brown's various sobriquets along with the names of many of his hit songs. The introduction by Fats Gonder, captured on Brown's 1963 album Live at the Apollo is a representative example:",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "So now ladies and gentlemen it is \"Star Time\". Are you ready for \"Star Time?\" Thank you and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time, national[ly] and international[ly] known as \"The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business\", the man that sings \"I'll Go Crazy\"...\"Try Me\"...\"You've Got the Power\"...\"Think\"...\"If You Want Me\"...\"I Don't Mind\"...\"Bewildered\"... the million dollar seller, \"Lost Someone\"... the very latest release, \"Night Train\"... let's everybody \"Shout and Shimmy\"... \"Mr. Dynamite\", the amazing \"Mr. Please Please\" himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the Famous Flames!!",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "James Brown's performances were famous for their intensity and length. His own stated goal was to \"give people more than what they came for — make them tired, 'cause that's what they came for.'\" Brown's concert repertoire consisted mostly of his own hits and recent songs, with a few R&B covers mixed in. Brown danced vigorously as he sang, working popular dance steps such as the Mashed Potato into his routine along with dramatic leaps, splits and slides. In addition, his horn players and singing group (The Famous Flames) typically performed choreographed dance routines, and later incarnations of the Revue included backup dancers. Male performers in the Revue were required to wear tuxedoes and cummerbunds long after more casual concert wear became the norm among the younger musical acts. Brown's own extravagant outfits and his elaborate processed hairdo completed the visual impression. A James Brown concert typically included a performance by a featured vocalist, such as Vicki Anderson or Marva Whitney, and an instrumental feature for the band, which sometimes served as the opening act for the show.",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "A trademark feature of Brown's stage shows, usually during the song \"Please, Please, Please\", involved Brown dropping to his knees while clutching the microphone stand in his hands, prompting the show's longtime MC, Danny Ray, to come out, drape a cape over Brown's shoulders and escort him off the stage after he had worked himself to exhaustion during his performance. As Brown was escorted off the stage by the MC, Brown's vocal group, the Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Lloyd Stallworth, and Bobby Bennett), continued singing the background vocals \"Please, please don't go-oh\". Brown would then shake off the cape and stagger back to the microphone to perform an encore. Brown's routine was inspired by a similar one used by the professional wrestler Gorgeous George, as well as Little Richard. In his 2005 autobiography I Feel Good: A Memoir in a Life of Soul, Brown, who was a fan of Gorgeous George, credited the wrestler as the inspiration for both his cape routine and concert attire, stating, \"Seeing him on TV helped create the James Brown you see on stage\". Brown performs a version of the cape routine in the film of the T.A.M.I. Show (1964) in which he and the Famous Flames upstaged the Rolling Stones, and over the closing credits of the film Blues Brothers 2000. The Police refer to \"James Brown on the T.A.M.I. Show\" in their 1980 song \"When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around\".",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Brown demanded extreme discipline, perfection and precision from his musicians and dancers – performers in his Revue showed up for rehearsals and members wore the right \"uniform\" or \"costume\" for concert performances. During an interview conducted by Terri Gross during the NPR segment \"Fresh Air\" with Maceo Parker, a former saxophonist in Brown's band for most of the 1960s and part of the 1970s and 1980s, Parker offered his experience with the discipline that Brown demanded of the band:",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "You gotta be on time. You gotta have your uniform. Your stuff's got to be intact. You gotta have the bow tie. You got to have it. You can't come up without the bow tie. You cannot come up without a cummerbund ... [The] patent leather shoes we were wearing at the time gotta be greased. You just gotta have this stuff. This is what [Brown expected] ... [Brown] bought the costumes. He bought the shoes. And if for some reason [the band member decided] to leave the group, [Brown told the person to] please leave my uniforms . ...",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Brown also had a practice of directing, correcting and assessing fines on members of his band who broke his rules, such as wearing unshined shoes, dancing out of sync or showing up late on stage. During some of his concert performances, Brown danced in front of his band with his back to the audience as he slid across the floor, flashing hand signals and splaying his pulsating fingers to the beat of the music. Although audiences thought Brown's dance routine was part of his act, this practice was actually his way of pointing to the offending member of his troupe who played or sang the wrong note or committed some other infraction. Brown used his splayed fingers and hand signals to alert the offending person of the fine that person must pay to him for breaking his rules.",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Brown's demands on his support acts could be harsh. As Fred Wesley recalled of his time as musical director of the JBs, if Brown felt intimidated by a support act he would try to \"undermine their performances by shortening their sets without notice, demanding that they not do certain showstopping songs, and even insisting on doing the unthinkable, playing drums on some of their songs. A sure set killer.\"",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Brown's main social activism was in preserving the need for education among youths, influenced by his own troubled childhood and his being forced to drop out of the seventh grade for wearing \"insufficient clothes\". Due to heavy dropout rates in the 1960s, Brown released the pro-education song, \"Don't Be a Drop-Out\". Royalties of the song were donated to dropout-prevention charity programs. The success of this led to Brown meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House. Johnson cited Brown for being a positive role model to the youth. In 1968 James Brown endorsed Hubert Humphrey, but later Brown gained the confidence of President Richard Nixon, to whom he found he had to explain the plight of Black Americans.",
"title": "Social activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Throughout the remainder of his life, Brown made public speeches in schools and continued to advocate the importance of education in school. Upon filing his will in 2002, Brown advised that most of the money in his estate go into creating the I Feel Good, Inc. Trust to benefit disadvantaged children and provide scholarships for his grandchildren. His final single, \"Killing Is Out, School Is In\", advocated against murders of young children in the streets. Brown often gave out money and other items to children while traveling to his childhood hometown of Augusta. A week before his death, while looking gravely ill, Brown gave out toys and turkeys to kids at an Atlanta orphanage, something he had done several times over the years.",
"title": "Social activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Though Brown performed at benefit rallies for civil rights organizations in the mid-1960s, Brown often shied away from discussing civil rights in his songs in fear of alienating his crossover audience. In 1968, in response to a growing urge of anti-war advocacy during the Vietnam War, Brown recorded the song, \"America Is My Home\". In the song, Brown performed a rap, advocating patriotism and exhorting listeners to \"stop pitying yoursel[ves] and get up and fight\". At the time of the song's release, Brown had been participating in performing for troops stationed in Vietnam.",
"title": "Social activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "On April 5, 1968, a day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, Brown provided a free citywide televised concert at the Boston Garden to maintain public order and calm concerned Boston residents (over the objections of the police chief, who wanted to call off the concert, which he thought would incite violence). The show was later released on DVD as Live at the Boston Garden: April 5, 1968. According to the documentary The Night James Brown Saved Boston, then-mayor Kevin White had strongly restrained the Boston police from cracking down on minor violence and protests after the assassination, while religious and community leaders worked to keep tempers from flaring. White arranged to have Brown's performance broadcast multiple times on Boston's public television station, WGBH, thus keeping potential rioters off the streets, watching the concert for free. Angered by not being told of this, Brown demanded $60,000 for \"gate\" fees (money he thought would be lost from ticket sales on account of the concert being broadcast for free) and then threatened to go public about the secret arrangement when the city balked at paying up afterwards, news of which would have been a political death blow to White and spark riots of its own. White eventually lobbied the behind-the-scenes power-brokering group known as \"The Vault\" to come up with money for Brown's gate fee and other social programs, contributing $100,000. Brown received $15,000 from them via the city. White also persuaded management at the Garden to give up their share of receipts to make up the differences. Following this successful performance, Brown was counseled by President Johnson to urge cities ravaged from riots following King's assassination to not resort to violence, telling them to \"cool it, there's another way\".",
"title": "Social activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Responding to pressure from black activists, including H. Rap Brown, to take a bigger stance on their issues and from footage of black on black crime committed in inner cities, Brown wrote the lyrics to the song \"Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud\", which his bandleader Alfred \"Pee Wee\" Ellis accompanied with a musical composition. Released late that summer, the song's lyrics helped to make it an anthem for the civil rights movement. Brown only performed the song sporadically following its initial release and later stated he had regrets about recording it, saying in 1984, \"Now 'Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud' has done more for the black race than any other record, but if I had my choice, I wouldn't have done it, because I don't like defining anyone by race. To teach race is to teach separatism.\" In his autobiography he stated:",
"title": "Social activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The song is obsolete now ... But it was necessary to teach pride then, and I think the song did a lot of good for a lot of people ... People called \"Black and Proud\" militant and angry – maybe because of the line about dying on your feet instead of living on your knees. But really, if you listen to it, it sounds like a children's song. That's why I had children in it, so children who heard it could grow up feeling pride ... The song cost me a lot of my crossover audience. The racial makeup at my concerts was mostly black after that. I don't regret it, though, even if it was misunderstood.",
"title": "Social activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In 1969, Brown recorded two more songs of social commentary, \"World\" and \"I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing\", the latter song pleading for equal opportunity and self-reliance rather than entitlement. In 1970, in response to some black leaders for not being outspoken enough, he recorded \"Get Up, Get into It, Get Involved\" and \"Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing\". In 1971, he began touring Africa, including Zambia and Nigeria. He was made \"freeman of the city\" in Lagos, Nigeria, by Oba Adeyinka Oyekan, for his \"influence on black people all over the world\". With his company, James Brown Enterprises, Brown helped to provide jobs for blacks in business in the communities. As the 1970s continued, Brown continued to record songs of social commentary, most prominently 1972's \"King Heroin\" and the two-part ballad \"Public Enemy\", which dealt with drug addiction.",
"title": "Social activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "During the 1968 presidential campaign, Brown endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey and appeared with Humphrey at political rallies. Brown was labeled an \"Uncle Tom\" for supporting Humphrey and also for releasing the pro-American funk song, \"America Is My Home\", in which Brown had lambasted protesters of the Vietnam War as well as the politics of pro-black activists. Brown began supporting Republican president Richard Nixon after being invited to perform at Nixon's inaugural ball in January 1969. Brown's endorsement of Nixon's campaign during the 1972 presidential election negatively impacted his career during that period with several national Black organizations boycotting his records and protesting at his concert shows; a November 1972 show in Cincinnati was picketed with signs saying, \"James Brown: Nixon's Clown\". Brown initially was invited to perform at a Youth Concert following Nixon's inauguration in January 1973 but bailed out due to the backlash he suffered from supporting Nixon. Brown joined fellow black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., who faced similar backlash, to back out of the concert. Brown blamed it on \"fatigue\". Brown later reversed his support of Nixon and composed the song, \"You Can Have Watergate (Just Gimme Some Bucks And I'll Be Straight)\" as a result. After Nixon resigned from office, Brown composed the 1974 hit, \"Funky President (People It's Bad)\", right after Gerald Ford took Nixon's place. Brown later supported Democratic President Jimmy Carter, attending one of Carter's inaugural balls in 1977. Brown also openly supported President Ronald Reagan's reelection in 1984.",
"title": "Social activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Brown stated he was neither Democratic nor Republican despite his support of Republican presidents such as Nixon and Reagan as well as Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. In 1999, when being interviewed by Rolling Stone, the magazine asked him to name a hero in the 20th century; Brown mentioned John F. Kennedy and then-96-year-old U.S. Senator, and former Dixiecrat, Strom Thurmond, stating \"when the young whippersnappers get out of line, whether Democratic or Republican, an old man can walk up and say 'Wait a minute, son, it goes this way.' And that's great for our country. He's like a grandfather to me.\" In 2003, Brown was the featured attraction of a Washington D.C. fundraiser for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Following the deaths of Ronald Reagan and his friend Ray Charles, Brown said to CNN, \"I'm kind of in an uproar. I love the country and I got – you know I've been around a long time, through many presidents and everything. So after losing Mr. Reagan, who I knew very well, then Mr. Ray Charles, who I worked with and lived with like, all our life, we had a show together in Oakland many, many years ago and it's like you found the placard.\" Despite his contrarian political views, Brown mentored black activist Rev. Al Sharpton during the 1970s.",
"title": "Social activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In 1962, Tammi Terrell joined the James Brown Revue. Brown became sexually involved with Terrell—even though she was only 17—in a relationship that continued until she escaped his physical abuse. Bobby Bennett, former member of the Famous Flames, told Rolling Stone about the abuse he witnessed: \"He beat Tammi Terrell terrible\", said Bennett. \"She was bleeding, shedding blood.\" Terrell, who died in 1970, was Brown's girlfriend before she became famous as Marvin Gaye's singing partner in the mid-1960s. \"Tammi left him because she didn't want her butt whipped\", said Bennett, who also claimed he saw Brown kick one pregnant girlfriend down a flight of stairs.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Brown was married three times. His first marriage was to Velma Warren in 1953, and they had one son together. Over a decade later, the couple had separated, and the final divorce decree was issued in 1969. They maintained a close friendship that lasted until Brown's death. Brown's second marriage was to Deidre \"Deedee\" Jenkins, on October 22, 1970. They had two daughters together. By 1974 they were separated after what his daughter describes as years of domestic abuse, and the final divorce decree was issued on January 10, 1981. His third marriage was to Adrienne Lois Rodriguez (March 9, 1950 – January 6, 1996) in 1984. It was a contentious marriage that made headlines due to domestic abuse complaints. Rodriguez filed for divorce in 1988, \"citing years of cruelty treatment\", but they reconciled. Less than a year after Rodriguez died in 1996, Brown hired Tomi Rae Hynie to be a background singer for his band; she later claimed that she was his fourth wife.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "On December 23, 2002, Brown, 69, and Hynie, 33, held a wedding ceremony that was officiated by the Rev. Larry Flyer. Following Brown's death, controversy surrounded the circumstances of the marriage, with Brown's attorney, Albert \"Buddy\" Dallas, reporting that the marriage was not valid; Hynie was still married to Javed Ahmed, a man from Bangladesh. Hynie claimed Ahmed married her to obtain residency through a Green Card and that the marriage was annulled but the annulment did not occur until April 2004. In an attempt to prove her marriage to Brown was valid, she provided a marriage certificate as proof of her marriage to Brown during an interview on CNN with Larry King, but she did not provide King with court records pointing to an annulment of her marriage to Brown or to Ahmed. According to Dallas, Brown was angry and hurt that Hynie had concealed her prior marriage from him and Brown moved to file for annulment from Hynie. Dallas added that though Hynie's marriage to Ahmed was annulled after she married Brown, the Brown–Hynie marriage was not valid under South Carolina law because Brown and Hynie did not remarry after the annulment. In August 2003, Brown took out a full-page public notice in Variety featuring Hynie, James II and himself on vacation at Disney World to announce that he and Hynie were going their separate ways. On January 27, 2015, a judge ruled Hynie as Brown's legal widow and that she was now Brown's widow for purposes of determining the distribution of Brown's estate. The decision was based on the grounds that Hynie's previous marriage was invalid and that James Brown had abandoned his efforts to annul his own marriage to Hynie. On June 17, 2020, a South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Hynie was not legally married to Brown due to her failure to annul her previous marriage. The court also officially ruled that she has no right to any part of his estate.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Brown had numerous children and acknowledged nine of them, including five sons—Teddy (1954–1973), Terry, Larry, Micheal Brown and James Joseph Brown Jr.—and six daughters: LaRhonda Petitt, Dr. Yamma Noyola Brown Lumar, Deanna Brown Thomas, Cinnamon Brown, Jeanette Bellinger and Venisha Brown (1964–2018). Brown also had eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Brown's eldest son, Teddy, died in a car crash on June 14, 1973. According to an August 22, 2007, article published in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, DNA tests indicate that Brown also fathered at least three extramarital children. The first one of them to be identified is LaRhonda Pettit (born 1962), a retired flight attendant and teacher who lives in Houston. Another alleged son, Michael Deon Brown, was born in September 1968 to Mary Florence Brown, and despite pleading no contest to a paternity suit brought against him in 1983, Brown never officially acknowledged Michael as his son. During contesting of Brown's will, another of the Brown family attorneys, Debra Opri, revealed to Larry King that Brown wanted a DNA test performed after his death to confirm the paternity of James Brown Jr. (born 2001)—not for Brown's sake but for the sake of the other family members. In April 2007, Hynie selected a guardian ad litem whom she wanted appointed by the court to represent her son, James Brown Jr., in the paternity proceedings. James Brown Jr. was confirmed to be his biological son.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "For most of his career, Brown had a strict drug- and alcohol-free policy for any member in his entourage, including band members, and would fire people who disobeyed orders, particularly those who used or abused drugs. Although early members of the Famous Flames were fired for using alcohol, Brown often served a highball consisting of Delaware Punch and moonshine at his St. Albans, Queens, house in the mid-1960s. Some of the original members of Brown's 1970s band, the J.B.'s, including Catfish and Bootsy Collins, intentionally took LSD during a performance in 1971, causing Brown to fire them after the show because he had suspected them of being on drugs all along.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Aide Bob Patton has asserted that he accidentally shared a PCP-laced cannabis joint with Brown in the mid-1970s and \"hallucinated for hours\", although Brown \"talked about it as if it was only marijuana he was smoking\". By the mid-1980s, it was widely alleged that Brown was using drugs, with Vicki Anderson confirming to journalist Barney Hoskyns that Brown's regular use of PCP (colloquially known as \"angel dust\") \"began before 1982\". After he met and later married Adrienne Rodriguez in 1984, she and Brown began using PCP together. This drug usage often resulted in violent outbursts from him, and he was arrested several times for domestic violence against Rodriguez while high on the drug. By January 1988, Brown faced four criminal charges within a 12-month span relating to driving, PCP, and gun possession. After an April 1988 arrest for domestic abuse, Brown went on the CNN program Sonya Live in L.A. with host Sonya Friedman. The interview became notorious for Brown's irreverent demeanor, with some asserting that Brown was high.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "One of Brown's former mistresses recalled in a GQ magazine article on Brown some years after his death that Brown would smoke PCP (\"until that got hard to find\") and cocaine, mixed with tobacco in Kool cigarettes. He also engaged in the off-label use of sildenafil, maintaining that it gave him \"extra energy\". Once, while traveling in a car under the influence of PCP (which he continued to procure dependent on its availability), Brown alleged that passing trees contained psychotronic surveillance technology.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In January 1998, he spent a week in rehab to deal with an addiction to unspecified prescription drugs. A week after his release, he was arrested for an unlawful use of a handgun and possession of cannabis. Prior to his death in December 2006, when Brown entered Emory University Hospital, traces of cocaine were found in the singer's urine. His widow suggested Brown would \"do crack\" with a female acquaintance.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Brown's personal life was marred by numerous brushes with the law. At the age of 16, he was convicted of theft and served three years in juvenile prison. During a concert held at Club 15 in Macon, Georgia, in 1963, while Otis Redding was performing alongside his former band Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, Brown, reportedly wielding two shotguns, tried to shoot his musical rival Joe Tex. The incident led to multiple people being shot and stabbed. Since Brown was still on parole at the time, he relied on his agent Clint Brantley \"and a few thousand dollars to make the situation disappear\". According to Jenkins, \"seven people got shot\", and after the shootout ended, a man appeared and gave \"each one of the injured a hundred dollars apiece not to carry it no further and not to talk to the press\". Brown was never charged for the incident.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "On July 16, 1978, after performing at the Apollo, Brown was arrested for reportedly failing to turn in records from one of his radio stations after the station was forced to file for bankruptcy.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Brown was arrested on April 3, 1988, for assault, and again in May 1988 on drug and weapons charges, and again on September 24, 1988, following a high-speed car chase on Interstate 20 near the Georgia–South Carolina state border. He was convicted of carrying an unlicensed pistol and assaulting a police officer, along with various drug-related and driving offenses. Although he was sentenced to six years in prison, he was eventually released on parole on February 27, 1991, after serving two years of his sentence. Brown's FBI file, released to The Washington Post in 2007 under the Freedom of Information Act, related Brown's claim that the high-speed chase did not occur as claimed by the police, and that local police shot at his car several times during an incident of police harassment and assaulted him after his arrest. Local authorities found no merit to Brown's accusations.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In 1998, a woman named Mary Simons accused Brown in a civil suit of holding her captive for three days, demanding oral sex and firing a gun in his office; Simons' charge was eventually dismissed. In another civil suit, filed by former background singer Lisa Rushton alleged that between 1994 and 1999, Brown allegedly demanded sexual favors and when refused, would cut off her pay and kept her offstage. She also claimed Brown would \"place a hand on her buttocks and loudly told her in a crowded restaurant to not look or speak to any other man besides himself;\" Rushton eventually withdrew her lawsuit. In yet another civil suit, a woman named Lisa Agbalaya, who worked for Brown, said the singer would tell her he had \"bull testicles\", handed her a pair of zebra-print underwear, told her to wear them while he massaged her with oil, and fired her after she refused. A Los Angeles jury cleared the singer of sexual harassment but found him liable for wrongful termination.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The police were summoned to Brown's residence on July 3, 2000, after he was accused of charging at an electric company repairman with a steak knife when the repairman visited Brown's house to investigate a complaint about having no lights at the residence. In 2003, Brown was pardoned by the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services for past crimes that he was convicted of committing in South Carolina.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Brown was repeatedly arrested for domestic violence. On four occasions between 1987 and 1995, Brown was arrested on charges of assault against his third wife, Adrienne Rodriguez. In one incident, Rodriguez reported to authorities that Brown beat her with an iron pipe and shot at her car. Rodriguez was hospitalized after the last assault in October 1995, but charges were dropped after she died in January 1996.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In January 2004, Brown was arrested in South Carolina on a domestic violence charge after Tomi Rae Hynie accused him of pushing her to the floor during an argument at their home, where she suffered scratches and bruises to her right arm and hip. In June, Brown pleaded no contest to the domestic violence incident, but served no jail time. Instead, Brown was required to forfeit a US$1,087 bond as punishment.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In January 2005, a woman named Jacque Hollander filed a lawsuit against James Brown, which stemmed from an alleged 1988 rape. When the case was initially heard before a judge in 2002, Hollander's claims against Brown were dismissed by the court as the limitations period for filing the suit had expired. Hollander claimed that stress from the alleged assault later caused her to contract Graves' disease, a thyroid condition. Hollander claimed that the incident took place in South Carolina while she was employed by Brown as a publicist. Hollander alleged that, during her ride in a van with Brown, Brown pulled over to the side of the road and sexually assaulted her while he threatened her with a shotgun.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In her case against Brown, Hollander entered as evidence a DNA sample and a polygraph result, but the evidence was not considered due to the limitations defense. Hollander later attempted to bring her case before the Supreme Court, but nothing came of her complaint.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "At the end of his life, James Brown lived in Beech Island, South Carolina, directly across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. According to his longtime manager Charles Bobbit, Brown had been living with Type 2 diabetes, which went undiagnosed for years. In 2004, Brown was successfully treated for prostate cancer. Regardless of his health, Brown maintained his reputation as the \"hardest working man in show business\" by keeping up with his grueling performance schedule.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "On December 23, 2006, Brown became very ill and arrived at his dentist's office in Atlanta, Georgia, several hours late. His appointment was for dental implant work. During that visit, Brown's dentist observed that he looked \"very bad ... weak and dazed\". Instead of performing the work, the dentist advised Brown to see a physician right away about his medical condition.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The following day, Brown went to the Emory Crawford Long Memorial Hospital for medical evaluation and was admitted for observation and treatment. According to Charles Bobbit, his longtime personal manager and friend, Brown had been struggling with a noisy cough since returning from a November trip to Europe. Yet, Bobbit said, the singer had a history of never complaining about being sick and often performed while ill. Although Brown had to cancel upcoming concerts in Waterbury, Connecticut, and Englewood, New Jersey, he was confident that the doctor would discharge him from the hospital in time for his scheduled New Year's Eve shows at the Count Basie Theatre in New Jersey and the B. B. King Blues Club in New York, in addition to performing a song live on CNN for the Anderson Cooper New Year's Eve special. Brown remained hospitalized, however, and his condition worsened throughout the day.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "On Christmas Day 2006, Brown died at approximately 1:45 a.m. EST (05:45 UTC), at age 73, from congestive heart failure, resulting from complications of pneumonia. Bobbit was at his bedside and later reported that Brown stuttered, \"I'm going away tonight\", then took three long, quiet breaths and fell asleep before dying.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In 2019, an investigation by CNN and other journalists led to suggestions that Brown had been murdered.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "After Brown's death, his relatives, a host of celebrities, and thousands of fans gathered, on December 28, 2006, for a public memorial service at the Apollo Theater in New York City and, on December 30, 2006, at the James Brown Arena in Augusta, Georgia. A separate, private ceremony was held in North Augusta, South Carolina, on December 29, 2006, with Brown's family in attendance. Celebrities at these various memorial events included Michael Jackson, Jimmy Cliff, Joe Frazier, Buddy Guy, Ice Cube, Ludacris, Dr. Dre, Little Richard, Dick Gregory, MC Hammer, Prince, Jesse Jackson, Ice-T, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bootsy Collins, LL Cool J, Lil Wayne, Lenny Kravitz, 50 Cent, Stevie Wonder, and Don King. Rev. Al Sharpton officiated at all of Brown's public and private memorial services.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Brown's memorial ceremonies were all elaborate, complete with costume changes for the deceased and videos featuring him in concert. His body, placed in a Promethean casket—bronze polished to a golden shine—was driven through the streets of New York to the Apollo Theater in a white, glass-encased horse-drawn carriage. In Augusta, Georgia, his memorial procession stopped to pay respects at his statue, en route to the James Brown Arena. During the public memorial there, a video showed Brown's last performance in Augusta, Georgia, with the Ray Charles version of \"Georgia on My Mind\" playing soulfully in the background. His last backup band, the Soul Generals, also played some of his hits during that tribute at the arena. The group was joined by Bootsy Collins on bass, with MC Hammer performing a dance in James Brown style. Former Temptations lead singer Ali-Ollie Woodson performed \"Walk Around Heaven All Day\" at the memorial services. Brown was buried in a crypt at his daughter's home in Beech Island, South Carolina.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Brown signed his last will and testament on August 1, 2000, before J. Strom Thurmond Jr., an attorney for the estate. The irrevocable trust, separate and apart from Brown's will, was created on his behalf, that same year, by his attorney, Albert \"Buddy\" Dallas, one of three personal representatives of Brown's estate. His will covered the disposition of his personal assets, such as clothing, cars, and jewelry, while the irrevocable trust covered the disposition of the music rights, business assets of James Brown Enterprises, and his Beech Island, South Carolina estate.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "During the reading of the will on January 11, 2007, Thurmond revealed that Brown's six adult living children (Terry Brown, Larry Brown, Daryl Brown, Yamma Brown Lumar, Deanna Brown Thomas and Venisha Brown) were named in the document, while Hynie and James II were not mentioned as heirs. Brown's will was signed 10 months before James II was born and more than a year before Brown's marriage to Tomi Rae Hynie. Like Brown's will, his irrevocable trust omitted Hynie and James II as recipients of Brown's property. The irrevocable trust had also been established before, and not amended since, the birth of James II.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "On January 24, 2007, Brown's children filed a lawsuit, petitioning the court to remove the personal representatives from the estate (including Brown's attorney, as well as trustee Albert \"Buddy\" Dallas) and appoint a special administrator because of perceived impropriety and alleged mismanagement of Brown's assets. On January 31, 2007, Hynie also filed a lawsuit against Brown's estate, challenging the validity of the will and the irrevocable trust. Hynie's suit asked the court both to recognize her as Brown's widow and to appoint a special administrator for the estate.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "On January 27, 2015, Judge Doyet Early III ruled that Tomi Rae Hynie Brown was officially the widow of James Brown. The decision was based on the grounds that Hynie's previous marriage was invalid and that James Brown had abandoned his efforts to annul his own marriage to Hynie.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "On February 19, 2015, the South Carolina Supreme Court intervened, halting all lower court actions in the estate and undertaking to review previous actions itself. The South Carolina Court of Appeals in July 2018 ruled that Hynie was, in fact, Mr. Brown's wife. In 2020, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Hynie had not been legally married to Brown and did not have a right to his estate. It was reported in July 2021 that Brown's family had reached a settlement ending the 15-year battle over the estate.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Brown received awards and honors throughout his lifetime and after his death. In 1993, the City Council of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, conducted a poll of residents to choose a new name for the bridge that crossed the Yampa River on Shield Drive. The winning name, with 7,717 votes, was \"James Brown Soul Center of the Universe Bridge\". The bridge was officially dedicated in September 1993, and Brown appeared at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the event. A petition was started by local ranchers to return the name to \"Stockbridge\" for historical reasons, but they backed off after citizens defeated their efforts because of the popularity of Brown's name. Brown returned to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, on July 4, 2002, for an outdoor festival, performing with bands such as the String Cheese Incident.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "During his long career, Brown received many prestigious music industry awards and honors. In 1983 he was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. Brown was one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction dinner in New York on January 23, 1986. At that time, the members of his original vocal group, the Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Johnny Terry, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth) were not inducted. However, on April 14, 2012, the Famous Flames were automatically and retroactively inducted into the Hall of Fame alongside Brown, without the need for nomination and voting, on the basis that they should have been inducted with him in 1986. On February 25, 1992, Brown was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 34th annual Grammy Awards. Exactly a year later, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 4th annual Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Awards. A ceremony was held for Brown on January 10, 1997, to honor him with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "On June 15, 2000, Brown was honored as an inductee to the New York Songwriters Hall of Fame. On August 6, 2002, he was honored as the first BMI Urban Icon at the BMI Urban Awards. His BMI accolades include an impressive ten R&B Awards and six Pop Awards. On November 14, 2006, Brown was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame, and he was one of several inductees to perform at the ceremony. In recognition of his accomplishments as an entertainer, Brown was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors on December 7, 2003. In 2004 Rolling Stone magazine ranked James Brown as No. 7 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. In an article for Rolling Stone, critic Robert Christgau cited Brown as \"the greatest musician of the rock era\". He appeared on the BET Awards June 24, 2003, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award presented by Michael Jackson, and performed with him. In 2004, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Aretha Franklin.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Brown was also honored in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, for his philanthropy and civic activities. On November 20, 1993, Mayor Charles DeVaney of Augusta held a ceremony to dedicate a section of 9th Street between Broad and Twiggs Streets, renamed \"James Brown Boulevard\", in the entertainer's honor. On May 6, 2005, as a 72nd birthday present for Brown, the city of Augusta unveiled a life-sized bronze James Brown statue on Broad Street. The statue was to have been dedicated a year earlier, but the ceremony was put on hold because of a domestic abuse charge that Brown faced at the time. In 2005, Charles \"Champ\" Walker and the We Feel Good Committee went before the County commission and received approval to change Augusta's slogan to \"We Feel Good\". Afterward, officials renamed the city's civic center the James Brown Arena, and James Brown attended a ceremony for the unveiling of the namesake center on October 15, 2006.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "On December 30, 2006, during the public memorial service at the James Brown Arena, Shirley A. R. Lewis, president of Paine College, a historically black college in Augusta, Georgia, bestowed posthumously upon Brown an honorary doctorate in recognition and honor of his many contributions to the school in its times of need. Brown had originally been scheduled to receive the honorary doctorate from Paine College during its May 2007 commencement.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "During the 49th Annual Grammy Awards presentation on February 11, 2007, James Brown's famous cape was draped over a microphone by Danny Ray at the end of a montage in honor of notable people in the music industry who died during the previous year. Earlier that evening, Christina Aguilera delivered an impassioned performance of Brown's hit \"It's a Man's Man's Man's World\" followed by a standing ovation, while Chris Brown performed a dance routine in honor of James Brown.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "On August 17, 2013, the official R&B Music Hall of Fame honored and inducted James Brown at a ceremony held at the Waetjen Auditorium at Cleveland State University.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "ART THE BOX began in early 2015 as a collaboration between three organizations: the City of Augusta, the Downtown Development Authority and the Greater Augusta Arts Council. 19 local artists were selected by a committee to create art on 23 local traffic signal control cabinets (TSCCs). A competition was held to create the James Brown Tribute Box on the corner of James Brown Blvd. (9th Ave.) and Broad St. This box was designed and painted by local artist, Ms. Robbie Pitts Bellamy and has become a favorite photo opportunity to visitors and locals in Augusta, Georgia.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "\"I have a lot of musical heroes but I think James Brown is at the top of the list\", remarked Public Enemy's Chuck D. \"Absolutely the funkiest man on Earth ... In a black household, James Brown is part of the fabric – Motown, Stax, Atlantic and James Brown.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Brown at No. 44 on their list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time. On April 24, 2023, James Brown was inducted into the newly established Atlantic City Walk Of Fame presented by The National R&B Music Society Inc. Brown's daughter Deanna Brown Thomas accepted the honor on his behalf. The unveiling and induction ceremony took place at Brighton Park in Atlantic City, NJ. Brown was inducted by Bowlegged Lou of the production team Full Force. Other inductees included, Little Anthony & The Imperials, The Delfonics and Grover Washington Jr.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "As a tribute to James Brown, the Rolling Stones covered the song, \"I'll Go Crazy\" from Brown's Live at the Apollo album, during their 2007 European tour. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has remarked, \"He [James Brown] was almost a musical genre in his own right and he changed and moved forward the whole time so people were able to learn from him.\"",
"title": "Tributes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "On December 22, 2007, the first annual \"Tribute Fit For the King of King Records\" in honor of James Brown was held at the Madison Theater in Covington, Kentucky. The tribute, organized by Bootsy Collins, featured Tony Wilson as Young James Brown with appearances by Afrika Bambaataa, Chuck D of Public Enemy, the Soul Generals, Buckethead, Freekbass, Triage and many of Brown's surviving family members. Comedian Michael Coyer was the MC for the event. During the show, the mayor of Cincinnati proclaimed December 22 as James Brown Day.",
"title": "Tributes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Studio albums",
"title": "Discography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Games",
"title": "In other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Television",
"title": "In other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Footnotes",
"title": "References"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Sources",
"title": "References"
}
]
| James Joseph Brown was an American singer and musician. The central progenitor of funk music and a major figure of 20th-century music, he is referred to by various honorific nicknames, some of which include "the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business", "Godfather of Soul", "Mr. Dynamite", and "Soul Brother No. 1". In a career that lasted more than 50 years, he influenced the development of several music genres. Brown was one of the first 10 inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction in New York on January 23, 1986. Brown began his career as a gospel singer in Toccoa, Georgia. He rose to prominence in the mid-1950s as the lead singer of the Famous Flames, a rhythm and blues vocal group founded by Bobby Byrd. With the hit ballads "Please, Please, Please" and "Try Me", Brown built a reputation as a dynamic live performer with the Famous Flames and his backing band, sometimes known as the James Brown Band or the James Brown Orchestra. His success peaked in the 1960s with the live album Live at the Apollo and hit singles such as "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", "I Got You" and "It's a Man's Man's Man's World". During the late 1960s, Brown moved from a continuum of blues and gospel-based forms and styles to a new approach to music-making, emphasizing stripped-down interlocking rhythms that influenced the development of funk music. By the early 1970s, Brown had fully established the funk sound after the formation of the J.B.s with records such as "Get Up Sex Machine" and "The Payback". He also became noted for songs of social commentary, including the 1968 hit "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud". Brown continued to perform and record until his death from pneumonia in 2006. Brown recorded and released 17 singles that reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B charts. He also holds the record for the most singles listed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart that did not reach No. 1. Brown was posthumously inducted into the first class of the Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2013 as an artist and then in 2017 as a songwriter. He also received honors from several other institutions, including inductions into the Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In Joel Whitburn's analysis of the Billboard R&B charts from 1942 to 2010, Brown is ranked No. 1 in the Top 500 Artists. He is ranked seventh on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. | 2001-08-09T18:12:40Z | 2023-12-29T02:39:09Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Brown |
15,767 | Jon Postel | Jonathan Bruce Postel (/pəˈstɛl/; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. During his lifetime he was referred to as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence; Postel himself noted that this "compliment" came with a barb, the suggestion that he should be replaced by a "professional," and responded with typical self-effacing matter-of-factness: "Of course, there isn’t any 'God of the Internet.' The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together."
Postel attended Van Nuys High School, and then UCLA where he earned his B.S. (1966) as well as his M.S. (1968) in Engineering. There he completed his Ph.D. in computer science in 1974, with Dave Farber as his thesis advisor.
Postel started work at UCLA on 23 December 1969 as a Postgraduate Research Engineer (I) where he was involved in early work on the ARPANET. He was involved in the development of the Internet domain system and, at his instigation, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed a second set of protocols for handling data between networks, which is now known as Internet protocol suite. Together with Cerf and Steve Crocker, Postel worked on implementing most of the ARPANET protocols. Cerf would later become one of the principal designers of the TCP/IP standard, which works because of the sentence known as Postel's Law.
Postel worked with ARPANET until 24 August 1973 when he left to join MITRE Corporation. He assisted with Network Information Center which was being set up at SRI by Elizabeth Feinler. In March 1977, he joined the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California as a research scientist.
Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFC 791, RFC 792 and RFC 793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. Between 1982 and 1984 Postel co-authored the RFCs which became the foundation of today's DNS (RFC 819, RFC 881, RFC 882 and RFC 920) which were joined in 1995 by RFC 1591 which he also co-wrote. In total, he wrote or co-authored more than 20 RFCs.
Postel served on the Internet Architecture Board and its predecessors for many years. He was the Director of the names and number assignment clearinghouse, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from its inception. He was the first member of the Internet Society, and was on its Board of Trustees. He was the original and long-time .us Top-Level Domain administrator. He also managed the Los Nettos Network.
All of the above were part-time activities he assumed in conjunction with his primary position as Director of the Computer Networks Division, Division 7, of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.
On January 28, 1998, Postel, as a test, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regional root nameservers on his own authority and instructed them to reconfigure their servers, changing the root zone server from then SAIC subsidiary Network Solutions' A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET (198.41.0.4) to IANA's DNSROOT.IANA.ORG (198.32.1.98). The operators complied with Postel's instructions, thus dividing control of Internet naming between the non-government operators with IANA and the 4 remaining U.S. Government roots at NASA, DoD, and BRL with NSI. Though usage of the Internet was not interrupted, Postel was threatened by US Presidential science advisor Ira Magaziner with the statement "You'll never work on the Internet again" and was ordered to end the test which he did. Within a week, the US NTIA issued A proposal to improve technical management of Internet names and addresses, including changes to authority over the Internet DNS root zone, which ultimately, and controversially, increased U.S. control.
On October 16, 1998, Postel died of complications from heart surgery in Los Angeles. He was recovering from a surgery to replace a leaking heart valve.
The significance of Jon Postel's contributions to building the Internet, both technical and personal, were such that a memorial recollection of his life and his work forms part of the core technical literature sequence of the Internet in the form of RFC2468 "I Remember IANA", written by Vint Cerf.
The Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California is named in his honor, as is the annual Postel Award. In 2012, Postel was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. The Channel Islands' Domain Registry building was named after him in early 2016.
Another tribute, "Working with Jon: Tribute delivered at UCLA, October 30, 1998" (RFC2441), was written by Danny Cohen.
Perhaps his most famous legacy is from RFC760, which includes a robustness principle often called Postel's law: "an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior" (reworded in RFC 1122 as "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send").
The Jonathan B. Postel Service Award is an award named after Postel. The award has been presented most years since 1999 by the Internet Society to "honor a person who has made outstanding contributions in service to the data communications community." The first recipient of the award was Postel himself, posthumously. The award was created by Vint Cerf as chairman of the Internet Society and announced in "I remember IANA" published as RFC 2468. | [
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"text": "Jonathan Bruce Postel (/pəˈstɛl/; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. During his lifetime he was referred to as the \"god of the Internet\" for his comprehensive influence; Postel himself noted that this \"compliment\" came with a barb, the suggestion that he should be replaced by a \"professional,\" and responded with typical self-effacing matter-of-factness: \"Of course, there isn’t any 'God of the Internet.' The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Postel attended Van Nuys High School, and then UCLA where he earned his B.S. (1966) as well as his M.S. (1968) in Engineering. There he completed his Ph.D. in computer science in 1974, with Dave Farber as his thesis advisor.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Postel started work at UCLA on 23 December 1969 as a Postgraduate Research Engineer (I) where he was involved in early work on the ARPANET. He was involved in the development of the Internet domain system and, at his instigation, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed a second set of protocols for handling data between networks, which is now known as Internet protocol suite. Together with Cerf and Steve Crocker, Postel worked on implementing most of the ARPANET protocols. Cerf would later become one of the principal designers of the TCP/IP standard, which works because of the sentence known as Postel's Law.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Postel worked with ARPANET until 24 August 1973 when he left to join MITRE Corporation. He assisted with Network Information Center which was being set up at SRI by Elizabeth Feinler. In March 1977, he joined the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California as a research scientist.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFC 791, RFC 792 and RFC 793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. Between 1982 and 1984 Postel co-authored the RFCs which became the foundation of today's DNS (RFC 819, RFC 881, RFC 882 and RFC 920) which were joined in 1995 by RFC 1591 which he also co-wrote. In total, he wrote or co-authored more than 20 RFCs.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Postel served on the Internet Architecture Board and its predecessors for many years. He was the Director of the names and number assignment clearinghouse, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from its inception. He was the first member of the Internet Society, and was on its Board of Trustees. He was the original and long-time .us Top-Level Domain administrator. He also managed the Los Nettos Network.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "All of the above were part-time activities he assumed in conjunction with his primary position as Director of the Computer Networks Division, Division 7, of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "On January 28, 1998, Postel, as a test, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regional root nameservers on his own authority and instructed them to reconfigure their servers, changing the root zone server from then SAIC subsidiary Network Solutions' A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET (198.41.0.4) to IANA's DNSROOT.IANA.ORG (198.32.1.98). The operators complied with Postel's instructions, thus dividing control of Internet naming between the non-government operators with IANA and the 4 remaining U.S. Government roots at NASA, DoD, and BRL with NSI. Though usage of the Internet was not interrupted, Postel was threatened by US Presidential science advisor Ira Magaziner with the statement \"You'll never work on the Internet again\" and was ordered to end the test which he did. Within a week, the US NTIA issued A proposal to improve technical management of Internet names and addresses, including changes to authority over the Internet DNS root zone, which ultimately, and controversially, increased U.S. control.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "On October 16, 1998, Postel died of complications from heart surgery in Los Angeles. He was recovering from a surgery to replace a leaking heart valve.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The significance of Jon Postel's contributions to building the Internet, both technical and personal, were such that a memorial recollection of his life and his work forms part of the core technical literature sequence of the Internet in the form of RFC2468 \"I Remember IANA\", written by Vint Cerf.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California is named in his honor, as is the annual Postel Award. In 2012, Postel was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. The Channel Islands' Domain Registry building was named after him in early 2016.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Another tribute, \"Working with Jon: Tribute delivered at UCLA, October 30, 1998\" (RFC2441), was written by Danny Cohen.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Perhaps his most famous legacy is from RFC760, which includes a robustness principle often called Postel's law: \"an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior\" (reworded in RFC 1122 as \"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send\").",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Jonathan B. Postel Service Award is an award named after Postel. The award has been presented most years since 1999 by the Internet Society to \"honor a person who has made outstanding contributions in service to the data communications community.\" The first recipient of the award was Postel himself, posthumously. The award was created by Vint Cerf as chairman of the Internet Society and announced in \"I remember IANA\" published as RFC 2468.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| Jonathan Bruce Postel was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. During his lifetime he was referred to as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence; Postel himself noted that this "compliment" came with a barb, the suggestion that he should be replaced by a "professional," and responded with typical self-effacing matter-of-factness: "Of course, there isn’t any 'God of the Internet.' The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together." | 2001-05-16T00:00:56Z | 2023-12-10T13:42:06Z | [
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15,768 | Joyce K. Reynolds | Joyce Kathleen Reynolds (March 8, 1952 – December 28, 2015) was an American computer scientist who played a significant role in developing protocols underlying the Internet. She authored or co-authored many RFCs, most notably those introducing and specifying the Telnet, FTP, and POP protocols.
Reynolds held bachelor's and master's degrees in social sciences from the University of Southern California.
From 1983 until 1998, she worked with Jon Postel to develop early functions of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, such as the global allocation of IP addresses, Autonomous System (AS) number allocation, and management of the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS). After Postel's death in 1998, Reynolds helped supervise the transition of the IANA functions to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. She worked with ICANN in this role until 2001, while remaining an employee of ISI.
From 1987 to 2006, she served on the editorial team of the Request for Comments series, co-leading the RFC Editor function at the ISI from 1998 until 2006.
As Area Director of the User Services area, she was a member of the Internet Engineering Steering Group of the IETF from 1990 to March 1998.
Reynolds died due to complications from cancer on December 28, 2015, at the age of 63.
With Bob Braden, she received the 2006 Postel Award in recognition of her services to the Internet. She is mentioned, along with a brief biography, in RFC 1336, Who's Who in the Internet (1992). Upon her death, former IETF Chairman Brian Carpenter suggested that "What would Joyce have said?" should be a guiding question for the organization. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Joyce Kathleen Reynolds (March 8, 1952 – December 28, 2015) was an American computer scientist who played a significant role in developing protocols underlying the Internet. She authored or co-authored many RFCs, most notably those introducing and specifying the Telnet, FTP, and POP protocols.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Reynolds held bachelor's and master's degrees in social sciences from the University of Southern California.",
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"text": "From 1983 until 1998, she worked with Jon Postel to develop early functions of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, such as the global allocation of IP addresses, Autonomous System (AS) number allocation, and management of the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS). After Postel's death in 1998, Reynolds helped supervise the transition of the IANA functions to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. She worked with ICANN in this role until 2001, while remaining an employee of ISI.",
"title": "Career"
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"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "From 1987 to 2006, she served on the editorial team of the Request for Comments series, co-leading the RFC Editor function at the ISI from 1998 until 2006.",
"title": "Career"
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"text": "As Area Director of the User Services area, she was a member of the Internet Engineering Steering Group of the IETF from 1990 to March 1998.",
"title": "Career"
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"text": "Reynolds died due to complications from cancer on December 28, 2015, at the age of 63.",
"title": "Death"
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"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "With Bob Braden, she received the 2006 Postel Award in recognition of her services to the Internet. She is mentioned, along with a brief biography, in RFC 1336, Who's Who in the Internet (1992). Upon her death, former IETF Chairman Brian Carpenter suggested that \"What would Joyce have said?\" should be a guiding question for the organization.",
"title": "Recognition"
}
]
| Joyce Kathleen Reynolds was an American computer scientist who played a significant role in developing protocols underlying the Internet. She authored or co-authored many RFCs, most notably those introducing and specifying the Telnet, FTP, and POP protocols. | 2023-04-07T21:42:53Z | [
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|
15,769 | Julmust | Julmust (Swedish: jul "Christmas" and must English: 'must' "not-yet-fermented fruit juice") is a soft drink that is mainly consumed in Sweden around Christmas. During Easter, the name is påskmust (from påsk, "Easter"). During the rest of the year, it is sometimes sold under the name must. The content is the same regardless of the marketing name, and the drink is most closely associated with Christmas. 45 million litres of julmust are consumed during December, which is around 50% of the total soft drink volume in December and 75% of the total yearly must sales. Must was created by Harry Roberts and his father Robert Roberts in 1910 as a non-alcoholic alternative to beer.
The syrup is still made exclusively by Roberts in Örebro. The syrup is sold to different soft drink manufacturers who then make the final product in their own way. This means that the must from different companies does not taste the same, although they are made of the same syrup.
Must is made of carbonated water, sugar, hop extract, malt extract, spices, caramel colouring, citric acid, and preservatives. The hops and malt extracts give the must a somewhat root beer-like taste without the sassafras – or British/Caribbean malt drinks such as Supermalt. It can be aged provided it is stored in a glass bottle. Some people buy julmust in December only to store it a year before drinking it. In 2013, a rumour occurred that the EU would ban julmust due to a directive banning the selling of malt beverages containing caramel colouring. The rumour however turned out to be false since julmust is not a fermented beverage and hence not affected by the directive.
In Sweden, julmust outsells Coca-Cola during the Christmas season; in fact, the consumption of Coca-Cola drops by as much as 50% over the holiday. This was quoted as one of the main reasons that The Coca-Cola Company broke away from their contract with the local brewer Pripps and started Coca-Cola Drycker Sverige AB instead. Coca-Cola Drycker Sverige AB produced its own julmust, with The Coca-Cola Company's name occupying only a small space on the label. Their julmust was never advertised until 2004, when Coca-Cola started marketing their julmust under the brand "Bjäre julmust", but they bought the syrup from Roberts AB. By 2007, the "Bjäre julmust" was only sold at McDonald's restaurants and it had completely disappeared from Coca-Colas range of products by Christmas 2008, only to return for Christmas 2011. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Julmust (Swedish: jul \"Christmas\" and must English: 'must' \"not-yet-fermented fruit juice\") is a soft drink that is mainly consumed in Sweden around Christmas. During Easter, the name is påskmust (from påsk, \"Easter\"). During the rest of the year, it is sometimes sold under the name must. The content is the same regardless of the marketing name, and the drink is most closely associated with Christmas. 45 million litres of julmust are consumed during December, which is around 50% of the total soft drink volume in December and 75% of the total yearly must sales. Must was created by Harry Roberts and his father Robert Roberts in 1910 as a non-alcoholic alternative to beer.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "The syrup is still made exclusively by Roberts in Örebro. The syrup is sold to different soft drink manufacturers who then make the final product in their own way. This means that the must from different companies does not taste the same, although they are made of the same syrup.",
"title": "Ingredients"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Must is made of carbonated water, sugar, hop extract, malt extract, spices, caramel colouring, citric acid, and preservatives. The hops and malt extracts give the must a somewhat root beer-like taste without the sassafras – or British/Caribbean malt drinks such as Supermalt. It can be aged provided it is stored in a glass bottle. Some people buy julmust in December only to store it a year before drinking it. In 2013, a rumour occurred that the EU would ban julmust due to a directive banning the selling of malt beverages containing caramel colouring. The rumour however turned out to be false since julmust is not a fermented beverage and hence not affected by the directive.",
"title": "Ingredients"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In Sweden, julmust outsells Coca-Cola during the Christmas season; in fact, the consumption of Coca-Cola drops by as much as 50% over the holiday. This was quoted as one of the main reasons that The Coca-Cola Company broke away from their contract with the local brewer Pripps and started Coca-Cola Drycker Sverige AB instead. Coca-Cola Drycker Sverige AB produced its own julmust, with The Coca-Cola Company's name occupying only a small space on the label. Their julmust was never advertised until 2004, when Coca-Cola started marketing their julmust under the brand \"Bjäre julmust\", but they bought the syrup from Roberts AB. By 2007, the \"Bjäre julmust\" was only sold at McDonald's restaurants and it had completely disappeared from Coca-Colas range of products by Christmas 2008, only to return for Christmas 2011.",
"title": "Julmust and Coca-Cola"
}
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| Julmust is a soft drink that is mainly consumed in Sweden around Christmas. During Easter, the name is påskmust. During the rest of the year, it is sometimes sold under the name must. The content is the same regardless of the marketing name, and the drink is most closely associated with Christmas. 45 million litres of julmust are consumed during December, which is around 50% of the total soft drink volume in December and 75% of the total yearly must sales. Must was created by Harry Roberts and his father Robert Roberts in 1910 as a non-alcoholic alternative to beer. | 2001-05-16T10:29:50Z | 2023-12-12T18:55:37Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julmust |
15,770 | Jules Verne | Jules Gabriel Verne (/vɜːrn/; French: [ʒyl ɡabʁijɛl vɛʁn]; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time.
In addition to his novels, he wrote numerous plays, short stories, autobiographical accounts, poetry, songs, and scientific, artistic, and literary studies. His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music and video games.
Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in the Anglosphere where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed. Since the 1980s, his literary reputation has improved.
Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "father of science fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. In the 2010s, he was the most translated French author in the world. In France, 2005 was declared "Jules Verne Year" on the occasion of the centenary of the writer's death.
Verne was born on 8 February 1828, on Île Feydeau, a then small artificial island on the river Loire within the town of Nantes (later filled-in and incorporated into the surrounding land-area), in No. 4 Rue Olivier-de-Clisson, the house of his maternal grandmother Dame Sophie Marie Adélaïde Julienne Allotte de La Fuÿe (born Guillochet de La Perrière). His parents were Pierre Verne, an attorney originally from Provins, and Sophie Allotte de La Fuÿe, a Nantes woman from a local family of navigators and shipowners, of distant Scottish descent. In 1829, the Verne family moved some hundred metres away to No. 2 Quai Jean-Bart, where Verne's brother Paul was born the same year. Three sisters, Anne "Anna" (1836), Mathilde (1839), and Marie (1842) would follow.
In 1834, at the age of six, Verne was sent to boarding school at 5 Place du Bouffay in Nantes. The teacher, Madame Sambin, was the widow of a naval captain who had disappeared some 30 years before. Madame Sambin often told the students that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway and that he would eventually return like Robinson Crusoe from his desert island paradise. The theme of the robinsonade would stay with Verne throughout his life and appear in many of his novels, some of which include The Mysterious Island (1874), Second Fatherland (1900), and The School for Robinsons (1882).
In 1836, Verne went on to École Saint‑Stanislas, a Catholic school suiting the pious religious tastes of his father. Verne quickly distinguished himself in mémoire (recitation from memory), geography, Greek, Latin, and singing. In the same year, 1836, Pierre Verne bought a vacation house at 29 Rue des Réformés in the village of Chantenay (now part of Nantes) on the Loire. In his brief memoir Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse (Memories of Childhood and Youth, 1890), Verne recalled a deep fascination with the river and with the many merchant vessels navigating it. He also took vacations at Brains, in the house of his uncle Prudent Allotte, a retired shipowner, who had gone around the world and served as mayor of Brains from 1828 to 1837. Verne took joy in playing interminable rounds of the Game of the Goose with his uncle, and both the game and his uncle's name would be memorialized in two late novels (The Will of an Eccentric (1900) and Robur the Conqueror (1886), respectively).
Legend has it that in 1839, at the age of 11, Verne secretly procured a spot as cabin boy on the three-mast ship Coralie with the intention of traveling to the Indies and bringing back a coral necklace for his cousin Caroline. The evening the ship set out for the Indies, it stopped first at Paimboeuf where Pierre Verne arrived just in time to catch his son and make him promise to travel "only in his imagination". It is now known that the legend is an exaggerated tale invented by Verne's first biographer, his niece Marguerite Allotte de la Füye, though it may have been inspired by a real incident.
In 1840, the Vernes moved again to a large apartment at No. 6 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, where the family's youngest child, Marie, was born in 1842. In the same year Verne entered another religious school, the Petit Séminaire de Saint-Donatien, as a lay student. His unfinished novel Un prêtre en 1839 (A Priest in 1839), written in his teens and the earliest of his prose works to survive, describes the seminary in disparaging terms. From 1844 to 1846, Verne and his brother were enrolled in the Lycée Royal (now the Lycée Georges-Clemenceau) in Nantes. After finishing classes in rhetoric and philosophy, he took the baccalauréat at Rennes and received the grade "Good Enough" on 29 July 1846.
By 1847, when Verne was 19, he had taken seriously to writing long works in the style of Victor Hugo, beginning Un prêtre en 1839 and seeing two verse tragedies, Alexandre VI and La Conspiration des poudres (The Gunpowder Plot), to completion. However, his father took it for granted that Verne, being the firstborn son of the family, would not attempt to make money in literature but would instead inherit the family law practice.
In 1847, Verne's father sent him to Paris, primarily to begin his studies in law school, and secondarily (according to family legend) to distance him temporarily from Nantes. His cousin Caroline, with whom he was in love, was married on 27 April 1847, to Émile Dezaunay, a man of 40, with whom she would have five children.
After a short stay in Paris, where he passed first-year law exams, Verne returned to Nantes for his father's help in preparing for the second year. (Provincial law students were in that era required to go to Paris to take exams.) While in Nantes, he met Rose Herminie Arnaud Grossetière, a young woman one year his senior, and fell intensely in love with her. He wrote and dedicated some thirty poems to her, including La Fille de l'air (The Daughter of Air), which describes her as "blonde and enchanting / winged and transparent". His passion seems to have been reciprocated, at least for a short time, but Grossetière's parents frowned upon the idea of their daughter marrying a young student of uncertain future. They married her instead to Armand Terrien de la Haye, a rich landowner ten years her senior, on 19 July 1848.
The sudden marriage sent Verne into deep frustration. He wrote a hallucinatory letter to his mother, apparently composed in a state of half-drunkenness, in which under pretext of a dream he described his misery. This requited but aborted love affair seems to have permanently marked the author and his work, and his novels include a significant number of young women married against their will (Gérande in Master Zacharius (1854), Sava in Mathias Sandorf (1885), Ellen in A Floating City (1871), etc.), to such an extent that the scholar Christian Chelebourg attributed the recurring theme to a "Herminie complex". The incident also led Verne to bear a grudge against his birthplace and Nantes society, which he criticized in his poem La sixième ville de France (The Sixth City of France).
In July 1848, Verne left Nantes again for Paris, where his father intended him to finish law studies and take up law as a profession. He obtained permission from his father to rent a furnished apartment at 24 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, which he shared with Édouard Bonamy, another student of Nantes origin. (On his 1847 Paris visit, Verne had stayed at 2 Rue Thérèse, the house of his aunt Charuel, on the Butte Saint-Roch.)
Verne arrived in Paris during a time of political upheaval: the French Revolution of 1848. In February, Louis Philippe I had been overthrown and had fled; on 24 February, a provisional government of the French Second Republic took power, but political demonstrations continued, and social tension remained. In June, barricades went up in Paris, and the government sent Louis-Eugène Cavaignac to crush the insurrection. Verne entered the city shortly before the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as the first president of the Republic, a state of affairs that would last until the French coup of 1851. In a letter to his family, Verne described the bombarded state of the city after the recent June Days uprising but assured them that the anniversary of Bastille Day had gone by without any significant conflict.
Verne used his family connections to make an entrance into Paris society. His uncle Francisque de Chatêaubourg introduced him into literary salons, and Verne particularly frequented those of Mme de Barrère, a friend of his mother's. While continuing his law studies, he fed his passion for the theater, writing numerous plays. Verne later recalled: "I was greatly under the influence of Victor Hugo, indeed, very excited by reading and re-reading his works. At that time I could have recited by heart whole pages of Notre Dame de Paris, but it was his dramatic work that most influenced me." Another source of creative stimulation came from a neighbor: living on the same floor in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie apartment house was a young composer, Aristide Hignard, with whom Verne soon became good friends, and Verne wrote several texts for Hignard to set as chansons.
During this period, Verne's letters to his parents primarily focused on expenses and on a suddenly appearing series of violent stomach cramps, the first of many he would suffer from during his life. (Modern scholars have hypothesized that he suffered from colitis; Verne believed the illness to have been inherited from his mother's side.) Rumors of an outbreak of cholera in March 1849 exacerbated these medical concerns. Yet another health problem would strike in 1851 when Verne suffered the first of four attacks of facial paralysis. These attacks, rather than being psychosomatic, were due to an inflammation in the middle ear, though this cause remained unknown to Verne during his life.
In the same year, Verne was required to enlist in the French army, but the sortition process spared him, to his great relief. He wrote to his father: "You should already know, dear papa, what I think of the military life, and of these domestic servants in livery. … You have to abandon all dignity to perform such functions." Verne's strong antiwar sentiments, to the dismay of his father, would remain steadfast throughout his life.
Though writing profusely and frequenting the salons, Verne diligently pursued his law studies and graduated with a licence en droit in January 1851.
Thanks to his visits to salons, Verne came into contact in 1849 with Alexandre Dumas through the mutual acquaintance of a celebrated chirologist of the time, the Chevalier d'Arpentigny. Verne became close friends with Dumas' son, Alexandre Dumas fils, and showed him a manuscript for a stage comedy, Les Pailles rompues (The Broken Straws). The two young men revised the play together, and Dumas, through arrangements with his father, had it produced by the Opéra-National at the Théâtre Historique in Paris, opening on 12 June 1850.
In 1851, Verne met with a fellow writer from Nantes, Pierre-Michel-François Chevalier (known as "Pitre-Chevalier"), the editor-in-chief of the magazine Musée des familles (The Family Museum). Pitre-Chevalier was looking for articles about geography, history, science, and technology, and was keen to make sure that the educational component would be made accessible to large popular audiences using a straightforward prose style or an engaging fictional story. Verne, with his delight in diligent research, especially in geography, was a natural for the job. Verne first offered him a short historical adventure story, The First Ships of the Mexican Navy, written in the style of James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels had deeply influenced him. Pitre-Chevalier published it in July 1851, and in the same year published a second short story by Verne, A Voyage in a Balloon (August 1851). The latter story, with its combination of adventurous narrative, travel themes, and detailed historical research, would later be described by Verne as "the first indication of the line of novel that I was destined to follow".
Dumas fils put Verne in contact with Jules Seveste, a stage director who had taken over the directorship of the Théâtre Historique and renamed it the Théâtre Lyrique. Seveste offered Verne the job of secretary of the theater, with little or no salary attached. Verne accepted, using the opportunity to write and produce several comic operas written in collaboration with Hignard and the prolific librettist Michel Carré. To celebrate his employment at the Théâtre Lyrique, Verne joined with ten friends to found a bachelors' dining club, the Onze-sans-femme (Eleven Bachelors).
For some time, Verne's father pressed him to abandon his writing and begin a business as a lawyer. However, Verne argued in his letters that he could only find success in literature. The pressure to plan for a secure future in law reached its climax in January 1852, when his father offered Verne his own Nantes law practice. Faced with this ultimatum, Verne decided conclusively to continue his literary life and refuse the job, writing: "Am I not right to follow my own instincts? It's because I know who I am that I realize what I can be one day."
Meanwhile, Verne was spending much time at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, conducting research for his stories and feeding his passion for science and recent discoveries, especially in geography. It was in this period that Verne met the illustrious geographer and explorer Jacques Arago, who continued to travel extensively despite his blindness (he had lost his sight completely in 1837). The two men became good friends, and Arago's innovative and witty accounts of his travels led Verne toward a newly developing genre of literature: that of travel writing.
In 1852, two new pieces from Verne appeared in the Musée des familles: Martin Paz, a novella set in Lima, which Verne wrote in 1851 and published 10 July through 11 August 1852, and Les Châteaux en Californie, ou, Pierre qui roule n'amasse pas mousse (The Castles in California, or, A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss), a one-act comedy full of racy double entendres. In April and May 1854, the magazine published Verne's short story Master Zacharius, an E. T. A. Hoffmann-like fantasy featuring a sharp condemnation of scientific hubris and ambition, followed soon afterward by A Winter Amid the Ice, a polar adventure story whose themes closely anticipated many of Verne's novels. The Musée also published some nonfiction popular science articles which, though unsigned, are generally attributed to Verne. Verne's work for the magazine was cut short in 1856 when he had a serious quarrel with Pitre-Chevalier and refused to continue contributing (a refusal he would maintain until 1863, when Pitre-Chevalier died, and the magazine went to new editorship).
While writing stories and articles for Pitre-Chevalier, Verne began to form the idea of inventing a new kind of novel, a "Roman de la Science" ("novel of science"), which would allow him to incorporate large amounts of the factual information he so enjoyed researching in the Bibliothèque. He is said to have discussed the project with the elder Alexandre Dumas, who had tried something similar with an unfinished novel, Isaac Laquedem, and who enthusiastically encouraged Verne's project.
At the end of 1854, another outbreak of cholera led to the death of Jules Seveste, Verne's employer at the Théâtre Lyrique and by then a good friend. Though his contract only held him to a further year of service, Verne remained connected to the theater for several years after Seveste's death, seeing additional productions to fruition. He also continued to write plays and musical comedies, most of which were not performed.
In May 1856, Verne traveled to Amiens to be the best man at the wedding of a Nantes friend, Auguste Lelarge, to an Amiens woman named Aimée du Fraysne de Viane. Verne, invited to stay with the bride's family, took to them warmly, befriending the entire household and finding himself increasingly attracted to the bride's sister, Honorine Anne Hébée Morel (née du Fraysne de Viane), a widow aged 26 with two young children. Hoping to find a secure source of income, as well as a chance to court Morel in earnest, he jumped at her brother's offer to go into business with a broker. Verne's father was initially dubious but gave in to his son's requests for approval in November 1856. With his financial situation finally looking promising, Verne won the favor of Morel and her family, and the couple were married on 10 January 1857.
Verne plunged into his new business obligations, leaving his work at the Théâtre Lyrique and taking up a full-time job as an agent de change on the Paris Bourse, where he became the associate of the broker Fernand Eggly. Verne woke up early each morning so that he would have time to write, before going to the Bourse for the day's work; in the rest of his spare time, he continued to consort with the Onze-Sans-Femme club (all eleven of its "bachelors" had by this time married). He also continued to frequent the Bibliothèque to do scientific and historical research, much of which he copied onto notecards for future use—a system he would continue for the rest of his life. According to the recollections of a colleague, Verne "did better in repartee than in business".
In July 1858, Verne and Aristide Hignard seized an opportunity offered by Hignard's brother: a sea voyage, at no charge, from Bordeaux to Liverpool and Scotland. The journey, Verne's first trip outside France, deeply impressed him, and upon his return to Paris he fictionalized his recollections to form the backbone of a semi-autobiographical novel, Backwards to Britain (written in the autumn and winter of 1859–1860 and not published until 1989). A second complimentary voyage in 1861 took Hignard and Verne to Stockholm, from where they traveled to Christiania and through Telemark. Verne left Hignard in Denmark to return in haste to Paris, but missed the birth on 3 August 1861 of his only biological son, Michel.
Meanwhile, Verne continued work on the idea of a "Roman de la Science", which he developed in a rough draft, inspired, according to his recollections, by his "love for maps and the great explorers of the world". It took shape as a story of travel across Africa and would eventually become his first published novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon.
In 1862, through their mutual acquaintance Alfred de Bréhat, Verne came into contact with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, and submitted to him the manuscript of his developing novel, then called Voyage en Ballon. Hetzel, already the publisher of Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and other well-known authors, had long been planning to launch a high-quality family magazine in which entertaining fiction would combine with scientific education. He saw Verne, with his demonstrated inclination toward scrupulously researched adventure stories, as an ideal contributor for such a magazine, and accepted the novel, giving Verne suggestions for improvement. Verne made the proposed revisions within two weeks and returned to Hetzel with the final draft, now titled Five Weeks in a Balloon. It was published by Hetzel on 31 January 1863.
To secure his services for the planned magazine, to be called the Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation (Magazine of Education and Recreation), Hetzel also drew up a long-term contract in which Verne would give him three volumes of text per year, each of which Hetzel would buy outright for a flat fee. Verne, finding both a steady salary and a sure outlet for writing at last, accepted immediately. For the rest of his lifetime, most of his novels would be serialized in Hetzel's Magasin before their appearance in book form, beginning with his second novel for Hetzel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1864–65).
When The Adventures of Captain Hatteras was published in book form in 1866, Hetzel publicly announced his literary and educational ambitions for Verne's novels by saying in a preface that Verne's works would form a novel sequence called the Voyages extraordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages or Extraordinary Journeys), and that Verne's aim was "to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format that is his own, the history of the universe". Late in life, Verne confirmed that this commission had become the running theme of his novels: "My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the universe… And I have tried at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style. It is said that there can't be any style in a novel of adventure, but it isn't true." However, he also noted that the project was extremely ambitious: "Yes! But the Earth is very large, and life is very short! In order to leave a completed work behind, one would need to live to be at least 100 years old!"
Hetzel influenced many of Verne's novels directly, especially in the first few years of their collaboration, for Verne was initially so happy to find a publisher that he agreed to almost all of the changes Hetzel suggested. For example, when Hetzel disapproved of the original climax of Captain Hatteras, including the death of the title character, Verne wrote an entirely new conclusion in which Hatteras survived. Hetzel also rejected Verne's next submission, Paris in the Twentieth Century, believing its pessimistic view of the future and its condemnation of technological progress were too subversive for a family magazine. (The manuscript, believed lost for some time after Verne's death, was finally published in 1994.)
The relationship between publisher and writer changed significantly around 1869 when Verne and Hetzel were brought into conflict over the manuscript for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Verne had initially conceived of the submariner Captain Nemo as a Polish scientist whose acts of vengeance were directed against the Russians who had killed his family during the January Uprising. Hetzel, not wanting to alienate the lucrative Russian market for Verne's books, demanded that Nemo be made an enemy of the slave trade, a situation that would make him an unambiguous hero. Verne, after fighting vehemently against the change, finally invented a compromise in which Nemo's past is left mysterious. After this disagreement, Verne became notably cooler in his dealings with Hetzel, taking suggestions into consideration but often rejecting them outright.
From that point, Verne published two or more volumes a year. The most successful of these are: Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864); De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865); Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 1869); and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), which first appeared in Le Temps in 1872. Verne could now live on his writings, but most of his wealth came from the stage adaptations of Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1874) and Michel Strogoff (1876), which he wrote with Adolphe d'Ennery.
In 1867, Verne bought a small boat, the Saint-Michel, which he successively replaced with the Saint-Michel II and the Saint-Michel III as his financial situation improved. On board the Saint-Michel III, he sailed around Europe. After his first novel, most of his stories were first serialised in the Magazine d'Éducation et de Récréation, a Hetzel biweekly publication, before being published in book form. His brother Paul contributed to 40th French climbing of the Mont-Blanc and a collection of short stories – Doctor Ox – in 1874. Verne became wealthy and famous.
Meanwhile, Michel Verne married an actress against his father's wishes, had two children by an underage mistress and buried himself in debts. The relationship between father and son improved as Michel grew older.
Though raised as a Roman Catholic, Verne gravitated towards deism. Some scholars believe his novels reflect a deist philosophy, as they often involve the notion of God or divine providence but rarely mention the concept of Christ.
On 9 March 1886, as Verne returned home, his twenty-six-year-old nephew, Gaston, shot at him twice with a pistol. The first bullet missed, but the second one entered Verne's left leg, giving him a permanent limp that could not be overcome. This incident was not publicised in the media, but Gaston spent the rest of his life in a mental asylum.
After the deaths of both his mother and Hetzel (who died in 1886), Jules Verne began publishing darker works. In 1888 he entered politics and was elected town councillor of Amiens, where he championed several improvements and served for fifteen years.
Verne was made a knight of France's Legion of Honour on 9 April 1870, and subsequently promoted in Legion of Honour rank to Officer on 19 July 1892.
On 24 March 1905, while ill with chronic diabetes and complications from a stroke which paralyzed his right side, Verne died at his home in Amiens, 44 Boulevard Longueville (now Boulevard Jules-Verne). His son, Michel Verne, oversaw the publication of the novels Invasion of the Sea and The Lighthouse at the End of the World after Jules's death. The Voyages extraordinaires series continued for several years afterwards at the same rate of two volumes a year. It was later discovered that Michel Verne had made extensive changes in these stories, and the original versions were eventually published at the end of the 20th century by the Jules Verne Society (Société Jules Verne). In 1919, Michel Verne published The Barsac Mission (French: L'Étonnante Aventure de la Mission Barsac), whose original drafts contained references to Esperanto, a language that his father had been very interested in.
In 1989, Verne's great-grandson discovered his ancestor's as-yet-unpublished novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, which was subsequently published in 1994.
Verne's largest body of work is the Voyages extraordinaires series, which includes all of his novels except for the two rejected manuscripts Paris in the Twentieth Century and Backwards to Britain (published posthumously in 1994 and 1989, respectively) and for projects left unfinished at his death (many of which would be posthumously adapted or rewritten for publication by his son Michel). Verne also wrote many plays, poems, song texts, operetta libretti, and short stories, as well as a variety of essays and miscellaneous non-fiction.
After his debut under Hetzel, Verne was enthusiastically received in France by writers and scientists alike, with George Sand and Théophile Gautier among his earliest admirers. Several notable contemporary figures, from the geographer Vivien de Saint-Martin to the critic Jules Claretie, spoke highly of Verne and his works in critical and biographical notes.
However, Verne's growing popularity among readers and playgoers (due especially to the highly successful stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days) led to a gradual change in his literary reputation. As the novels and stage productions continued to sell, many contemporary critics felt that Verne's status as a commercially popular author meant he could only be seen as a mere genre-based storyteller, rather than a serious author worthy of academic study.
This denial of formal literary status took various forms, including dismissive criticism by such writers as Émile Zola and the lack of Verne's nomination for membership in the Académie Française, and was recognized by Verne himself, who said in a late interview: "The great regret of my life is that I have never taken any place in French literature." To Verne, who considered himself "a man of letters and an artist, living in the pursuit of the ideal", this critical dismissal on the basis of literary ideology could only be seen as the ultimate snub.
This bifurcation of Verne as a popular genre writer but a critical persona non grata continued after his death, with early biographies (including one by Verne's own niece, Marguerite Allotte de la Fuÿe) focusing on error-filled and embroidered hagiography of Verne as a popular figure rather than on Verne's actual working methods or his output. Meanwhile, sales of Verne's novels in their original unabridged versions dropped markedly even in Verne's home country, with abridged versions aimed directly at children taking their place.
However, the decades after Verne's death also saw the rise in France of the "Jules Verne cult", a steadily growing group of scholars and young writers who took Verne's works seriously as literature and willingly noted his influence on their own pioneering works. Some of the cult founded the Société Jules Verne, the first academic society for Verne scholars; many others became highly respected avant garde and surrealist literary figures in their own right. Their praise and analyses, emphasizing Verne's stylistic innovations and enduring literary themes, proved highly influential for literary studies to come.
In the 1960s and 1970s, thanks in large part to a sustained wave of serious literary study from well-known French scholars and writers, Verne's reputation skyrocketed in France. Roland Barthes' seminal essay Nautilus et Bateau Ivre (The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat) was influential in its exegesis of the Voyages extraordinares as a purely literary text, while book-length studies by such figures as Marcel Moré and Jean Chesneaux considered Verne from a multitude of thematic vantage points.
French literary journals devoted entire issues to Verne and his work, with essays by such imposing literary figures as Michel Butor, Georges Borgeaud, Marcel Brion, Pierre Versins, Michel Foucault, René Barjavel, Marcel Lecomte, Francis Lacassin, and Michel Serres; meanwhile, Verne's entire published opus returned to print, with unabridged and illustrated editions of his works printed by Livre de Poche and Éditions Rencontre. The wave reached its climax in Verne's sesquicentennial year 1978, when he was made the subject of an academic colloquium at the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, and Journey to the Center of the Earth was accepted for the French university system's agrégation reading list. Since these events, Verne has been consistently recognized in Europe as a legitimate member of the French literary canon, with academic studies and new publications steadily continuing.
Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries has been considerably slower in changing. Throughout the 20th century, most anglophone scholars dismissed Verne as a genre writer for children and a naïve proponent of science and technology (despite strong evidence to the contrary on both counts), thus finding him more interesting as a technological "prophet" or as a subject of comparison to English-language writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells than as a topic of literary study in his own right. This narrow view of Verne has undoubtedly been influenced by the poor-quality English translations and very loosely adapted Hollywood film versions through which most American and British readers have discovered Verne. However, since the mid-1980s a considerable number of serious English-language studies and translations have appeared, suggesting that a rehabilitation of Verne's anglophone reputation may currently be underway.
Translation of Verne into English began in 1852, when Verne's short story A Voyage in a Balloon (1851) was published in the American journal Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art in a translation by Anne T. Wilbur. Translation of his novels began in 1869 with William Lackland's translation of Five Weeks in a Balloon (originally published in 1863), and continued steadily throughout Verne's lifetime, with publishers and hired translators often working in great haste to rush his most lucrative titles into English-language print. Unlike Hetzel, who targeted all ages with his publishing strategies for the Voyages extraordinaires, the British and American publishers of Verne chose to market his books almost exclusively to young audiences; this business move, with its implication that Verne could be treated purely as a children's author, had a long-lasting effect on Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries.
These early English-language translations have been widely criticized for their extensive textual omissions, errors, and alterations, and are not considered adequate representations of Verne's actual novels. In an essay for The Guardian, British writer Adam Roberts commented: "I'd always liked reading Jules Verne and I've read most of his novels; but it wasn't until recently that I really understood I hadn't been reading Jules Verne at all ... It's a bizarre situation for a world-famous writer to be in. Indeed, I can't think of a major writer who has been so poorly served by translation."
Similarly, the American novelist Michael Crichton observed:
Verne's prose is lean and fast-moving in a peculiarly modern way ... [but] Verne has been particularly ill-served by his English translators. At best they have provided us with clunky, choppy, tone-deaf prose. At worst – as in the notorious 1872 "translation" [of Journey to the Center of the Earth] published by Griffith & Farran – they have blithely altered the text, giving Verne's characters new names, and adding whole pages of their own invention, thus effectively obliterating the meaning and tone of Verne's original.
Since 1965, a considerable number of more accurate English translations of Verne have appeared. However, the older, deficient translations continue to be republished due to their public domain status, and in many cases their easy availability in online sources.
The relationship between Verne's Voyages extraordinaires and the literary genre science fiction is a complex one. Verne, like H. G. Wells, is frequently cited as one of the founders of the genre, and his profound influence on its development is indisputable; however, many earlier writers, such as Lucian of Samosata, Voltaire, and Mary Shelley, have also been cited as creators of science fiction, an unavoidable ambiguity arising from the vague definition and history of the genre.
A primary issue at the heart of the dispute is the question of whether Verne's works count as science fiction to begin with. Maurice Renard claimed that Verne "never wrote a single sentence of scientific-marvelous". Verne himself argued repeatedly in interviews that his novels were not meant to be read as scientific, saying "I have invented nothing". His own goal was rather to "depict the earth [and] at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style", as he pointed out in an example:
I wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon, not as a story about ballooning, but as a story about Africa. I always was greatly interested in geography, history and travel, and I wanted to give a romantic description of Africa. Now, there was no means of taking my travellers through Africa otherwise than in a balloon, and that is why a balloon is introduced.… I may say that at the time I wrote the novel, as now, I had no faith in the possibility of ever steering balloons…
Closely related to Verne's science-fiction reputation is the often-repeated claim that he is a "prophet" of scientific progress, and that many of his novels involve elements of technology that were fantastic for his day but later became commonplace. These claims have a long history, especially in America, but the modern scholarly consensus is that such claims of prophecy are heavily exaggerated. In a 1961 article critical of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas' scientific accuracy, Theodore L. Thomas speculated that Verne's storytelling skill and readers' faulty memories of a book they read as children caused people to "remember things from it that are not there. The impression that the novel contains valid scientific prediction seems to grow as the years roll by". As with science fiction, Verne himself flatly denied that he was a futuristic prophet, saying that any connection between scientific developments and his work was "mere coincidence" and attributing his indisputable scientific accuracy to his extensive research: "even before I began writing stories, I always took numerous notes out of every book, newspaper, magazine, or scientific report that I came across."
Verne's novels have had a wide influence on both literary and scientific works; writers known to have been influenced by Verne include Marcel Aymé, Roland Barthes, René Barjavel, Michel Butor, Blaise Cendrars, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Julio Cortázar, François Mauriac, Rick Riordan, Raymond Roussel, Claude Roy, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Jean-Paul Sartre, while scientists and explorers who acknowledged Verne's inspiration have included Richard E. Byrd, Yuri Gagarin, Simon Lake, Hubert Lyautey, Guglielmo Marconi, Fridtjof Nansen, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Wernher von Braun, and Jack Parsons. Verne is credited with helping inspire the steampunk genre, a literary and social movement that glamorizes science fiction based on 19th-century technology.
Ray Bradbury summarized Verne's influence on literature and science the world over by saying: "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne." | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jules Gabriel Verne (/vɜːrn/; French: [ʒyl ɡabʁijɛl vɛʁn]; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In addition to his novels, he wrote numerous plays, short stories, autobiographical accounts, poetry, songs, and scientific, artistic, and literary studies. His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music and video games.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in the Anglosphere where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed. Since the 1980s, his literary reputation has improved.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the \"father of science fiction\", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. In the 2010s, he was the most translated French author in the world. In France, 2005 was declared \"Jules Verne Year\" on the occasion of the centenary of the writer's death.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Verne was born on 8 February 1828, on Île Feydeau, a then small artificial island on the river Loire within the town of Nantes (later filled-in and incorporated into the surrounding land-area), in No. 4 Rue Olivier-de-Clisson, the house of his maternal grandmother Dame Sophie Marie Adélaïde Julienne Allotte de La Fuÿe (born Guillochet de La Perrière). His parents were Pierre Verne, an attorney originally from Provins, and Sophie Allotte de La Fuÿe, a Nantes woman from a local family of navigators and shipowners, of distant Scottish descent. In 1829, the Verne family moved some hundred metres away to No. 2 Quai Jean-Bart, where Verne's brother Paul was born the same year. Three sisters, Anne \"Anna\" (1836), Mathilde (1839), and Marie (1842) would follow.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1834, at the age of six, Verne was sent to boarding school at 5 Place du Bouffay in Nantes. The teacher, Madame Sambin, was the widow of a naval captain who had disappeared some 30 years before. Madame Sambin often told the students that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway and that he would eventually return like Robinson Crusoe from his desert island paradise. The theme of the robinsonade would stay with Verne throughout his life and appear in many of his novels, some of which include The Mysterious Island (1874), Second Fatherland (1900), and The School for Robinsons (1882).",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1836, Verne went on to École Saint‑Stanislas, a Catholic school suiting the pious religious tastes of his father. Verne quickly distinguished himself in mémoire (recitation from memory), geography, Greek, Latin, and singing. In the same year, 1836, Pierre Verne bought a vacation house at 29 Rue des Réformés in the village of Chantenay (now part of Nantes) on the Loire. In his brief memoir Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse (Memories of Childhood and Youth, 1890), Verne recalled a deep fascination with the river and with the many merchant vessels navigating it. He also took vacations at Brains, in the house of his uncle Prudent Allotte, a retired shipowner, who had gone around the world and served as mayor of Brains from 1828 to 1837. Verne took joy in playing interminable rounds of the Game of the Goose with his uncle, and both the game and his uncle's name would be memorialized in two late novels (The Will of an Eccentric (1900) and Robur the Conqueror (1886), respectively).",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Legend has it that in 1839, at the age of 11, Verne secretly procured a spot as cabin boy on the three-mast ship Coralie with the intention of traveling to the Indies and bringing back a coral necklace for his cousin Caroline. The evening the ship set out for the Indies, it stopped first at Paimboeuf where Pierre Verne arrived just in time to catch his son and make him promise to travel \"only in his imagination\". It is now known that the legend is an exaggerated tale invented by Verne's first biographer, his niece Marguerite Allotte de la Füye, though it may have been inspired by a real incident.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1840, the Vernes moved again to a large apartment at No. 6 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, where the family's youngest child, Marie, was born in 1842. In the same year Verne entered another religious school, the Petit Séminaire de Saint-Donatien, as a lay student. His unfinished novel Un prêtre en 1839 (A Priest in 1839), written in his teens and the earliest of his prose works to survive, describes the seminary in disparaging terms. From 1844 to 1846, Verne and his brother were enrolled in the Lycée Royal (now the Lycée Georges-Clemenceau) in Nantes. After finishing classes in rhetoric and philosophy, he took the baccalauréat at Rennes and received the grade \"Good Enough\" on 29 July 1846.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "By 1847, when Verne was 19, he had taken seriously to writing long works in the style of Victor Hugo, beginning Un prêtre en 1839 and seeing two verse tragedies, Alexandre VI and La Conspiration des poudres (The Gunpowder Plot), to completion. However, his father took it for granted that Verne, being the firstborn son of the family, would not attempt to make money in literature but would instead inherit the family law practice.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1847, Verne's father sent him to Paris, primarily to begin his studies in law school, and secondarily (according to family legend) to distance him temporarily from Nantes. His cousin Caroline, with whom he was in love, was married on 27 April 1847, to Émile Dezaunay, a man of 40, with whom she would have five children.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "After a short stay in Paris, where he passed first-year law exams, Verne returned to Nantes for his father's help in preparing for the second year. (Provincial law students were in that era required to go to Paris to take exams.) While in Nantes, he met Rose Herminie Arnaud Grossetière, a young woman one year his senior, and fell intensely in love with her. He wrote and dedicated some thirty poems to her, including La Fille de l'air (The Daughter of Air), which describes her as \"blonde and enchanting / winged and transparent\". His passion seems to have been reciprocated, at least for a short time, but Grossetière's parents frowned upon the idea of their daughter marrying a young student of uncertain future. They married her instead to Armand Terrien de la Haye, a rich landowner ten years her senior, on 19 July 1848.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The sudden marriage sent Verne into deep frustration. He wrote a hallucinatory letter to his mother, apparently composed in a state of half-drunkenness, in which under pretext of a dream he described his misery. This requited but aborted love affair seems to have permanently marked the author and his work, and his novels include a significant number of young women married against their will (Gérande in Master Zacharius (1854), Sava in Mathias Sandorf (1885), Ellen in A Floating City (1871), etc.), to such an extent that the scholar Christian Chelebourg attributed the recurring theme to a \"Herminie complex\". The incident also led Verne to bear a grudge against his birthplace and Nantes society, which he criticized in his poem La sixième ville de France (The Sixth City of France).",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In July 1848, Verne left Nantes again for Paris, where his father intended him to finish law studies and take up law as a profession. He obtained permission from his father to rent a furnished apartment at 24 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, which he shared with Édouard Bonamy, another student of Nantes origin. (On his 1847 Paris visit, Verne had stayed at 2 Rue Thérèse, the house of his aunt Charuel, on the Butte Saint-Roch.)",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Verne arrived in Paris during a time of political upheaval: the French Revolution of 1848. In February, Louis Philippe I had been overthrown and had fled; on 24 February, a provisional government of the French Second Republic took power, but political demonstrations continued, and social tension remained. In June, barricades went up in Paris, and the government sent Louis-Eugène Cavaignac to crush the insurrection. Verne entered the city shortly before the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as the first president of the Republic, a state of affairs that would last until the French coup of 1851. In a letter to his family, Verne described the bombarded state of the city after the recent June Days uprising but assured them that the anniversary of Bastille Day had gone by without any significant conflict.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Verne used his family connections to make an entrance into Paris society. His uncle Francisque de Chatêaubourg introduced him into literary salons, and Verne particularly frequented those of Mme de Barrère, a friend of his mother's. While continuing his law studies, he fed his passion for the theater, writing numerous plays. Verne later recalled: \"I was greatly under the influence of Victor Hugo, indeed, very excited by reading and re-reading his works. At that time I could have recited by heart whole pages of Notre Dame de Paris, but it was his dramatic work that most influenced me.\" Another source of creative stimulation came from a neighbor: living on the same floor in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie apartment house was a young composer, Aristide Hignard, with whom Verne soon became good friends, and Verne wrote several texts for Hignard to set as chansons.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "During this period, Verne's letters to his parents primarily focused on expenses and on a suddenly appearing series of violent stomach cramps, the first of many he would suffer from during his life. (Modern scholars have hypothesized that he suffered from colitis; Verne believed the illness to have been inherited from his mother's side.) Rumors of an outbreak of cholera in March 1849 exacerbated these medical concerns. Yet another health problem would strike in 1851 when Verne suffered the first of four attacks of facial paralysis. These attacks, rather than being psychosomatic, were due to an inflammation in the middle ear, though this cause remained unknown to Verne during his life.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In the same year, Verne was required to enlist in the French army, but the sortition process spared him, to his great relief. He wrote to his father: \"You should already know, dear papa, what I think of the military life, and of these domestic servants in livery. … You have to abandon all dignity to perform such functions.\" Verne's strong antiwar sentiments, to the dismay of his father, would remain steadfast throughout his life.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Though writing profusely and frequenting the salons, Verne diligently pursued his law studies and graduated with a licence en droit in January 1851.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Thanks to his visits to salons, Verne came into contact in 1849 with Alexandre Dumas through the mutual acquaintance of a celebrated chirologist of the time, the Chevalier d'Arpentigny. Verne became close friends with Dumas' son, Alexandre Dumas fils, and showed him a manuscript for a stage comedy, Les Pailles rompues (The Broken Straws). The two young men revised the play together, and Dumas, through arrangements with his father, had it produced by the Opéra-National at the Théâtre Historique in Paris, opening on 12 June 1850.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 1851, Verne met with a fellow writer from Nantes, Pierre-Michel-François Chevalier (known as \"Pitre-Chevalier\"), the editor-in-chief of the magazine Musée des familles (The Family Museum). Pitre-Chevalier was looking for articles about geography, history, science, and technology, and was keen to make sure that the educational component would be made accessible to large popular audiences using a straightforward prose style or an engaging fictional story. Verne, with his delight in diligent research, especially in geography, was a natural for the job. Verne first offered him a short historical adventure story, The First Ships of the Mexican Navy, written in the style of James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels had deeply influenced him. Pitre-Chevalier published it in July 1851, and in the same year published a second short story by Verne, A Voyage in a Balloon (August 1851). The latter story, with its combination of adventurous narrative, travel themes, and detailed historical research, would later be described by Verne as \"the first indication of the line of novel that I was destined to follow\".",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Dumas fils put Verne in contact with Jules Seveste, a stage director who had taken over the directorship of the Théâtre Historique and renamed it the Théâtre Lyrique. Seveste offered Verne the job of secretary of the theater, with little or no salary attached. Verne accepted, using the opportunity to write and produce several comic operas written in collaboration with Hignard and the prolific librettist Michel Carré. To celebrate his employment at the Théâtre Lyrique, Verne joined with ten friends to found a bachelors' dining club, the Onze-sans-femme (Eleven Bachelors).",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "For some time, Verne's father pressed him to abandon his writing and begin a business as a lawyer. However, Verne argued in his letters that he could only find success in literature. The pressure to plan for a secure future in law reached its climax in January 1852, when his father offered Verne his own Nantes law practice. Faced with this ultimatum, Verne decided conclusively to continue his literary life and refuse the job, writing: \"Am I not right to follow my own instincts? It's because I know who I am that I realize what I can be one day.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Meanwhile, Verne was spending much time at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, conducting research for his stories and feeding his passion for science and recent discoveries, especially in geography. It was in this period that Verne met the illustrious geographer and explorer Jacques Arago, who continued to travel extensively despite his blindness (he had lost his sight completely in 1837). The two men became good friends, and Arago's innovative and witty accounts of his travels led Verne toward a newly developing genre of literature: that of travel writing.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1852, two new pieces from Verne appeared in the Musée des familles: Martin Paz, a novella set in Lima, which Verne wrote in 1851 and published 10 July through 11 August 1852, and Les Châteaux en Californie, ou, Pierre qui roule n'amasse pas mousse (The Castles in California, or, A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss), a one-act comedy full of racy double entendres. In April and May 1854, the magazine published Verne's short story Master Zacharius, an E. T. A. Hoffmann-like fantasy featuring a sharp condemnation of scientific hubris and ambition, followed soon afterward by A Winter Amid the Ice, a polar adventure story whose themes closely anticipated many of Verne's novels. The Musée also published some nonfiction popular science articles which, though unsigned, are generally attributed to Verne. Verne's work for the magazine was cut short in 1856 when he had a serious quarrel with Pitre-Chevalier and refused to continue contributing (a refusal he would maintain until 1863, when Pitre-Chevalier died, and the magazine went to new editorship).",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "While writing stories and articles for Pitre-Chevalier, Verne began to form the idea of inventing a new kind of novel, a \"Roman de la Science\" (\"novel of science\"), which would allow him to incorporate large amounts of the factual information he so enjoyed researching in the Bibliothèque. He is said to have discussed the project with the elder Alexandre Dumas, who had tried something similar with an unfinished novel, Isaac Laquedem, and who enthusiastically encouraged Verne's project.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "At the end of 1854, another outbreak of cholera led to the death of Jules Seveste, Verne's employer at the Théâtre Lyrique and by then a good friend. Though his contract only held him to a further year of service, Verne remained connected to the theater for several years after Seveste's death, seeing additional productions to fruition. He also continued to write plays and musical comedies, most of which were not performed.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In May 1856, Verne traveled to Amiens to be the best man at the wedding of a Nantes friend, Auguste Lelarge, to an Amiens woman named Aimée du Fraysne de Viane. Verne, invited to stay with the bride's family, took to them warmly, befriending the entire household and finding himself increasingly attracted to the bride's sister, Honorine Anne Hébée Morel (née du Fraysne de Viane), a widow aged 26 with two young children. Hoping to find a secure source of income, as well as a chance to court Morel in earnest, he jumped at her brother's offer to go into business with a broker. Verne's father was initially dubious but gave in to his son's requests for approval in November 1856. With his financial situation finally looking promising, Verne won the favor of Morel and her family, and the couple were married on 10 January 1857.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Verne plunged into his new business obligations, leaving his work at the Théâtre Lyrique and taking up a full-time job as an agent de change on the Paris Bourse, where he became the associate of the broker Fernand Eggly. Verne woke up early each morning so that he would have time to write, before going to the Bourse for the day's work; in the rest of his spare time, he continued to consort with the Onze-Sans-Femme club (all eleven of its \"bachelors\" had by this time married). He also continued to frequent the Bibliothèque to do scientific and historical research, much of which he copied onto notecards for future use—a system he would continue for the rest of his life. According to the recollections of a colleague, Verne \"did better in repartee than in business\".",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In July 1858, Verne and Aristide Hignard seized an opportunity offered by Hignard's brother: a sea voyage, at no charge, from Bordeaux to Liverpool and Scotland. The journey, Verne's first trip outside France, deeply impressed him, and upon his return to Paris he fictionalized his recollections to form the backbone of a semi-autobiographical novel, Backwards to Britain (written in the autumn and winter of 1859–1860 and not published until 1989). A second complimentary voyage in 1861 took Hignard and Verne to Stockholm, from where they traveled to Christiania and through Telemark. Verne left Hignard in Denmark to return in haste to Paris, but missed the birth on 3 August 1861 of his only biological son, Michel.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Meanwhile, Verne continued work on the idea of a \"Roman de la Science\", which he developed in a rough draft, inspired, according to his recollections, by his \"love for maps and the great explorers of the world\". It took shape as a story of travel across Africa and would eventually become his first published novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 1862, through their mutual acquaintance Alfred de Bréhat, Verne came into contact with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, and submitted to him the manuscript of his developing novel, then called Voyage en Ballon. Hetzel, already the publisher of Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and other well-known authors, had long been planning to launch a high-quality family magazine in which entertaining fiction would combine with scientific education. He saw Verne, with his demonstrated inclination toward scrupulously researched adventure stories, as an ideal contributor for such a magazine, and accepted the novel, giving Verne suggestions for improvement. Verne made the proposed revisions within two weeks and returned to Hetzel with the final draft, now titled Five Weeks in a Balloon. It was published by Hetzel on 31 January 1863.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "To secure his services for the planned magazine, to be called the Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation (Magazine of Education and Recreation), Hetzel also drew up a long-term contract in which Verne would give him three volumes of text per year, each of which Hetzel would buy outright for a flat fee. Verne, finding both a steady salary and a sure outlet for writing at last, accepted immediately. For the rest of his lifetime, most of his novels would be serialized in Hetzel's Magasin before their appearance in book form, beginning with his second novel for Hetzel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1864–65).",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "When The Adventures of Captain Hatteras was published in book form in 1866, Hetzel publicly announced his literary and educational ambitions for Verne's novels by saying in a preface that Verne's works would form a novel sequence called the Voyages extraordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages or Extraordinary Journeys), and that Verne's aim was \"to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format that is his own, the history of the universe\". Late in life, Verne confirmed that this commission had become the running theme of his novels: \"My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the universe… And I have tried at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style. It is said that there can't be any style in a novel of adventure, but it isn't true.\" However, he also noted that the project was extremely ambitious: \"Yes! But the Earth is very large, and life is very short! In order to leave a completed work behind, one would need to live to be at least 100 years old!\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Hetzel influenced many of Verne's novels directly, especially in the first few years of their collaboration, for Verne was initially so happy to find a publisher that he agreed to almost all of the changes Hetzel suggested. For example, when Hetzel disapproved of the original climax of Captain Hatteras, including the death of the title character, Verne wrote an entirely new conclusion in which Hatteras survived. Hetzel also rejected Verne's next submission, Paris in the Twentieth Century, believing its pessimistic view of the future and its condemnation of technological progress were too subversive for a family magazine. (The manuscript, believed lost for some time after Verne's death, was finally published in 1994.)",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The relationship between publisher and writer changed significantly around 1869 when Verne and Hetzel were brought into conflict over the manuscript for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Verne had initially conceived of the submariner Captain Nemo as a Polish scientist whose acts of vengeance were directed against the Russians who had killed his family during the January Uprising. Hetzel, not wanting to alienate the lucrative Russian market for Verne's books, demanded that Nemo be made an enemy of the slave trade, a situation that would make him an unambiguous hero. Verne, after fighting vehemently against the change, finally invented a compromise in which Nemo's past is left mysterious. After this disagreement, Verne became notably cooler in his dealings with Hetzel, taking suggestions into consideration but often rejecting them outright.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "From that point, Verne published two or more volumes a year. The most successful of these are: Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864); De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865); Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 1869); and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), which first appeared in Le Temps in 1872. Verne could now live on his writings, but most of his wealth came from the stage adaptations of Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1874) and Michel Strogoff (1876), which he wrote with Adolphe d'Ennery.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 1867, Verne bought a small boat, the Saint-Michel, which he successively replaced with the Saint-Michel II and the Saint-Michel III as his financial situation improved. On board the Saint-Michel III, he sailed around Europe. After his first novel, most of his stories were first serialised in the Magazine d'Éducation et de Récréation, a Hetzel biweekly publication, before being published in book form. His brother Paul contributed to 40th French climbing of the Mont-Blanc and a collection of short stories – Doctor Ox – in 1874. Verne became wealthy and famous.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Meanwhile, Michel Verne married an actress against his father's wishes, had two children by an underage mistress and buried himself in debts. The relationship between father and son improved as Michel grew older.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Though raised as a Roman Catholic, Verne gravitated towards deism. Some scholars believe his novels reflect a deist philosophy, as they often involve the notion of God or divine providence but rarely mention the concept of Christ.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "On 9 March 1886, as Verne returned home, his twenty-six-year-old nephew, Gaston, shot at him twice with a pistol. The first bullet missed, but the second one entered Verne's left leg, giving him a permanent limp that could not be overcome. This incident was not publicised in the media, but Gaston spent the rest of his life in a mental asylum.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "After the deaths of both his mother and Hetzel (who died in 1886), Jules Verne began publishing darker works. In 1888 he entered politics and was elected town councillor of Amiens, where he championed several improvements and served for fifteen years.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Verne was made a knight of France's Legion of Honour on 9 April 1870, and subsequently promoted in Legion of Honour rank to Officer on 19 July 1892.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "On 24 March 1905, while ill with chronic diabetes and complications from a stroke which paralyzed his right side, Verne died at his home in Amiens, 44 Boulevard Longueville (now Boulevard Jules-Verne). His son, Michel Verne, oversaw the publication of the novels Invasion of the Sea and The Lighthouse at the End of the World after Jules's death. The Voyages extraordinaires series continued for several years afterwards at the same rate of two volumes a year. It was later discovered that Michel Verne had made extensive changes in these stories, and the original versions were eventually published at the end of the 20th century by the Jules Verne Society (Société Jules Verne). In 1919, Michel Verne published The Barsac Mission (French: L'Étonnante Aventure de la Mission Barsac), whose original drafts contained references to Esperanto, a language that his father had been very interested in.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In 1989, Verne's great-grandson discovered his ancestor's as-yet-unpublished novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, which was subsequently published in 1994.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Verne's largest body of work is the Voyages extraordinaires series, which includes all of his novels except for the two rejected manuscripts Paris in the Twentieth Century and Backwards to Britain (published posthumously in 1994 and 1989, respectively) and for projects left unfinished at his death (many of which would be posthumously adapted or rewritten for publication by his son Michel). Verne also wrote many plays, poems, song texts, operetta libretti, and short stories, as well as a variety of essays and miscellaneous non-fiction.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "After his debut under Hetzel, Verne was enthusiastically received in France by writers and scientists alike, with George Sand and Théophile Gautier among his earliest admirers. Several notable contemporary figures, from the geographer Vivien de Saint-Martin to the critic Jules Claretie, spoke highly of Verne and his works in critical and biographical notes.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "However, Verne's growing popularity among readers and playgoers (due especially to the highly successful stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days) led to a gradual change in his literary reputation. As the novels and stage productions continued to sell, many contemporary critics felt that Verne's status as a commercially popular author meant he could only be seen as a mere genre-based storyteller, rather than a serious author worthy of academic study.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "This denial of formal literary status took various forms, including dismissive criticism by such writers as Émile Zola and the lack of Verne's nomination for membership in the Académie Française, and was recognized by Verne himself, who said in a late interview: \"The great regret of my life is that I have never taken any place in French literature.\" To Verne, who considered himself \"a man of letters and an artist, living in the pursuit of the ideal\", this critical dismissal on the basis of literary ideology could only be seen as the ultimate snub.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "This bifurcation of Verne as a popular genre writer but a critical persona non grata continued after his death, with early biographies (including one by Verne's own niece, Marguerite Allotte de la Fuÿe) focusing on error-filled and embroidered hagiography of Verne as a popular figure rather than on Verne's actual working methods or his output. Meanwhile, sales of Verne's novels in their original unabridged versions dropped markedly even in Verne's home country, with abridged versions aimed directly at children taking their place.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "However, the decades after Verne's death also saw the rise in France of the \"Jules Verne cult\", a steadily growing group of scholars and young writers who took Verne's works seriously as literature and willingly noted his influence on their own pioneering works. Some of the cult founded the Société Jules Verne, the first academic society for Verne scholars; many others became highly respected avant garde and surrealist literary figures in their own right. Their praise and analyses, emphasizing Verne's stylistic innovations and enduring literary themes, proved highly influential for literary studies to come.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In the 1960s and 1970s, thanks in large part to a sustained wave of serious literary study from well-known French scholars and writers, Verne's reputation skyrocketed in France. Roland Barthes' seminal essay Nautilus et Bateau Ivre (The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat) was influential in its exegesis of the Voyages extraordinares as a purely literary text, while book-length studies by such figures as Marcel Moré and Jean Chesneaux considered Verne from a multitude of thematic vantage points.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "French literary journals devoted entire issues to Verne and his work, with essays by such imposing literary figures as Michel Butor, Georges Borgeaud, Marcel Brion, Pierre Versins, Michel Foucault, René Barjavel, Marcel Lecomte, Francis Lacassin, and Michel Serres; meanwhile, Verne's entire published opus returned to print, with unabridged and illustrated editions of his works printed by Livre de Poche and Éditions Rencontre. The wave reached its climax in Verne's sesquicentennial year 1978, when he was made the subject of an academic colloquium at the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, and Journey to the Center of the Earth was accepted for the French university system's agrégation reading list. Since these events, Verne has been consistently recognized in Europe as a legitimate member of the French literary canon, with academic studies and new publications steadily continuing.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries has been considerably slower in changing. Throughout the 20th century, most anglophone scholars dismissed Verne as a genre writer for children and a naïve proponent of science and technology (despite strong evidence to the contrary on both counts), thus finding him more interesting as a technological \"prophet\" or as a subject of comparison to English-language writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells than as a topic of literary study in his own right. This narrow view of Verne has undoubtedly been influenced by the poor-quality English translations and very loosely adapted Hollywood film versions through which most American and British readers have discovered Verne. However, since the mid-1980s a considerable number of serious English-language studies and translations have appeared, suggesting that a rehabilitation of Verne's anglophone reputation may currently be underway.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Translation of Verne into English began in 1852, when Verne's short story A Voyage in a Balloon (1851) was published in the American journal Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art in a translation by Anne T. Wilbur. Translation of his novels began in 1869 with William Lackland's translation of Five Weeks in a Balloon (originally published in 1863), and continued steadily throughout Verne's lifetime, with publishers and hired translators often working in great haste to rush his most lucrative titles into English-language print. Unlike Hetzel, who targeted all ages with his publishing strategies for the Voyages extraordinaires, the British and American publishers of Verne chose to market his books almost exclusively to young audiences; this business move, with its implication that Verne could be treated purely as a children's author, had a long-lasting effect on Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "These early English-language translations have been widely criticized for their extensive textual omissions, errors, and alterations, and are not considered adequate representations of Verne's actual novels. In an essay for The Guardian, British writer Adam Roberts commented: \"I'd always liked reading Jules Verne and I've read most of his novels; but it wasn't until recently that I really understood I hadn't been reading Jules Verne at all ... It's a bizarre situation for a world-famous writer to be in. Indeed, I can't think of a major writer who has been so poorly served by translation.\"",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Similarly, the American novelist Michael Crichton observed:",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Verne's prose is lean and fast-moving in a peculiarly modern way ... [but] Verne has been particularly ill-served by his English translators. At best they have provided us with clunky, choppy, tone-deaf prose. At worst – as in the notorious 1872 \"translation\" [of Journey to the Center of the Earth] published by Griffith & Farran – they have blithely altered the text, giving Verne's characters new names, and adding whole pages of their own invention, thus effectively obliterating the meaning and tone of Verne's original.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Since 1965, a considerable number of more accurate English translations of Verne have appeared. However, the older, deficient translations continue to be republished due to their public domain status, and in many cases their easy availability in online sources.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The relationship between Verne's Voyages extraordinaires and the literary genre science fiction is a complex one. Verne, like H. G. Wells, is frequently cited as one of the founders of the genre, and his profound influence on its development is indisputable; however, many earlier writers, such as Lucian of Samosata, Voltaire, and Mary Shelley, have also been cited as creators of science fiction, an unavoidable ambiguity arising from the vague definition and history of the genre.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "A primary issue at the heart of the dispute is the question of whether Verne's works count as science fiction to begin with. Maurice Renard claimed that Verne \"never wrote a single sentence of scientific-marvelous\". Verne himself argued repeatedly in interviews that his novels were not meant to be read as scientific, saying \"I have invented nothing\". His own goal was rather to \"depict the earth [and] at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style\", as he pointed out in an example:",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "I wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon, not as a story about ballooning, but as a story about Africa. I always was greatly interested in geography, history and travel, and I wanted to give a romantic description of Africa. Now, there was no means of taking my travellers through Africa otherwise than in a balloon, and that is why a balloon is introduced.… I may say that at the time I wrote the novel, as now, I had no faith in the possibility of ever steering balloons…",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Closely related to Verne's science-fiction reputation is the often-repeated claim that he is a \"prophet\" of scientific progress, and that many of his novels involve elements of technology that were fantastic for his day but later became commonplace. These claims have a long history, especially in America, but the modern scholarly consensus is that such claims of prophecy are heavily exaggerated. In a 1961 article critical of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas' scientific accuracy, Theodore L. Thomas speculated that Verne's storytelling skill and readers' faulty memories of a book they read as children caused people to \"remember things from it that are not there. The impression that the novel contains valid scientific prediction seems to grow as the years roll by\". As with science fiction, Verne himself flatly denied that he was a futuristic prophet, saying that any connection between scientific developments and his work was \"mere coincidence\" and attributing his indisputable scientific accuracy to his extensive research: \"even before I began writing stories, I always took numerous notes out of every book, newspaper, magazine, or scientific report that I came across.\"",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Verne's novels have had a wide influence on both literary and scientific works; writers known to have been influenced by Verne include Marcel Aymé, Roland Barthes, René Barjavel, Michel Butor, Blaise Cendrars, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Julio Cortázar, François Mauriac, Rick Riordan, Raymond Roussel, Claude Roy, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Jean-Paul Sartre, while scientists and explorers who acknowledged Verne's inspiration have included Richard E. Byrd, Yuri Gagarin, Simon Lake, Hubert Lyautey, Guglielmo Marconi, Fridtjof Nansen, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Wernher von Braun, and Jack Parsons. Verne is credited with helping inspire the steampunk genre, a literary and social movement that glamorizes science fiction based on 19th-century technology.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Ray Bradbury summarized Verne's influence on literature and science the world over by saying: \"We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time. In addition to his novels, he wrote numerous plays, short stories, autobiographical accounts, poetry, songs, and scientific, artistic, and literary studies. His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music and video games. Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in the Anglosphere where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed. Since the 1980s, his literary reputation has improved. Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "father of science fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. In the 2010s, he was the most translated French author in the world. In France, 2005 was declared "Jules Verne Year" on the occasion of the centenary of the writer's death. | 2001-05-16T18:31:05Z | 2023-12-10T22:30:27Z | [
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15,771 | Johannes Rau | Johannes Rau (German: [joˈhanəs ˈʁaʊ] ; 16 January 1931 – 27 January 2006) was a German politician (SPD). He was the president of Germany from 1 July 1999 until 30 June 2004 and the minister president of North Rhine-Westphalia from 20 September 1978 to 9 June 1998. In the latter role, he also served as president of the Bundesrat in 1982/83 and in 1994/95.
Rau was born in the Barmen part of Wuppertal, Rhine Province, as the third of five children. His family was strongly Protestant. As a schoolboy, Rau was active in the Confessing Church, which resisted Nazism.
Rau left school in 1949 and worked as a publisher, especially with the Protestant Youth Publishing House.
Rau was a member of the All-German People's Party (GVP), which was founded by Gustav Heinemann. The party was known for proposing German reunification from 1952 until it was disbanded in 1957.
In 1958, the pacifist Rau and his political mentor, Gustav Heinemann, joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), where he was active in the Wuppertal chapter. He served as deputy chairman of the SPD party of Wuppertal and was elected later on to the City Council (1964–1978), where he served as chairman of the SPD Group (1964–1967) and later as Mayor (1969–1970).
In 1958, Rau was elected for the first time as member of the Landtag (state parliament) of North Rhine-Westphalia. In 1967, he became chairman of the SPD fraction in the Landtag, and in 1970, he was Minister of Science and Education in the cabinet of Minister President Heinz Kühn. He soon gained a reputation as a reformer. As part of the mass education campaign of the 1970s, he founded five universities, each at different sites, in North Rhine-Westphalia and initiated Germany's first distance learning university at Hagen (modelled on the British Open University).
In 1977, Rau became Chairman of the North Rhine-Westphalia SPD and, in 1978, Minister President of the state, which he remained until 1998, with four successful elections for the SPD, which became strongest party in the Landtag each time and gained an absolute majority three times, in 1980, 1985, 1990 and finally 1995. From 1995 onwards, Rau led an SPD-Greens coalition in North Rhine-Westphalia. Rau twice served as President of the Bundesrat in 1982/83 and 1994/95.
In 1987, Rau was his party's candidate to become chancellor of Germany for the SPD, but he lost the elections against Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats (CDU). In 1994, Rau was a candidate to become President of Germany but lost the 1994 German presidential election to Roman Herzog.
In 1998, Rau stepped down from his positions as SPD chairman and Minister President, and in the 1999 German presidential election on 23 May 1999, he was elected President of Germany by the Federal Assembly of Germany to succeed Roman Herzog (CDU). On 1 July 2004, he was succeeded by Horst Köhler. In common with all other Federal presidents Rau was honored by a Großer Zapfenstreich. At his request the hymn "Jesus bleibet meine Freude" (literally "that Jesus remain my Joy", but commonly Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring) was included.
During 2000, Rau became the first German head of state to address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in German. The controversial step prompted some Israeli delegates to walk out. However, Israeli President Moshe Katsav supported and praised him for bridging the gap between the two states. Rau had a deep and lifelong commitment to bringing reconciliation between Germany and its past.
Rau had a long history of heart disease and died 11 days after his 75th birthday on 27 January 2006. The funeral took place on 7 February following a funeral act of state on the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in Berlin in the closest of family and friends.
The maxim of Rau was "to reconcile, not divide".
As his personal motto, Rau adopted the Confessing Church dictum "teneo, quia teneor" (I hold because I am held).
In his acceptance speech after his election, Rau claimed "I never want to be a nationalist but rather a patriot. A patriot is someone who loves his fatherland. A nationalist is someone who condemns the fatherland of others." The quote can be attributed to the French writer Romain Gary.
Rau was awarded 15 honorary doctorates. In 2001, he received the Leo Baeck Medal for his humanitarian work promoting tolerance and social justice.
Rau was known as a practising Christian (sometimes known as Bruder Johannes, "Brother John", in ridicule of his intense Christian position; however, he sometimes used this term himself). He held lay positions in and was a member of the Synod of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, a member church of the Protestant Church in Germany.
On 9 August 1982, Rau married the political scientist Christina Delius (born 1956). Christina Rau is a granddaughter of her husband's mentor, Gustav Heinemann, former President of Germany. The couple had three children: Anna Christina, born 1983, Philip Immanuel, born 1985 and Laura Helene, born 1986.
On 18 August 2004, Rau had to undergo serious heart surgery, in which an artificial heart valve was inserted. Only two months later (19 October 2004), a hematoma in the abdominal cavity was surgically removed.
After leaving office, Rau lived with his family in the federal capital, Berlin. However, they also kept a house in Wuppertal. | [
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"text": "In 1998, Rau stepped down from his positions as SPD chairman and Minister President, and in the 1999 German presidential election on 23 May 1999, he was elected President of Germany by the Federal Assembly of Germany to succeed Roman Herzog (CDU). On 1 July 2004, he was succeeded by Horst Köhler. In common with all other Federal presidents Rau was honored by a Großer Zapfenstreich. At his request the hymn \"Jesus bleibet meine Freude\" (literally \"that Jesus remain my Joy\", but commonly Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring) was included.",
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"text": "Rau was known as a practising Christian (sometimes known as Bruder Johannes, \"Brother John\", in ridicule of his intense Christian position; however, he sometimes used this term himself). He held lay positions in and was a member of the Synod of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, a member church of the Protestant Church in Germany.",
"title": "Private life"
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"title": "Private life"
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{
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"title": "Private life"
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| Johannes Rau was a German politician (SPD). He was the president of Germany from 1 July 1999 until 30 June 2004 and the minister president of North Rhine-Westphalia from 20 September 1978 to 9 June 1998. In the latter role, he also served as president of the Bundesrat in 1982/83 and in 1994/95. | 2001-05-17T16:52:22Z | 2023-12-20T18:34:51Z | [
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15,772 | Jackson | Jackson may refer to: | [
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| Jackson may refer to: | 2001-08-10T19:47:43Z | 2023-08-23T17:40:18Z | [
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15,773 | Jabal Ram | Jabal Ram is a mountain in Jordan. Most authorities give its elevation as 1,734 m (5,689 ft) above sea level. It was once thought to be the highest point in Jordan, but SRTM data shows that Jabal Umm al Dami is 1,854 m (6,083 ft) above sea level and therefore higher.
Traditional climbing routes over its eastern face make it one of the main attractions for climbers.
There are about ten scrambling routes across the mountain.
Tony Howard wrote a valuable book about Jordan, including Wadi Rum and Jabal Rum: Treks and Climbs in Wadi Rum, Jordan.
The most popular scrambling routes are the Thamudic and Sheikh Hamdans. | [
{
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"text": "Jabal Ram is a mountain in Jordan. Most authorities give its elevation as 1,734 m (5,689 ft) above sea level. It was once thought to be the highest point in Jordan, but SRTM data shows that Jabal Umm al Dami is 1,854 m (6,083 ft) above sea level and therefore higher.",
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| Jabal Ram is a mountain in Jordan. Most authorities give its elevation as 1,734 m (5,689 ft) above sea level. It was once thought to be the highest point in Jordan, but SRTM data shows that Jabal Umm al Dami is 1,854 m (6,083 ft) above sea level and therefore higher. Traditional climbing routes over its eastern face make it one of the main attractions for climbers. There are about ten scrambling routes across the mountain. Tony Howard wrote a valuable book about Jordan, including Wadi Rum and Jabal Rum: Treks and Climbs in Wadi Rum, Jordan. The most popular scrambling routes are the Thamudic and Sheikh Hamdans. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-06T21:20:29Z | [
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15,777 | Joseph Goebbels | Paul Joseph Goebbels (pronounced [ˈpaʊ̯l ˈjoːzɛf ˈɡœbl̩s] ; 29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German philologist and Nazi politician who was the Gauleiter (district leader) of Berlin, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and most devoted followers, known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.
Goebbels, who aspired to be an author, obtained a doctorate in philology from the University of Heidelberg in 1921. He joined the Nazi Party in 1924, and worked with Gregor Strasser in its northern branch. He was appointed Gauleiter of Berlin in 1926, where he began to take an interest in the use of propaganda to promote the party and its programme. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry quickly gained and exerted control over the news media, arts, and information in Nazi Germany. He was particularly adept at using the relatively new media of radio and film for propaganda purposes. Topics for party propaganda included antisemitism, attacks on the Christian churches, and (after the start of the Second World War) attempting to shape morale.
In 1943, Goebbels began to pressure Hitler to introduce measures that would produce "total war", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Hitler finally appointed him as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War on 23 July 1944, whereby Goebbels undertook largely unsuccessful measures to increase the number of people available for armaments manufacture and the Wehrmacht.
As the war drew to a close and Nazi Germany faced defeat, Magda Goebbels and the Goebbels children joined Hitler in Berlin. They moved into the underground Vorbunker, part of Hitler's underground bunker complex, on 22 April 1945. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April. In accordance with Hitler's will, Goebbels succeeded him as Chancellor of Germany; he served one day in this post. The following day, Goebbels and his wife Magda committed suicide, after having poisoned their six children with a cyanide compound.
Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on 29 October 1897 in Rheydt, an industrial town south of Mönchengladbach near Düsseldorf, Germany. Both of his parents were Roman Catholics with modest family backgrounds. His father Fritz was a German factory clerk; his mother Katharina Maria (née Odenhausen) was born to Dutch and German parents in a Dutch village close to the border with Germany. Goebbels had five siblings: Konrad (1893–1949), Hans (1895–1947), Maria (1896–1896), Elisabeth (1901–1915), and Maria (1910–1949), who married the German filmmaker Max W. Kimmich in 1938. In 1932, Goebbels commissioned the publication of a pamphlet of his family tree to refute the rumours that his maternal grandmother was of Jewish ancestry.
During childhood, Goebbels experienced ill health, which included a long bout of inflammation of the lungs. He had a deformed right foot that turned inwards, due to a congenital disorder. It was thicker and shorter than his left foot. Just prior to starting grammar school, he underwent an operation that failed to correct the problem. Goebbels wore a metal brace and special shoe because of his shortened leg and walked with a limp. He was rejected for military service in World War I because of this deformity.
Goebbels was educated at a Gymnasium, where he completed his Abitur (university entrance examination) in 1917. He was the top student of his class and was given the traditional honour to speak at the awards ceremony. His parents initially hoped that he would become a Catholic priest, which Goebbels seriously considered. He studied literature and history at the universities of Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg, and Munich, aided by a scholarship from the Albertus Magnus Society. By this time Goebbels had begun to distance himself from the church.
Historians, including Richard J. Evans and Roger Manvell, speculate that Goebbels' lifelong pursuit of women may have been in compensation for his physical disability. At Freiburg, he met and fell in love with Anka Stalherm, who was three years his senior. She went on to Würzburg to continue school, as did Goebbels. By 1920, the relationship with Anka was over; the break-up filled Goebbels with thoughts of suicide. In 1921, he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Michael, a three-part work of which only Parts I and III have survived. Goebbels felt he was writing his "own story". Antisemitic content and material about a charismatic leader may have been added by Goebbels shortly before the book was published in 1929 by Eher-Verlag, the publishing house of the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers' Party; NSDAP).
At the University of Heidelberg, Goebbels wrote his doctoral thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz, a minor 19th-century romantic dramatist. He had hoped to write his thesis under the supervision of Friedrich Gundolf, a literary historian. It did not seem to bother Goebbels that Gundolf was Jewish. Gundolf was no longer teaching, so directed Goebbels to associate professor Max Freiherr von Waldberg. Waldberg, who was also Jewish, recommended Goebbels write his thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz. After submitting the thesis and passing his oral examination, Goebbels earned his PhD in 1921. By 1940, he had written 14 books.
Goebbels returned home and worked as a private tutor. He also found work as a journalist and was published in the local newspaper. His writing during that time reflected his growing antisemitism and dislike for modern culture. In the summer of 1922, he met and began a love affair with Else Janke, a schoolteacher. After she revealed to him that she was half-Jewish, Goebbels stated the "enchantment [was] ruined." Nevertheless, he continued to see her on and off until 1927.
He continued for several years to try to become a published author. His diaries, which he began in 1923 and continued for the rest of his life, provided an outlet for his desire to write. The lack of income from his literary works (he wrote two plays in 1923, neither of which sold) forced him to take employment as a caller on the stock exchange and as a bank clerk in Cologne, a job he detested. He was dismissed from the bank in August 1923 and returned to Rheydt. During this period, he read avidly and was influenced by the works of Oswald Spengler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British-born German writer whose book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) was one of the standard works of the extreme right in Germany. He also began to study the "social question" and read the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, August Bebel and Gustav Noske. According to German historian Peter Longerich, Goebbels's diary entries from late 1923 to early 1924 reflected the writings of a man who was isolated, preoccupied with "religious-philosophical" issues, and lacked a sense of direction. Diary entries of mid-December 1923 forward show Goebbels was moving towards the Völkisch nationalist movement.
Goebbels first took an interest in Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1924. In February 1924, Hitler's trial for treason began in the wake of his failed attempt to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch of 8–9 November 1923. The trial attracted widespread press coverage and gave Hitler a platform for propaganda. Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, but was released on 20 December 1924, after serving just over a year. Goebbels was drawn to the Nazi Party mostly because of Hitler's charisma and commitment to his beliefs. He joined the Nazi Party around this time, becoming member number 8762. In late 1924, Goebbels offered his services to Karl Kaufmann, who was Gauleiter (Nazi Party district leader) for the Rhine-Ruhr District. Kaufmann put him in touch with Gregor Strasser, a leading Nazi organiser in northern Germany, who hired him to work on their weekly newspaper and undertake secretarial work for the regional party offices. He was also put to work as party speaker and representative for Rhineland-Westphalia. Strasser founded the National Socialist Working Association on 10 September 1925, a short-lived group of about a dozen northern and western German Gauleiter; Goebbels became its business manager and the editor of its biweekly journal, NS-Briefe. Members of Strasser's northern branch of the Nazi Party, including Goebbels, had a more socialist outlook than the rival Hitler group in Munich. Strasser disagreed with Hitler on many parts of the party platform, and in November 1926 began working on a revision.
Hitler viewed Strasser's actions as a threat to his authority, and summoned 60 Gauleiters and party leaders, including Goebbels, to a special conference in Bamberg, in Streicher's Gau of Franconia, where he gave a two-hour speech repudiating Strasser's new political programme. Hitler was opposed to the socialist leanings of the northern wing, stating it would mean "political bolshevization of Germany." Further, there would be "no princes, only Germans," and a legal system with no "Jewish system of exploitation ... for plundering of our people." The future would be secured by acquiring land, not through expropriation of the estates of the former nobility, but through colonising territories to the east. Goebbels was horrified by Hitler's characterisation of socialism as "a Jewish creation" and his assertion that a Nazi government would not expropriate private property. He wrote in his diary: "I no longer fully believe in Hitler. That's the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken away."
After reading Hitler's book Mein Kampf, Goebbels found himself agreeing with Hitler's assertion of a "Jewish doctrine of Marxism". In February 1926, Goebbels gave a speech titled "Lenin or Hitler?" in which he asserted that communism or Marxism could not save the German people, but he believed it would cause a "socialist nationalist state" to arise in Russia. In 1926, Goebbels published a pamphlet titled Nazi-Sozi which attempted to explain how National Socialism differed from Marxism.
In hopes of winning over the opposition, Hitler arranged meetings in Munich with the three Greater Ruhr Gau leaders, including Goebbels. Goebbels was impressed when Hitler sent his own car to meet them at the railway station. That evening, Hitler and Goebbels both gave speeches at a beer hall rally. The following day, Hitler offered his hand in reconciliation to the three men, encouraging them to put their differences behind them. Goebbels capitulated completely, offering Hitler his total loyalty. He wrote in his diary: "I love him ... He has thought through everything," "Such a sparkling mind can be my leader. I bow to the greater one, the political genius." He later wrote: "Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius." As a result of the Bamberg and Munich meetings, the National Socialist Working Association was disbanded. Strasser's new draft of the party programme was discarded, the original National Socialist Program of 1920 was retained unchanged, and Hitler's position as party leader was greatly strengthened.
At Hitler's invitation, Goebbels spoke at party meetings in Munich and at the annual Party Congress, held in Weimar in 1926. For the following year's event, Goebbels was involved in the planning for the first time. He and Hitler arranged for the rally to be filmed. Receiving praise for doing well at these events led Goebbels to shape his political ideas to match Hitler's, and to admire and idolise him even more.
Goebbels was first offered the position of party Gauleiter for the Berlin section in August 1926. He travelled to Berlin in mid-September and by the middle of October accepted the position. Thus Hitler's plan to divide and dissolve the northwestern Gauleiters group that Goebbels had served in under Strasser was successful. Hitler gave Goebbels great authority over the area, allowing him to determine the course for organisation and leadership for the Gau. Goebbels was given control over the local Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) and answered only to Hitler. The party membership numbered about 1,000 when Goebbels arrived, and he reduced it to a core of 600 of the most active and promising members. To raise money, he instituted membership fees and began charging admission to party meetings. Aware of the value of publicity (both positive and negative), he deliberately provoked beer-hall battles and street brawls, including violent attacks on the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Goebbels adapted recent developments in commercial advertising to the political sphere, including the use of catchy slogans and subliminal cues. His new ideas for poster design included using large type, red ink, and cryptic headers that encouraged the reader to examine the fine print to determine the meaning.
Like Hitler, Goebbels practised his public speaking skills in front of a mirror. Meetings were preceded by ceremonial marches and singing, and the venues were decorated with party banners. His entrance (almost always late) was timed for maximum emotional impact. Goebbels usually meticulously planned his speeches ahead of time, using pre-planned and choreographed inflection and gestures, but he was also able to improvise and adapt his presentation to make a good connection with his audience. He used loudspeakers, decorative flames, uniforms, and marches to attract attention to speeches.
Goebbels' tactic of using provocation to bring attention to the Nazi Party, along with violence at the public party meetings and demonstrations, led the Berlin police to ban the Nazi Party from the city on 5 May 1927. Violent incidents continued, including young Nazis randomly attacking Jews in the streets. Goebbels was subjected to a public speaking ban until the end of October. During this period, he founded the newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack) as a propaganda vehicle for the Berlin area, where few supported the party. It was a modern-style newspaper with an aggressive tone; 126 libel suits were pending against Goebbels at one point. To his disappointment, circulation was initially only 2,000. Material in the paper was highly anti-communist and antisemitic. Among the paper's favourite targets was the Jewish Deputy Chief of the Berlin Police Bernhard Weiß. Goebbels gave him the derogatory nickname "Isidore" and subjected him to a relentless campaign of Jew-baiting in the hope of provoking a crackdown he could then exploit. Goebbels continued to try to break into the literary world, with a revised version of his book Michael finally being published, and the unsuccessful production of two of his plays (Der Wanderer and Die Saat (The Seed)). The latter was his final attempt at playwriting. During this period in Berlin he had relationships with many women, including his old flame Anka Stalherm, who was now married and had a small child. He was quick to fall in love, but easily tired of a relationship and moved on to someone new. He worried too about how a committed personal relationship might interfere with his career.
The ban on the Nazi Party was lifted before the Reichstag elections on 20 May 1928. The Nazi Party lost nearly 100,000 voters and earned only 2.6 per cent of the vote nationwide. Results in Berlin were even worse, where they attained only 1.4 per cent of the vote. Goebbels was one of the first 12 Nazi Party members to gain election to the Reichstag. This gave him immunity from prosecution for a long list of outstanding charges, including a three-week jail sentence he received in April for insulting the deputy police chief Weiß. The Reichstag changed the immunity regulations in February 1931, and Goebbels was forced to pay fines for libellous material he had placed in Der Angriff over the course of the previous year. Goebbels continued to be elected to the Reichstag at every subsequent election during the Weimar and Nazi regimes.
In his newspaper Berliner Arbeiterzeitung (Berlin Workers Newspaper), Gregor Strasser was highly critical of Goebbels' failure to attract the urban vote. However, the party as a whole did much better in rural areas, attracting as much as 18 per cent of the vote in some regions. This was partly because Hitler had publicly stated just prior to the election that Point 17 of the party programme, which mandated the expropriation of land without compensation, would apply only to Jewish speculators and not private landholders. After the election, the party refocused their efforts to try to attract still more votes in the agricultural sector. In May, shortly after the election, Hitler considered appointing Goebbels as party propaganda chief. But he hesitated, as he worried that the removal of Gregor Strasser from the post would lead to a split in the party. Goebbels considered himself well suited to the position, and began to formulate ideas about how propaganda could be used in schools and the media.
By 1930 Berlin was the party's second-strongest base of support after Munich. That year the violence between the Nazis and communists led to local SA troop leader Horst Wessel being shot by two members of the KPD. He later died in hospital. Exploiting Wessel's death, Goebbels turned him into a martyr for the Nazi movement. He officially declared Wessel's march Die Fahne hoch (Raise the flag), renamed as the Horst-Wessel-Lied, to be the Nazi Party anthem.
The Great Depression greatly impacted Germany and by 1930 there was a dramatic increase in unemployment. During this time, the Strasser brothers started publishing a new daily newspaper in Berlin, the Nationaler Sozialist. Like their other publications, it conveyed the brothers' own brand of Nazism, including nationalism, anti-capitalism, social reform, and anti-Westernism. Goebbels complained vehemently about the rival Strasser newspapers to Hitler, and admitted that their success was causing his own Berlin newspapers to be "pushed to the wall". In late April 1930, Hitler publicly and firmly announced his opposition to Gregor Strasser and appointed Goebbels to replace him as Reich leader of Nazi Party propaganda. One of Goebbels' first acts was to ban the evening edition of the Nationaler Sozialist. Goebbels was also given control of other Nazi papers across the country, including the party's national newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (People's Observer). He still had to wait until 3 July for Otto Strasser and his supporters to announce they were leaving the Nazi Party. Upon receiving the news, Goebbels was relieved the "crisis" with the Strassers was finally over and glad that Otto Strasser had lost all power.
The rapid deterioration of the economy led to the resignation on 27 March 1930 of the coalition government that had been elected in 1928. Paul von Hindenburg appointed Heinrich Brüning as chancellor. A new cabinet was formed, and Hindenburg used his power as president to govern via emergency decrees. Goebbels took charge of the Nazi Party's national campaign for Reichstag elections called for 14 September 1930. Campaigning was undertaken on a huge scale, with thousands of meetings and speeches held all over the country. Hitler's speeches focused on blaming the country's economic woes on the Weimar Republic, particularly its adherence to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which required war reparations that had proven devastating to the German economy. He proposed a new German society based on race and national unity. The resulting success took even Hitler and Goebbels by surprise: the party received 6.5 million votes nationwide and took 107 seats in the Reichstag, making it the second largest party in the country.
In late 1930 Goebbels met Magda Quandt, a divorcée who had joined the party a few months earlier. She worked as a volunteer in the party offices in Berlin, helping Goebbels organise his private papers. Her flat on Reichskanzlerplatz soon became a favourite meeting place for Hitler and other Nazi Party officials. Goebbels and Quandt married on 19 December 1931 at a Protestant church. Hitler was his best man.
For two further elections held in 1932, Goebbels organised massive campaigns that included rallies, parades, speeches, and Hitler travelling around the country by aeroplane with the slogan "the Führer over Germany". Goebbels wrote in his diary that the Nazis must gain power and exterminate Marxism. He undertook numerous speaking tours during these election campaigns and had some of their speeches published on gramophone records and as pamphlets. Goebbels was also involved in the production of a small collection of silent films that could be shown at party meetings, though they did not yet have enough equipment to widely use this medium. Many of Goebbels' campaign posters used violent imagery such as a giant half-clad male destroying political opponents or other perceived enemies such as "International High Finance". His propaganda characterised the opposition as "November criminals", "Jewish wire-pullers", or a communist threat.
Support for the party continued to grow, but neither of these elections led to a majority government. In an effort to stabilise the country and improve economic conditions, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reich chancellor on 30 January 1933.
To celebrate Hitler's appointment as chancellor, Goebbels organised a torchlight parade in Berlin on the night of 30 January of an estimated 60,000 men, many in the uniforms of the SA and SS. The spectacle was covered by a live state radio broadcast, with commentary by longtime party member and future Minister of Aviation Hermann Göring. Goebbels was disappointed not to be given a post in Hitler's new cabinet. Bernhard Rust was appointed as Minister of Culture, the post that Goebbels was expecting to receive. Like other Nazi Party officials, Goebbels had to deal with Hitler's leadership style of giving contradictory orders to his subordinates, while placing them into positions where their duties and responsibilities overlapped. In this way, Hitler fostered distrust, competition, and infighting among his subordinates to consolidate and maximise his own power. The Nazi Party took advantage of the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933, with Hindenburg passing the Reichstag Fire Decree the following day at Hitler's urging. This was the first of several pieces of legislation that dismantled democracy in Germany and put a totalitarian dictatorship—headed by Hitler—in its place. On 5 March, yet another Reichstag election took place, the last to be held before the defeat of the Nazis at the end of the Second World War. While the Nazi Party increased their number of seats and percentage of the vote, it was not the landslide expected by the party leadership. Goebbels finally received Hitler's appointment to the cabinet, officially becoming head of the newly created Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on 14 March.
The role of the new ministry, which set up its offices in the 18th-century Ordenspalais across from the Reich Chancellery, was to centralise Nazi control of all aspects of German cultural and intellectual life. Goebbels hoped to increase popular support of the party from the 37 per cent achieved at the last free election held in Germany on 25 March 1933 to 100 per cent support. An unstated goal was to present to other nations the impression that the Nazi Party had the full and enthusiastic backing of the entire population. One of Goebbels' first productions was staging the Day of Potsdam, a ceremonial passing of power from Hindenburg to Hitler, held in Potsdam on 21 March. He composed the text of Hitler's decree authorising the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, held on 1 April. Later that month, Goebbels travelled back to Rheydt, where he was given a triumphal reception. The townsfolk lined the main street, which had been renamed in his honour. On the following day, Goebbels was declared a local hero.
Goebbels converted the 1 May holiday from a celebration of workers' rights (observed as such especially by the communists) into a day celebrating the Nazi Party. In place of the usual ad hoc labour celebrations, he organised a huge party rally held at Tempelhof Field in Berlin. The following day, all trade union offices in the country were forcibly disbanded by the SA and SS, and the Nazi-run German Labour Front was created to take their place. "We are the masters of Germany," he commented in his diary entry of 3 May. Less than two weeks later, he gave a speech at the Nazi book burning in Berlin on 10 May, a ceremony he suggested.
Meanwhile, the Nazi Party began passing laws to marginalise Jews and remove them from German society. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933, forced all non-Aryans to retire from the legal profession and civil service. Similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of their right to practise. The first Nazi concentration camps (initially created to house political dissenters) were founded shortly after Hitler seized power. In a process termed Gleichschaltung (co-ordination), the Nazi Party proceeded to rapidly bring all aspects of life under control of the party. All civilian organisations, including agricultural groups, volunteer organisations, and sports clubs, had their leadership replaced with Nazi sympathisers or party members. By June 1933, virtually the only organisations not in the control of the Nazi Party were the army and the churches. On 2 June 1933, Hitler appointed Goebbels a Reichsleiter, the second highest political rank in the Nazi Party. On 3 October 1933, on the formation of the Academy for German Law, Goebbels was made a member and given a seat on its executive committee. In a move to manipulate Germany's middle class and shape popular opinion, the regime passed on 4 October 1933 the Schriftleitergesetz (Editor's Law), which became the cornerstone of the Nazi Party's control of the popular press. Modelled to some extent on the system in Benito Mussolini's Italy, the law defined a Schriftleiter as anyone who wrote, edited, or selected texts and/or illustrated material for serial publication. Individuals selected for this position were chosen based on experiential, educational, and racial criteria. The law required journalists to "regulate their work in accordance with National Socialism as a philosophy of life and as a conception of government."
In 1934, Goebbels published Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei ("From the Kaiserhof to the Reich Chancellery"), his account of Hitler's seizure of power, which he based on his diary from 1 January 1932 to 1 May 1933. The book sought to glorify both Hitler and the author. It sold around 660,000 copies, making it Goebbels's best-selling publication during his lifetime.
At the end of June 1934, top officials of the SA and opponents of the regime, including Gregor Strasser, were arrested and killed in a purge later called the Night of Long Knives. Goebbels was present at the arrest of SA leader Ernst Röhm in Munich. On 2 August 1934, President von Hindenburg died. In a radio broadcast, Goebbels announced that the offices of president and chancellor had been combined, and Hitler had been formally named as Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor).
The propaganda ministry was organised into seven departments: administration and legal; mass rallies, public health, youth, and race; radio; national and foreign press; films and film censorship; art, music, and theatre; and protection against counter-propaganda, both foreign and domestic. Goebbels's style of leadership was tempestuous and unpredictable. He would suddenly change direction and shift his support between senior associates; he was a difficult boss and liked to berate his staff in public. Goebbels was successful at his job, however; Life wrote in 1938 that "[p]ersonally he likes nobody, is liked by nobody, and runs the most efficient Nazi department." John Gunther wrote in 1940 that Goebbels "is the cleverest of all the Nazis", but could not succeed Hitler because "everybody hates him".
The Reich Film Chamber, which all members of the film industry were required to join, was created in June 1933. Goebbels promoted the development of films with a Nazi slant, and ones that contained subliminal or overt propaganda messages. Under the auspices of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), created in September, Goebbels added additional sub-chambers for the fields of broadcasting, fine arts, literature, music, the press, and the theatre. As in the film industry, anyone wishing to pursue a career in these fields had to be a member of the corresponding chamber. In this way anyone whose views were contrary to the regime could be excluded from working in their chosen field and thus silenced. In addition, journalists (now considered employees of the state) were required to prove Aryan descent back to the year 1800, and if married, the same requirement applied to the spouse. Members of any chamber were not allowed to leave the country for their work without prior permission of their chamber. A committee was established to censor books, and works could not be re-published unless they were on the list of approved works. Similar regulations applied to other fine arts and entertainment; even cabaret performances were censored. Many German artists and intellectuals left Germany in the pre-war years rather than work under these restrictions.
Goebbels was particularly interested in controlling the radio, which was then still a fairly new mass medium. Sometimes under protest from individual states (particularly Prussia, headed by Göring), Goebbels gained control of radio stations nationwide, and placed them under the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (German National Broadcasting Corporation) in July 1934. Manufacturers were urged by Goebbels to produce inexpensive home receivers, called Volksempfänger (people's receiver), and by 1938 nearly ten million sets had been sold. Loudspeakers were placed in public areas, factories, and schools, so that important party broadcasts would be heard live by nearly all Germans. On 2 September 1939 (the day after the start of the war), Goebbels and the Council of Ministers proclaimed it illegal to listen to foreign radio stations. Disseminating news from foreign broadcasts could result in the death penalty. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and later Minister for Armaments and War Production, later said the regime "made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought."
A major focus of Nazi propaganda was Hitler himself, who was glorified as a heroic and infallible leader and became the focus of a cult of personality. Much of this was spontaneous, but some was stage-managed as part of Goebbels' propaganda work. Adulation of Hitler was the focus of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, where his moves were carefully choreographed. The rally was the subject of the film Triumph of the Will, one of several Nazi propaganda films directed by Leni Riefenstahl. It won the gold medal at the 1935 Venice Film Festival. At the 1935 Nazi party congress rally at Nuremberg, Goebbels declared that "Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself."
Goebbels was involved in planning the staging of the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin. It was around this time that he met and started having an affair with the actress Lída Baarová, whom he continued to see until 1938. A major project in 1937 was the Degenerate Art Exhibition, organised by Goebbels, which ran in Munich from July to November. The exhibition proved wildly popular, attracting over two million visitors. A degenerate music exhibition took place the following year. Meanwhile, Goebbels was disappointed by the lack of quality in the National Socialist artwork, films, and literature.
In 1933, Hitler signed the Reichskonkordat (Reich Concordat), a treaty with the Vatican that required the regime to honour the independence of Catholic institutions and prohibited clergy from involvement in politics. However, the regime continued to target the Christian churches to weaken their influence. Throughout 1935 and 1936, hundreds of clergy and nuns were arrested, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or sexual offences. Goebbels widely publicised the trials in his propaganda campaigns, showing the cases in the worst possible light. Restrictions were placed on public meetings, and Catholic publications faced censorship. Catholic schools were required to reduce religious instruction and crucifixes were removed from state buildings. Hitler often vacillated on whether or not the Kirchenkampf (church struggle) should be a priority, but his frequent inflammatory comments on the issue were enough to convince Goebbels to intensify his work on the issue; in February 1937 he stated he wanted to eliminate the Protestant church.
In response to the persecution, Pope Pius XI had the "Mit brennender Sorge" ("With Burning Concern") Encyclical smuggled into Germany for Passion Sunday 1937 and read from every pulpit. It denounced the systematic hostility of the regime toward the church. In response, Goebbels renewed the regime's crackdown and propaganda against Catholics. His speech of 28 May in Berlin in front of 20,000 party members, which was also broadcast on the radio, attacked the Catholic church as morally corrupt. As a result of the propaganda campaign, enrolment in denominational schools dropped sharply, and by 1939 all such schools were disbanded or converted to public facilities. Harassment and threats of imprisonment led the clergy to be much more cautious in their criticism of the regime. Partly out of foreign policy concerns, Hitler ordered a scaling back of the church struggle by the end of July 1937.
Goebbels was antisemitic from a young age. After joining the Nazi Party and meeting Hitler, his antisemitism grew and became more radical. He began to see the Jews as a destructive force with a negative impact on German society. In 1930, he criticised Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini for his relative lack of hostility towards Jews, stating that "Mussolini appears to have not recognized the Jewish question." After the Nazis seized control, he repeatedly urged Hitler to take action against the Jews. Despite his extreme antisemitism, Goebbels spoke of the "rubbish of race-materialism" and of the unnecessity of biological racism for the Nazi ideology. He also described Himmler's ideology as "in many regards, mad" and thought Alfred Rosenberg's theories were ridiculous.
The Nazi Party's goal was to remove Jews from German cultural and economic life, and eventually to remove them from the country altogether. In addition to his propaganda efforts, Goebbels actively promoted the persecution of the Jews through pogroms, legislation, and other actions. Discriminatory measures he instituted in Berlin in the early years of the regime included bans against their using public transport and requiring that Jewish shops be marked as such.
In November 1938, the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath was killed in Paris by the young Jewish man Herschel Grynszpan. In response, Goebbels arranged for inflammatory antisemitic material to be released by the press, and the result was the start of a pogrom. Jews were attacked and synagogues destroyed all over Germany. The situation was further inflamed by a speech Goebbels gave at a party meeting on the night of 8 November, where he obliquely called for party members to incite further violence against Jews while making it appear to be a spontaneous series of acts by the German people. At least a hundred Jews were killed, several hundred synagogues were damaged or destroyed, and thousands of Jewish shops were vandalised in an event called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). Around 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. The destruction stopped after a conference held on 12 November, where Göring pointed out that the destruction of Jewish property was in effect the destruction of German property since the intention was that it would all eventually be confiscated.
Goebbels continued his intensive antisemitic propaganda campaign that culminated in Hitler's 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech, which Goebbels helped to write:
If international finance Jewry in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!
While Goebbels had been pressing for expulsion of the Berlin Jews since 1935, there were still 62,000 living in the city in 1940. Part of the delay in their deportation was that they were needed as workers in the armaments industry. Deportations of German Jews began in October 1941, with the first transport from Berlin leaving on 18 October. Some Jews were shot immediately on arrival in destinations such as Riga and Kaunas. In preparation for the deportations, Goebbels ordered that all German Jews wear an identifying yellow badge as of 5 September 1941. On 6 March 1942, Goebbels received a copy of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, which indicated indirectly that the Jewish population of Europe was to be sent to extermination camps in occupied areas of Poland and killed. His diary entries of the period show that he was well aware of the fate of the Jews. "In general, it can probably be established that 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated, while only 40 per cent can be put to work. ... A judgment is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric but thoroughly deserved," he wrote on 27 March 1942.
Goebbels had frequent discussions with Hitler about the fate of the Jews, a subject they discussed almost every time they met. He was aware throughout that the Jews were being exterminated, and completely supported this decision. He was one of the few top Nazi officials to do so publicly.
As early as February 1933, Hitler announced that rearmament must be undertaken, albeit clandestinely at first, as to do so was in violation of the Versailles Treaty. A year later he told his military leaders that 1942 was the target date for going to war in the east. Goebbels was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Hitler aggressively pursuing Germany's expansionist policies sooner rather than later. At the time of the Reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, Goebbels summed up his general attitude in his diary: "[N]ow is the time for action. Fortune favors the brave! He who dares nothing wins nothing." In the lead-up to the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, Goebbels took the initiative time and again to use propaganda to whip up sympathy for the Sudeten Germans while campaigning against the Czech government. Still, Goebbels was well aware there was a growing "war panic" in Germany and so by July had the press conduct propaganda efforts at a lower level of intensity. After the western powers acceded to Hitler's demands concerning Czechoslovakia in 1938, Goebbels soon redirected his propaganda machine against Poland. From May onwards, he orchestrated a campaign against Poland, fabricating stories about atrocities against ethnic Germans in Danzig and other cities. Even so, he was unable to persuade the majority of Germans to welcome the prospect of war. He privately held doubts about the wisdom of risking a protracted war against Britain and France by attacking Poland.
After the Invasion of Poland in September 1939, Goebbels used his propaganda ministry and the Reich chambers to control access to information domestically. To his chagrin, his rival Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, continually challenged Goebbels' jurisdiction over the dissemination of international propaganda. Hitler declined to make a firm ruling on the subject, so the two men remained rivals for the remainder of the Nazi era. Goebbels did not participate in the military decision-making process, nor was he made privy to diplomatic negotiations until after the fact.
The Propaganda Ministry took over the broadcasting facilities of conquered countries immediately after surrender, and began broadcasting prepared material using the existing announcers as a way to gain the trust of the citizens. Most aspects of the media, both domestically and in the conquered countries, were controlled by Goebbels and his department. The German Home Service, the Armed Forces Programme, and the German European Service were all rigorously controlled in everything from the information they were permitted to disseminate to the music they were allowed to play. Party rallies, speeches, and demonstrations continued; speeches were broadcast on the radio and short propaganda films were exhibited using 1,500 mobile film vans. Hitler made fewer public appearances and broadcasts as the war progressed, so Goebbels increasingly became the voice of the Nazi regime for the German people. From May 1940 he wrote frequent editorials that were published in Das Reich which were later read aloud over the radio. He found films to be his most effective propaganda medium, after radio. At his insistence, initially half the films made in wartime Germany were propaganda films (particularly on antisemitism) and war propaganda films (recounting both historical wars and current exploits of the Wehrmacht).
Goebbels became preoccupied with morale and the efforts of the people on the home front. He believed that the more the people at home were involved in the war effort, the better their morale would be. For example, he initiated a programme for the collection of winter clothing and ski equipment for troops on the eastern front. At the same time, Goebbels implemented changes to have more "entertaining material" in radio and film produced for the public, decreeing in late 1942 that 20 per cent of the films should be propaganda and 80 per cent light entertainment. As Gauleiter of Berlin, Goebbels dealt with increasingly serious shortages of necessities such as food and clothing, as well as the need to ration beer and tobacco, which were important for morale. Hitler suggested watering the beer and degrading the quality of the cigarettes so that more could be produced, but Goebbels refused, saying the cigarettes were already of such low quality that it was impossible to make them any worse. Through his propaganda campaigns, he worked hard to maintain an appropriate level of morale among the public about the military situation, neither too optimistic nor too grim. The series of military setbacks the Germans suffered in this period – the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne (May 1942), the Allied victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein (November 1942), and especially the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad (February 1943) – were difficult matters to present to the German public, who were increasingly weary of the war and sceptical that it could be won. On 16 November 1942 Goebbels, like all Gauleiters, was appointed the Reich Defense Commissioner for his Gau. This enabled him to issue direct instructions to authorities within his jurisdiction in matters concerning the civilian war effort. On 15 January 1943, Hitler appointed Goebbels as head of the newly created Air Raid Damage committee, which meant Goebbels was nominally in charge of nationwide civil air defences and shelters as well as the assessment and repair of damaged buildings. In actuality, the defence of areas other than Berlin remained in the hands of the local Gauleiters, and his main tasks were limited to providing immediate aid to the affected civilians and using propaganda to improve their morale.
By early 1943, the war produced a labour crisis for the regime. Hitler created a three-man committee with representatives of the State, the army, and the Party in an attempt to centralise control of the war economy. The committee members were Hans Lammers (head of the Reich Chancellery), Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command; OKW), and Martin Bormann, who controlled the Party. The committee was intended to independently propose measures regardless of the wishes of various ministries, with Hitler reserving most final decisions to himself. The committee, soon known as the Dreierausschuß (Committee of Three), met eleven times between January and August 1943. However, they ran up against resistance from Hitler's cabinet ministers, who headed deeply entrenched spheres of influence and were excluded from the committee. Seeing it as a threat to their power, Goebbels, Göring, and Speer worked together to bring it down. The result was that nothing changed, and the Committee of Three declined into irrelevance by September 1943.
Partly in response to being excluded from the Committee of Three, Goebbels pressured Hitler to introduce measures that would produce "total war", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Some of these measures were implemented in an edict of 13 January, but to Goebbels' dismay, Göring demanded that his favourite restaurants in Berlin should remain open, and Lammers successfully lobbied Hitler to have women with children exempted from conscription, even if they had child care available. After receiving an enthusiastic response to his speech of 30 January 1943 on the topic, Goebbels believed he had the support of the German people in his call for total war. His next speech, the Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943, was a passionate demand for his audience to commit to total war, which he presented as the only way to stop the Bolshevik onslaught and save the German people from destruction. The speech also had a strong antisemitic element and hinted at the extermination of the Jewish people that was already underway. The speech was presented live on radio and was filmed as well. During the live version of the speech, Goebbels accidentally begins to mention the "extermination" of the Jews; this is omitted in the published text of the speech.
Goebbels' efforts had little impact for the time being, because Hitler, who in principle was in favour of total war, was not prepared to implement changes over the objections of his ministers. The discovery around this time of a mass grave of Polish officers that had been killed by the Red Army in the 1940 Katyn massacre was made use of by Goebbels in his propaganda in an attempt to drive a wedge between the Soviets and the other western allies.
After the Allied invasion of Sicily (July 1943) and the strategic Soviet victory in the Battle of Kursk (July–August 1943), Goebbels began to recognise that the war could no longer be won. Following the Allied invasion of Italy and the fall of Mussolini in September, he raised with Hitler the possibility of a separate peace, either with the Soviets or with Britain. Hitler rejected both of these proposals.
As Germany's military and economic situation grew steadily worse, on 25 August 1943 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler took over the post of interior minister, replacing Wilhelm Frick. Intensive air raids on Berlin and other cities took the lives of thousands of people. In December 1943, Hitler asked Goebbels to take on the job of Stadtpräsident (City President) of Berlin, and Goebbels agreed to this as a means of obtaining more direct control over the municipal authorities, though Hitler delayed the formal appointment for several months. Goebbels took over direct administrative control of the city when he was formally named Stadtpräsident on 7 April 1944, thus uniting under his control the city's most powerful party and governmental offices. As air raids on Berlin continued, Göring's Luftwaffe attempted to retaliate with air raids on London in early 1944, but they no longer had sufficient aircraft to make much of an impact. While Goebbels' propaganda in this period indicated that a huge retaliation was in the offing, the V-1 flying bombs, launched on British targets beginning in mid-June 1944, had little effect, with only around 20 per cent reaching their intended targets. To boost morale, Goebbels continued to publish propaganda to the effect that further improvements to these weapons would have a decisive impact on the outcome of the war. Meanwhile, in the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, the Allies successfully gained a foothold in France.
Throughout July 1944, Goebbels and Speer continued to press Hitler to bring the economy to a total war footing. The 20 July plot, where Hitler was almost killed by a bomb at his field headquarters in East Prussia, played into the hands of those who had been pushing for change: Bormann, Goebbels, Himmler, and Speer. Over the objections of Göring, Goebbels was appointed on 23 July as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War, charged with maximising the manpower for the Wehrmacht and the armaments industry at the expense of sectors of the economy not critical to the war effort. Through these efforts, he was able to free up an additional half a million men for military service. However, as many of these new recruits came from the armaments industry, the move put him in conflict with armaments minister Speer. Untrained workers from elsewhere were not readily absorbed into the armaments industry, and likewise, the new Wehrmacht recruits waited in barracks for their turn to be trained.
Hitler ordered a nationwide militia of men previously considered unsuitable for military service — the Volkssturm (People's Storm) — to be formed on 25 September 1944; it was launched on 18 October. In his capacity as Gauleiter and Reich Defense Commissioner, Goebbels was named Führer des Deutschen Volkssturms im Gau Groß-Berlin on 25 September 1944, and he administered the oath of allegiance to the assembled Berlin Volkssturm troops on 12 November. Goebbels recorded in his diary that 100,000 recruits were sworn in from his Gau alone. However, the men, mostly age 45 to 60, received only rudimentary training and many were not properly armed. Goebbels' notion that these men could effectively serve on the front lines against Soviet tanks and artillery was unrealistic at best. The programme was deeply unpopular.
Goebbels realised that his influence would diminish in wartime. He suffered a series of setbacks as propaganda became less important compared to warfare, the war economy, and the Allied bombing of German cities. Historian Michael Balfour states that from 1942 onward, Goebbels, "lost control over Nazi policy toward the press and over the handling of news in general." Rival agencies expanded. The foreign ministry took charge of propaganda outside Germany. The military set up its own propaganda division, providing daily reports on the progress of the war and the conditions of the armed forces. The Nazi Party also generated and distributed its own propaganda during the war. Goebbels was still influential when he had the opportunity to meet with Hitler, who became less available as he moved his headquarters closer to the military front lines. They were together perhaps one day a month. Furthermore, Hitler rarely gave speeches or rallies of the sort that had dominated propaganda in the 1930s. After Hitler returned to Berlin in 1945, Goebbels' ministry was destroyed by an Allied air raid on 13 March, and Goebbels had great difficulty disseminating propaganda. In April 1945, he finally bested the rival agencies and took full charge of propaganda, but by then the Soviet Red Army had already entered Berlin. Goebbels was an astute observer of the war, and historians have exhaustively mined his diary for insights on how the Nazi leadership tried to maintain public morale.
In the last months of the war, Goebbels' speeches and articles took on an increasingly apocalyptic tone. By the beginning of 1945, with the Soviets on the Oder River and the Western Allies preparing to cross the Rhine River, he could no longer disguise the inevitability of German defeat. Berlin had little in the way of fortifications or artillery, and even Volkssturm units were in short supply, as almost everything and everyone had been sent to the front. Goebbels noted in his diary on 21 January that millions of Germans were fleeing westward. He tentatively discussed with Hitler the issue of making peace overtures to the western allies, but Hitler again refused. Privately, Goebbels was conflicted at pushing the case with Hitler since he did not want to lose Hitler's confidence.
When other Nazi leaders urged Hitler to leave Berlin and establish a new centre of resistance in the National Redoubt in Bavaria, Goebbels opposed this, arguing for a heroic last stand in Berlin. His family (except for Magda's son Harald, who had served in the Luftwaffe and been captured by the Allies) moved into their house in Berlin to await the end. He and Magda may have discussed suicide and the fate of their young children in a long meeting on the night of 27 January. He knew how the outside world would view the criminal acts committed by the regime and had no desire to subject himself to the "debacle" of a trial. He burned his private papers on the night of 18 April.
Goebbels knew how to play on Hitler's fantasies, encouraging him to see the hand of providence in the death of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 12 April. Whether Hitler really saw this event as a turning point as Goebbels proclaimed is not known. By this time, Goebbels had gained the position he had wanted so long—at Hitler's side. Göring was utterly discredited, although he was not stripped of his offices until 23 April. Himmler, whose appointment as commander of Army Group Vistula had led to disaster on the Oder, was also in disgrace with Hitler. Most of Hitler's inner circle, including Göring, Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Speer, prepared to leave Berlin immediately after Hitler's birthday celebration on 20 April. Even Bormann was "not anxious" to meet his end at Hitler's side. On 22 April, Hitler announced that he would stay in Berlin until the end and then shoot himself. Goebbels moved with his family into the Vorbunker, connected to the lower Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery garden in central Berlin, that same day. He told Vice-Admiral Hans-Erich Voss that he would not entertain the idea of either surrender or escape. On 23 April, Goebbels made the following proclamation to the people of Berlin:
I call on you to fight for your city. Fight with everything you have got, for the sake of your wives and your children, your mothers and your parents. Your arms are defending everything we have ever held dear, and all the generations that will come after us. Be proud and courageous! Be inventive and cunning! Your Gauleiter is amongst you. He and his colleagues will remain in your midst. His wife and children are here as well. He, who once captured the city with 200 men, will now use every means to galvanize the defence of the capital. The battle for Berlin must become the signal for the whole nation to rise up in battle.
After midnight on 29 April, with the Soviets advancing ever closer to the bunker complex, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in the Führerbunker. Afterward, he hosted a modest wedding breakfast. Hitler then took secretary Traudl Junge to another room and dictated his last will and testament. Goebbels and Bormann were two of the witnesses.
In his last will and testament, Hitler named no successor as Führer or leader of the Nazi Party. Instead, he appointed Goebbels as Reich Chancellor; Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was at Flensburg near the Danish border, as Reich President; and Bormann as Party Minister. Goebbels wrote a postscript to the will stating that he would "categorically refuse" to obey Hitler's order to leave Berlin—as he put it, "the first time in my life" that he had not complied with Hitler's orders. He felt compelled to remain with Hitler "for reasons of humanity and personal loyalty". His wife and children would stay as well. They would end their lives "side by side with the Führer".
In the mid-afternoon of 30 April, Adolf Hitler shot himself. Goebbels was depressed, and said he would walk around the Chancellery garden until he was killed by the Russian shelling. Voss later recounted Goebbels as saying: "It is a great pity that such a man [Hitler] is not with us any longer. But there is nothing to be done. For us, everything is lost now and the only way out left for us is the one Hitler chose. I shall follow his example."
On 1 May, Goebbels carried out his sole official act as Chancellor: he dictated a letter to General Vasily Chuikov and ordered German General Hans Krebs to deliver it under a white flag. Chuikov, as commander of the Soviet 8th Guards Army, commanded the Soviet forces in central Berlin. Goebbels' letter informed Chuikov of Hitler's death and requested a ceasefire. After this was rejected, Goebbels decided that further efforts were futile.
Later on 1 May, Voss saw Goebbels for the last time: "While saying goodbye I asked Goebbels to join us. But he replied: 'The captain must not leave his sinking ship. I have thought about it all and decided to stay here. I have nowhere to go because with little children I will not be able to make it, especially with a leg like mine'." On the evening of 1 May, Goebbels arranged for an SS dentist, Helmut Kunz, to inject his six children with morphine so that when they were unconscious, an ampule of a cyanide compound could be then crushed in each of their mouths. According to Kunz's later testimony, he gave the children morphine injections but Magda Goebbels and SS-Obersturmbannführer Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's personal doctor, administered the cyanide.
At around 20:30, Goebbels and Magda left the bunker and walked up to the garden of the Chancellery, where they killed themselves. There are several different accounts of this event. One is that they each bit on a cyanide ampule near where Hitler had been buried and were given a coup de grâce immediately afterward. Goebbels' SS adjutant Günther Schwägermann testified in 1948 that they walked ahead of him up the stairs and out into the Chancellery garden. He waited in the stairwell and heard shots. Schwägermann then walked up the remaining stairs and, once outside, saw their lifeless bodies. Following Goebbels' prior order, Schwägermann had an SS soldier fire several shots into Goebbels' body, which did not move.
The corpses were then doused with petrol, but they were only partially burned and not buried. A few days later, the Soviets brought Voss back to the bunker to identify the Goebbelses' partly burned bodies. The remains of the Goebbels family, Krebs, and Hitler's dogs were repeatedly buried and exhumed. The last burial was at the SMERSH facility in Magdeburg on 21 February 1946. In 1970, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to destroy the remains. On 4 April 1970, a Soviet KGB team used detailed burial charts to exhume five wooden boxes at the Magdeburg SMERSH facility. They were burned, crushed, and scattered into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.
Hitler was very fond of Magda and the children. He enjoyed staying at the Goebbels' Berlin apartment, where he could relax. Magda had a close relationship with Hitler, and became a member of his small coterie of female friends. She also became an unofficial representative of the regime, receiving letters from all over Germany from women with questions about domestic matters or child custody issues.
In 1936, Goebbels met the Czech actress Lída Baarová and by the winter of 1937 began an intense affair with her. Magda had a long conversation with Hitler about it on 15 August 1938. Unwilling to put up with a scandal involving one of his top ministers, Hitler demanded that Goebbels break off the relationship. Thereafter, Joseph and Magda seemed to reach a truce until the end of September. The couple had another falling out at that point, and again Hitler became involved, insisting the couple stay together. He arranged for publicity photos to be taken of himself with the reconciled couple in October. Goebbels also had short-term affairs and relationships with numerous other women. Magda too had affairs, including a relationship with Kurt Lüdecke in 1933 and Karl Hanke in 1938.
The Goebbels family included Harald Quandt (Magda's son from her first marriage; b. 1921), plus Helga (b. 1932), Hilde (b. 1934), Helmut (b. 1935), Holde (b. 1937), Hedda (b. 1938), and Heide (b. 1940). Harald was the only member of the family to survive the war. He died in an aeroplane crash in 1967. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Paul Joseph Goebbels (pronounced [ˈpaʊ̯l ˈjoːzɛf ˈɡœbl̩s] ; 29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German philologist and Nazi politician who was the Gauleiter (district leader) of Berlin, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and most devoted followers, known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Goebbels, who aspired to be an author, obtained a doctorate in philology from the University of Heidelberg in 1921. He joined the Nazi Party in 1924, and worked with Gregor Strasser in its northern branch. He was appointed Gauleiter of Berlin in 1926, where he began to take an interest in the use of propaganda to promote the party and its programme. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry quickly gained and exerted control over the news media, arts, and information in Nazi Germany. He was particularly adept at using the relatively new media of radio and film for propaganda purposes. Topics for party propaganda included antisemitism, attacks on the Christian churches, and (after the start of the Second World War) attempting to shape morale.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1943, Goebbels began to pressure Hitler to introduce measures that would produce \"total war\", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Hitler finally appointed him as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War on 23 July 1944, whereby Goebbels undertook largely unsuccessful measures to increase the number of people available for armaments manufacture and the Wehrmacht.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "As the war drew to a close and Nazi Germany faced defeat, Magda Goebbels and the Goebbels children joined Hitler in Berlin. They moved into the underground Vorbunker, part of Hitler's underground bunker complex, on 22 April 1945. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April. In accordance with Hitler's will, Goebbels succeeded him as Chancellor of Germany; he served one day in this post. The following day, Goebbels and his wife Magda committed suicide, after having poisoned their six children with a cyanide compound.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on 29 October 1897 in Rheydt, an industrial town south of Mönchengladbach near Düsseldorf, Germany. Both of his parents were Roman Catholics with modest family backgrounds. His father Fritz was a German factory clerk; his mother Katharina Maria (née Odenhausen) was born to Dutch and German parents in a Dutch village close to the border with Germany. Goebbels had five siblings: Konrad (1893–1949), Hans (1895–1947), Maria (1896–1896), Elisabeth (1901–1915), and Maria (1910–1949), who married the German filmmaker Max W. Kimmich in 1938. In 1932, Goebbels commissioned the publication of a pamphlet of his family tree to refute the rumours that his maternal grandmother was of Jewish ancestry.",
"title": "Early life, education, and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "During childhood, Goebbels experienced ill health, which included a long bout of inflammation of the lungs. He had a deformed right foot that turned inwards, due to a congenital disorder. It was thicker and shorter than his left foot. Just prior to starting grammar school, he underwent an operation that failed to correct the problem. Goebbels wore a metal brace and special shoe because of his shortened leg and walked with a limp. He was rejected for military service in World War I because of this deformity.",
"title": "Early life, education, and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Goebbels was educated at a Gymnasium, where he completed his Abitur (university entrance examination) in 1917. He was the top student of his class and was given the traditional honour to speak at the awards ceremony. His parents initially hoped that he would become a Catholic priest, which Goebbels seriously considered. He studied literature and history at the universities of Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg, and Munich, aided by a scholarship from the Albertus Magnus Society. By this time Goebbels had begun to distance himself from the church.",
"title": "Early life, education, and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Historians, including Richard J. Evans and Roger Manvell, speculate that Goebbels' lifelong pursuit of women may have been in compensation for his physical disability. At Freiburg, he met and fell in love with Anka Stalherm, who was three years his senior. She went on to Würzburg to continue school, as did Goebbels. By 1920, the relationship with Anka was over; the break-up filled Goebbels with thoughts of suicide. In 1921, he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Michael, a three-part work of which only Parts I and III have survived. Goebbels felt he was writing his \"own story\". Antisemitic content and material about a charismatic leader may have been added by Goebbels shortly before the book was published in 1929 by Eher-Verlag, the publishing house of the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers' Party; NSDAP).",
"title": "Early life, education, and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "At the University of Heidelberg, Goebbels wrote his doctoral thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz, a minor 19th-century romantic dramatist. He had hoped to write his thesis under the supervision of Friedrich Gundolf, a literary historian. It did not seem to bother Goebbels that Gundolf was Jewish. Gundolf was no longer teaching, so directed Goebbels to associate professor Max Freiherr von Waldberg. Waldberg, who was also Jewish, recommended Goebbels write his thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz. After submitting the thesis and passing his oral examination, Goebbels earned his PhD in 1921. By 1940, he had written 14 books.",
"title": "Early life, education, and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Goebbels returned home and worked as a private tutor. He also found work as a journalist and was published in the local newspaper. His writing during that time reflected his growing antisemitism and dislike for modern culture. In the summer of 1922, he met and began a love affair with Else Janke, a schoolteacher. After she revealed to him that she was half-Jewish, Goebbels stated the \"enchantment [was] ruined.\" Nevertheless, he continued to see her on and off until 1927.",
"title": "Early life, education, and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "He continued for several years to try to become a published author. His diaries, which he began in 1923 and continued for the rest of his life, provided an outlet for his desire to write. The lack of income from his literary works (he wrote two plays in 1923, neither of which sold) forced him to take employment as a caller on the stock exchange and as a bank clerk in Cologne, a job he detested. He was dismissed from the bank in August 1923 and returned to Rheydt. During this period, he read avidly and was influenced by the works of Oswald Spengler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British-born German writer whose book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) was one of the standard works of the extreme right in Germany. He also began to study the \"social question\" and read the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, August Bebel and Gustav Noske. According to German historian Peter Longerich, Goebbels's diary entries from late 1923 to early 1924 reflected the writings of a man who was isolated, preoccupied with \"religious-philosophical\" issues, and lacked a sense of direction. Diary entries of mid-December 1923 forward show Goebbels was moving towards the Völkisch nationalist movement.",
"title": "Early life, education, and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Goebbels first took an interest in Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1924. In February 1924, Hitler's trial for treason began in the wake of his failed attempt to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch of 8–9 November 1923. The trial attracted widespread press coverage and gave Hitler a platform for propaganda. Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, but was released on 20 December 1924, after serving just over a year. Goebbels was drawn to the Nazi Party mostly because of Hitler's charisma and commitment to his beliefs. He joined the Nazi Party around this time, becoming member number 8762. In late 1924, Goebbels offered his services to Karl Kaufmann, who was Gauleiter (Nazi Party district leader) for the Rhine-Ruhr District. Kaufmann put him in touch with Gregor Strasser, a leading Nazi organiser in northern Germany, who hired him to work on their weekly newspaper and undertake secretarial work for the regional party offices. He was also put to work as party speaker and representative for Rhineland-Westphalia. Strasser founded the National Socialist Working Association on 10 September 1925, a short-lived group of about a dozen northern and western German Gauleiter; Goebbels became its business manager and the editor of its biweekly journal, NS-Briefe. Members of Strasser's northern branch of the Nazi Party, including Goebbels, had a more socialist outlook than the rival Hitler group in Munich. Strasser disagreed with Hitler on many parts of the party platform, and in November 1926 began working on a revision.",
"title": "Nazi activist"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Hitler viewed Strasser's actions as a threat to his authority, and summoned 60 Gauleiters and party leaders, including Goebbels, to a special conference in Bamberg, in Streicher's Gau of Franconia, where he gave a two-hour speech repudiating Strasser's new political programme. Hitler was opposed to the socialist leanings of the northern wing, stating it would mean \"political bolshevization of Germany.\" Further, there would be \"no princes, only Germans,\" and a legal system with no \"Jewish system of exploitation ... for plundering of our people.\" The future would be secured by acquiring land, not through expropriation of the estates of the former nobility, but through colonising territories to the east. Goebbels was horrified by Hitler's characterisation of socialism as \"a Jewish creation\" and his assertion that a Nazi government would not expropriate private property. He wrote in his diary: \"I no longer fully believe in Hitler. That's the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken away.\"",
"title": "Nazi activist"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "After reading Hitler's book Mein Kampf, Goebbels found himself agreeing with Hitler's assertion of a \"Jewish doctrine of Marxism\". In February 1926, Goebbels gave a speech titled \"Lenin or Hitler?\" in which he asserted that communism or Marxism could not save the German people, but he believed it would cause a \"socialist nationalist state\" to arise in Russia. In 1926, Goebbels published a pamphlet titled Nazi-Sozi which attempted to explain how National Socialism differed from Marxism.",
"title": "Nazi activist"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In hopes of winning over the opposition, Hitler arranged meetings in Munich with the three Greater Ruhr Gau leaders, including Goebbels. Goebbels was impressed when Hitler sent his own car to meet them at the railway station. That evening, Hitler and Goebbels both gave speeches at a beer hall rally. The following day, Hitler offered his hand in reconciliation to the three men, encouraging them to put their differences behind them. Goebbels capitulated completely, offering Hitler his total loyalty. He wrote in his diary: \"I love him ... He has thought through everything,\" \"Such a sparkling mind can be my leader. I bow to the greater one, the political genius.\" He later wrote: \"Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius.\" As a result of the Bamberg and Munich meetings, the National Socialist Working Association was disbanded. Strasser's new draft of the party programme was discarded, the original National Socialist Program of 1920 was retained unchanged, and Hitler's position as party leader was greatly strengthened.",
"title": "Nazi activist"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "At Hitler's invitation, Goebbels spoke at party meetings in Munich and at the annual Party Congress, held in Weimar in 1926. For the following year's event, Goebbels was involved in the planning for the first time. He and Hitler arranged for the rally to be filmed. Receiving praise for doing well at these events led Goebbels to shape his political ideas to match Hitler's, and to admire and idolise him even more.",
"title": "Propagandist in Berlin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Goebbels was first offered the position of party Gauleiter for the Berlin section in August 1926. He travelled to Berlin in mid-September and by the middle of October accepted the position. Thus Hitler's plan to divide and dissolve the northwestern Gauleiters group that Goebbels had served in under Strasser was successful. Hitler gave Goebbels great authority over the area, allowing him to determine the course for organisation and leadership for the Gau. Goebbels was given control over the local Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) and answered only to Hitler. The party membership numbered about 1,000 when Goebbels arrived, and he reduced it to a core of 600 of the most active and promising members. To raise money, he instituted membership fees and began charging admission to party meetings. Aware of the value of publicity (both positive and negative), he deliberately provoked beer-hall battles and street brawls, including violent attacks on the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Goebbels adapted recent developments in commercial advertising to the political sphere, including the use of catchy slogans and subliminal cues. His new ideas for poster design included using large type, red ink, and cryptic headers that encouraged the reader to examine the fine print to determine the meaning.",
"title": "Propagandist in Berlin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Like Hitler, Goebbels practised his public speaking skills in front of a mirror. Meetings were preceded by ceremonial marches and singing, and the venues were decorated with party banners. His entrance (almost always late) was timed for maximum emotional impact. Goebbels usually meticulously planned his speeches ahead of time, using pre-planned and choreographed inflection and gestures, but he was also able to improvise and adapt his presentation to make a good connection with his audience. He used loudspeakers, decorative flames, uniforms, and marches to attract attention to speeches.",
"title": "Propagandist in Berlin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Goebbels' tactic of using provocation to bring attention to the Nazi Party, along with violence at the public party meetings and demonstrations, led the Berlin police to ban the Nazi Party from the city on 5 May 1927. Violent incidents continued, including young Nazis randomly attacking Jews in the streets. Goebbels was subjected to a public speaking ban until the end of October. During this period, he founded the newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack) as a propaganda vehicle for the Berlin area, where few supported the party. It was a modern-style newspaper with an aggressive tone; 126 libel suits were pending against Goebbels at one point. To his disappointment, circulation was initially only 2,000. Material in the paper was highly anti-communist and antisemitic. Among the paper's favourite targets was the Jewish Deputy Chief of the Berlin Police Bernhard Weiß. Goebbels gave him the derogatory nickname \"Isidore\" and subjected him to a relentless campaign of Jew-baiting in the hope of provoking a crackdown he could then exploit. Goebbels continued to try to break into the literary world, with a revised version of his book Michael finally being published, and the unsuccessful production of two of his plays (Der Wanderer and Die Saat (The Seed)). The latter was his final attempt at playwriting. During this period in Berlin he had relationships with many women, including his old flame Anka Stalherm, who was now married and had a small child. He was quick to fall in love, but easily tired of a relationship and moved on to someone new. He worried too about how a committed personal relationship might interfere with his career.",
"title": "Propagandist in Berlin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The ban on the Nazi Party was lifted before the Reichstag elections on 20 May 1928. The Nazi Party lost nearly 100,000 voters and earned only 2.6 per cent of the vote nationwide. Results in Berlin were even worse, where they attained only 1.4 per cent of the vote. Goebbels was one of the first 12 Nazi Party members to gain election to the Reichstag. This gave him immunity from prosecution for a long list of outstanding charges, including a three-week jail sentence he received in April for insulting the deputy police chief Weiß. The Reichstag changed the immunity regulations in February 1931, and Goebbels was forced to pay fines for libellous material he had placed in Der Angriff over the course of the previous year. Goebbels continued to be elected to the Reichstag at every subsequent election during the Weimar and Nazi regimes.",
"title": "Propagandist in Berlin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In his newspaper Berliner Arbeiterzeitung (Berlin Workers Newspaper), Gregor Strasser was highly critical of Goebbels' failure to attract the urban vote. However, the party as a whole did much better in rural areas, attracting as much as 18 per cent of the vote in some regions. This was partly because Hitler had publicly stated just prior to the election that Point 17 of the party programme, which mandated the expropriation of land without compensation, would apply only to Jewish speculators and not private landholders. After the election, the party refocused their efforts to try to attract still more votes in the agricultural sector. In May, shortly after the election, Hitler considered appointing Goebbels as party propaganda chief. But he hesitated, as he worried that the removal of Gregor Strasser from the post would lead to a split in the party. Goebbels considered himself well suited to the position, and began to formulate ideas about how propaganda could be used in schools and the media.",
"title": "Propagandist in Berlin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "By 1930 Berlin was the party's second-strongest base of support after Munich. That year the violence between the Nazis and communists led to local SA troop leader Horst Wessel being shot by two members of the KPD. He later died in hospital. Exploiting Wessel's death, Goebbels turned him into a martyr for the Nazi movement. He officially declared Wessel's march Die Fahne hoch (Raise the flag), renamed as the Horst-Wessel-Lied, to be the Nazi Party anthem.",
"title": "Propagandist in Berlin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Great Depression greatly impacted Germany and by 1930 there was a dramatic increase in unemployment. During this time, the Strasser brothers started publishing a new daily newspaper in Berlin, the Nationaler Sozialist. Like their other publications, it conveyed the brothers' own brand of Nazism, including nationalism, anti-capitalism, social reform, and anti-Westernism. Goebbels complained vehemently about the rival Strasser newspapers to Hitler, and admitted that their success was causing his own Berlin newspapers to be \"pushed to the wall\". In late April 1930, Hitler publicly and firmly announced his opposition to Gregor Strasser and appointed Goebbels to replace him as Reich leader of Nazi Party propaganda. One of Goebbels' first acts was to ban the evening edition of the Nationaler Sozialist. Goebbels was also given control of other Nazi papers across the country, including the party's national newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (People's Observer). He still had to wait until 3 July for Otto Strasser and his supporters to announce they were leaving the Nazi Party. Upon receiving the news, Goebbels was relieved the \"crisis\" with the Strassers was finally over and glad that Otto Strasser had lost all power.",
"title": "Propagandist in Berlin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The rapid deterioration of the economy led to the resignation on 27 March 1930 of the coalition government that had been elected in 1928. Paul von Hindenburg appointed Heinrich Brüning as chancellor. A new cabinet was formed, and Hindenburg used his power as president to govern via emergency decrees. Goebbels took charge of the Nazi Party's national campaign for Reichstag elections called for 14 September 1930. Campaigning was undertaken on a huge scale, with thousands of meetings and speeches held all over the country. Hitler's speeches focused on blaming the country's economic woes on the Weimar Republic, particularly its adherence to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which required war reparations that had proven devastating to the German economy. He proposed a new German society based on race and national unity. The resulting success took even Hitler and Goebbels by surprise: the party received 6.5 million votes nationwide and took 107 seats in the Reichstag, making it the second largest party in the country.",
"title": "Propagandist in Berlin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In late 1930 Goebbels met Magda Quandt, a divorcée who had joined the party a few months earlier. She worked as a volunteer in the party offices in Berlin, helping Goebbels organise his private papers. Her flat on Reichskanzlerplatz soon became a favourite meeting place for Hitler and other Nazi Party officials. Goebbels and Quandt married on 19 December 1931 at a Protestant church. Hitler was his best man.",
"title": "Propagandist in Berlin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "For two further elections held in 1932, Goebbels organised massive campaigns that included rallies, parades, speeches, and Hitler travelling around the country by aeroplane with the slogan \"the Führer over Germany\". Goebbels wrote in his diary that the Nazis must gain power and exterminate Marxism. He undertook numerous speaking tours during these election campaigns and had some of their speeches published on gramophone records and as pamphlets. Goebbels was also involved in the production of a small collection of silent films that could be shown at party meetings, though they did not yet have enough equipment to widely use this medium. Many of Goebbels' campaign posters used violent imagery such as a giant half-clad male destroying political opponents or other perceived enemies such as \"International High Finance\". His propaganda characterised the opposition as \"November criminals\", \"Jewish wire-pullers\", or a communist threat.",
"title": "Propagandist in Berlin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Support for the party continued to grow, but neither of these elections led to a majority government. In an effort to stabilise the country and improve economic conditions, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reich chancellor on 30 January 1933.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "To celebrate Hitler's appointment as chancellor, Goebbels organised a torchlight parade in Berlin on the night of 30 January of an estimated 60,000 men, many in the uniforms of the SA and SS. The spectacle was covered by a live state radio broadcast, with commentary by longtime party member and future Minister of Aviation Hermann Göring. Goebbels was disappointed not to be given a post in Hitler's new cabinet. Bernhard Rust was appointed as Minister of Culture, the post that Goebbels was expecting to receive. Like other Nazi Party officials, Goebbels had to deal with Hitler's leadership style of giving contradictory orders to his subordinates, while placing them into positions where their duties and responsibilities overlapped. In this way, Hitler fostered distrust, competition, and infighting among his subordinates to consolidate and maximise his own power. The Nazi Party took advantage of the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933, with Hindenburg passing the Reichstag Fire Decree the following day at Hitler's urging. This was the first of several pieces of legislation that dismantled democracy in Germany and put a totalitarian dictatorship—headed by Hitler—in its place. On 5 March, yet another Reichstag election took place, the last to be held before the defeat of the Nazis at the end of the Second World War. While the Nazi Party increased their number of seats and percentage of the vote, it was not the landslide expected by the party leadership. Goebbels finally received Hitler's appointment to the cabinet, officially becoming head of the newly created Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on 14 March.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The role of the new ministry, which set up its offices in the 18th-century Ordenspalais across from the Reich Chancellery, was to centralise Nazi control of all aspects of German cultural and intellectual life. Goebbels hoped to increase popular support of the party from the 37 per cent achieved at the last free election held in Germany on 25 March 1933 to 100 per cent support. An unstated goal was to present to other nations the impression that the Nazi Party had the full and enthusiastic backing of the entire population. One of Goebbels' first productions was staging the Day of Potsdam, a ceremonial passing of power from Hindenburg to Hitler, held in Potsdam on 21 March. He composed the text of Hitler's decree authorising the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, held on 1 April. Later that month, Goebbels travelled back to Rheydt, where he was given a triumphal reception. The townsfolk lined the main street, which had been renamed in his honour. On the following day, Goebbels was declared a local hero.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Goebbels converted the 1 May holiday from a celebration of workers' rights (observed as such especially by the communists) into a day celebrating the Nazi Party. In place of the usual ad hoc labour celebrations, he organised a huge party rally held at Tempelhof Field in Berlin. The following day, all trade union offices in the country were forcibly disbanded by the SA and SS, and the Nazi-run German Labour Front was created to take their place. \"We are the masters of Germany,\" he commented in his diary entry of 3 May. Less than two weeks later, he gave a speech at the Nazi book burning in Berlin on 10 May, a ceremony he suggested.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Meanwhile, the Nazi Party began passing laws to marginalise Jews and remove them from German society. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933, forced all non-Aryans to retire from the legal profession and civil service. Similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of their right to practise. The first Nazi concentration camps (initially created to house political dissenters) were founded shortly after Hitler seized power. In a process termed Gleichschaltung (co-ordination), the Nazi Party proceeded to rapidly bring all aspects of life under control of the party. All civilian organisations, including agricultural groups, volunteer organisations, and sports clubs, had their leadership replaced with Nazi sympathisers or party members. By June 1933, virtually the only organisations not in the control of the Nazi Party were the army and the churches. On 2 June 1933, Hitler appointed Goebbels a Reichsleiter, the second highest political rank in the Nazi Party. On 3 October 1933, on the formation of the Academy for German Law, Goebbels was made a member and given a seat on its executive committee. In a move to manipulate Germany's middle class and shape popular opinion, the regime passed on 4 October 1933 the Schriftleitergesetz (Editor's Law), which became the cornerstone of the Nazi Party's control of the popular press. Modelled to some extent on the system in Benito Mussolini's Italy, the law defined a Schriftleiter as anyone who wrote, edited, or selected texts and/or illustrated material for serial publication. Individuals selected for this position were chosen based on experiential, educational, and racial criteria. The law required journalists to \"regulate their work in accordance with National Socialism as a philosophy of life and as a conception of government.\"",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 1934, Goebbels published Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei (\"From the Kaiserhof to the Reich Chancellery\"), his account of Hitler's seizure of power, which he based on his diary from 1 January 1932 to 1 May 1933. The book sought to glorify both Hitler and the author. It sold around 660,000 copies, making it Goebbels's best-selling publication during his lifetime.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "At the end of June 1934, top officials of the SA and opponents of the regime, including Gregor Strasser, were arrested and killed in a purge later called the Night of Long Knives. Goebbels was present at the arrest of SA leader Ernst Röhm in Munich. On 2 August 1934, President von Hindenburg died. In a radio broadcast, Goebbels announced that the offices of president and chancellor had been combined, and Hitler had been formally named as Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor).",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The propaganda ministry was organised into seven departments: administration and legal; mass rallies, public health, youth, and race; radio; national and foreign press; films and film censorship; art, music, and theatre; and protection against counter-propaganda, both foreign and domestic. Goebbels's style of leadership was tempestuous and unpredictable. He would suddenly change direction and shift his support between senior associates; he was a difficult boss and liked to berate his staff in public. Goebbels was successful at his job, however; Life wrote in 1938 that \"[p]ersonally he likes nobody, is liked by nobody, and runs the most efficient Nazi department.\" John Gunther wrote in 1940 that Goebbels \"is the cleverest of all the Nazis\", but could not succeed Hitler because \"everybody hates him\".",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Reich Film Chamber, which all members of the film industry were required to join, was created in June 1933. Goebbels promoted the development of films with a Nazi slant, and ones that contained subliminal or overt propaganda messages. Under the auspices of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), created in September, Goebbels added additional sub-chambers for the fields of broadcasting, fine arts, literature, music, the press, and the theatre. As in the film industry, anyone wishing to pursue a career in these fields had to be a member of the corresponding chamber. In this way anyone whose views were contrary to the regime could be excluded from working in their chosen field and thus silenced. In addition, journalists (now considered employees of the state) were required to prove Aryan descent back to the year 1800, and if married, the same requirement applied to the spouse. Members of any chamber were not allowed to leave the country for their work without prior permission of their chamber. A committee was established to censor books, and works could not be re-published unless they were on the list of approved works. Similar regulations applied to other fine arts and entertainment; even cabaret performances were censored. Many German artists and intellectuals left Germany in the pre-war years rather than work under these restrictions.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Goebbels was particularly interested in controlling the radio, which was then still a fairly new mass medium. Sometimes under protest from individual states (particularly Prussia, headed by Göring), Goebbels gained control of radio stations nationwide, and placed them under the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (German National Broadcasting Corporation) in July 1934. Manufacturers were urged by Goebbels to produce inexpensive home receivers, called Volksempfänger (people's receiver), and by 1938 nearly ten million sets had been sold. Loudspeakers were placed in public areas, factories, and schools, so that important party broadcasts would be heard live by nearly all Germans. On 2 September 1939 (the day after the start of the war), Goebbels and the Council of Ministers proclaimed it illegal to listen to foreign radio stations. Disseminating news from foreign broadcasts could result in the death penalty. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and later Minister for Armaments and War Production, later said the regime \"made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought.\"",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "A major focus of Nazi propaganda was Hitler himself, who was glorified as a heroic and infallible leader and became the focus of a cult of personality. Much of this was spontaneous, but some was stage-managed as part of Goebbels' propaganda work. Adulation of Hitler was the focus of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, where his moves were carefully choreographed. The rally was the subject of the film Triumph of the Will, one of several Nazi propaganda films directed by Leni Riefenstahl. It won the gold medal at the 1935 Venice Film Festival. At the 1935 Nazi party congress rally at Nuremberg, Goebbels declared that \"Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself.\"",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Goebbels was involved in planning the staging of the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin. It was around this time that he met and started having an affair with the actress Lída Baarová, whom he continued to see until 1938. A major project in 1937 was the Degenerate Art Exhibition, organised by Goebbels, which ran in Munich from July to November. The exhibition proved wildly popular, attracting over two million visitors. A degenerate music exhibition took place the following year. Meanwhile, Goebbels was disappointed by the lack of quality in the National Socialist artwork, films, and literature.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In 1933, Hitler signed the Reichskonkordat (Reich Concordat), a treaty with the Vatican that required the regime to honour the independence of Catholic institutions and prohibited clergy from involvement in politics. However, the regime continued to target the Christian churches to weaken their influence. Throughout 1935 and 1936, hundreds of clergy and nuns were arrested, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or sexual offences. Goebbels widely publicised the trials in his propaganda campaigns, showing the cases in the worst possible light. Restrictions were placed on public meetings, and Catholic publications faced censorship. Catholic schools were required to reduce religious instruction and crucifixes were removed from state buildings. Hitler often vacillated on whether or not the Kirchenkampf (church struggle) should be a priority, but his frequent inflammatory comments on the issue were enough to convince Goebbels to intensify his work on the issue; in February 1937 he stated he wanted to eliminate the Protestant church.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In response to the persecution, Pope Pius XI had the \"Mit brennender Sorge\" (\"With Burning Concern\") Encyclical smuggled into Germany for Passion Sunday 1937 and read from every pulpit. It denounced the systematic hostility of the regime toward the church. In response, Goebbels renewed the regime's crackdown and propaganda against Catholics. His speech of 28 May in Berlin in front of 20,000 party members, which was also broadcast on the radio, attacked the Catholic church as morally corrupt. As a result of the propaganda campaign, enrolment in denominational schools dropped sharply, and by 1939 all such schools were disbanded or converted to public facilities. Harassment and threats of imprisonment led the clergy to be much more cautious in their criticism of the regime. Partly out of foreign policy concerns, Hitler ordered a scaling back of the church struggle by the end of July 1937.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Goebbels was antisemitic from a young age. After joining the Nazi Party and meeting Hitler, his antisemitism grew and became more radical. He began to see the Jews as a destructive force with a negative impact on German society. In 1930, he criticised Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini for his relative lack of hostility towards Jews, stating that \"Mussolini appears to have not recognized the Jewish question.\" After the Nazis seized control, he repeatedly urged Hitler to take action against the Jews. Despite his extreme antisemitism, Goebbels spoke of the \"rubbish of race-materialism\" and of the unnecessity of biological racism for the Nazi ideology. He also described Himmler's ideology as \"in many regards, mad\" and thought Alfred Rosenberg's theories were ridiculous.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The Nazi Party's goal was to remove Jews from German cultural and economic life, and eventually to remove them from the country altogether. In addition to his propaganda efforts, Goebbels actively promoted the persecution of the Jews through pogroms, legislation, and other actions. Discriminatory measures he instituted in Berlin in the early years of the regime included bans against their using public transport and requiring that Jewish shops be marked as such.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In November 1938, the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath was killed in Paris by the young Jewish man Herschel Grynszpan. In response, Goebbels arranged for inflammatory antisemitic material to be released by the press, and the result was the start of a pogrom. Jews were attacked and synagogues destroyed all over Germany. The situation was further inflamed by a speech Goebbels gave at a party meeting on the night of 8 November, where he obliquely called for party members to incite further violence against Jews while making it appear to be a spontaneous series of acts by the German people. At least a hundred Jews were killed, several hundred synagogues were damaged or destroyed, and thousands of Jewish shops were vandalised in an event called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). Around 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. The destruction stopped after a conference held on 12 November, where Göring pointed out that the destruction of Jewish property was in effect the destruction of German property since the intention was that it would all eventually be confiscated.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Goebbels continued his intensive antisemitic propaganda campaign that culminated in Hitler's 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech, which Goebbels helped to write:",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "If international finance Jewry in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "While Goebbels had been pressing for expulsion of the Berlin Jews since 1935, there were still 62,000 living in the city in 1940. Part of the delay in their deportation was that they were needed as workers in the armaments industry. Deportations of German Jews began in October 1941, with the first transport from Berlin leaving on 18 October. Some Jews were shot immediately on arrival in destinations such as Riga and Kaunas. In preparation for the deportations, Goebbels ordered that all German Jews wear an identifying yellow badge as of 5 September 1941. On 6 March 1942, Goebbels received a copy of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, which indicated indirectly that the Jewish population of Europe was to be sent to extermination camps in occupied areas of Poland and killed. His diary entries of the period show that he was well aware of the fate of the Jews. \"In general, it can probably be established that 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated, while only 40 per cent can be put to work. ... A judgment is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric but thoroughly deserved,\" he wrote on 27 March 1942.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Goebbels had frequent discussions with Hitler about the fate of the Jews, a subject they discussed almost every time they met. He was aware throughout that the Jews were being exterminated, and completely supported this decision. He was one of the few top Nazi officials to do so publicly.",
"title": "Role in Hitler’s government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "As early as February 1933, Hitler announced that rearmament must be undertaken, albeit clandestinely at first, as to do so was in violation of the Versailles Treaty. A year later he told his military leaders that 1942 was the target date for going to war in the east. Goebbels was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Hitler aggressively pursuing Germany's expansionist policies sooner rather than later. At the time of the Reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, Goebbels summed up his general attitude in his diary: \"[N]ow is the time for action. Fortune favors the brave! He who dares nothing wins nothing.\" In the lead-up to the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, Goebbels took the initiative time and again to use propaganda to whip up sympathy for the Sudeten Germans while campaigning against the Czech government. Still, Goebbels was well aware there was a growing \"war panic\" in Germany and so by July had the press conduct propaganda efforts at a lower level of intensity. After the western powers acceded to Hitler's demands concerning Czechoslovakia in 1938, Goebbels soon redirected his propaganda machine against Poland. From May onwards, he orchestrated a campaign against Poland, fabricating stories about atrocities against ethnic Germans in Danzig and other cities. Even so, he was unable to persuade the majority of Germans to welcome the prospect of war. He privately held doubts about the wisdom of risking a protracted war against Britain and France by attacking Poland.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "After the Invasion of Poland in September 1939, Goebbels used his propaganda ministry and the Reich chambers to control access to information domestically. To his chagrin, his rival Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, continually challenged Goebbels' jurisdiction over the dissemination of international propaganda. Hitler declined to make a firm ruling on the subject, so the two men remained rivals for the remainder of the Nazi era. Goebbels did not participate in the military decision-making process, nor was he made privy to diplomatic negotiations until after the fact.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Propaganda Ministry took over the broadcasting facilities of conquered countries immediately after surrender, and began broadcasting prepared material using the existing announcers as a way to gain the trust of the citizens. Most aspects of the media, both domestically and in the conquered countries, were controlled by Goebbels and his department. The German Home Service, the Armed Forces Programme, and the German European Service were all rigorously controlled in everything from the information they were permitted to disseminate to the music they were allowed to play. Party rallies, speeches, and demonstrations continued; speeches were broadcast on the radio and short propaganda films were exhibited using 1,500 mobile film vans. Hitler made fewer public appearances and broadcasts as the war progressed, so Goebbels increasingly became the voice of the Nazi regime for the German people. From May 1940 he wrote frequent editorials that were published in Das Reich which were later read aloud over the radio. He found films to be his most effective propaganda medium, after radio. At his insistence, initially half the films made in wartime Germany were propaganda films (particularly on antisemitism) and war propaganda films (recounting both historical wars and current exploits of the Wehrmacht).",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Goebbels became preoccupied with morale and the efforts of the people on the home front. He believed that the more the people at home were involved in the war effort, the better their morale would be. For example, he initiated a programme for the collection of winter clothing and ski equipment for troops on the eastern front. At the same time, Goebbels implemented changes to have more \"entertaining material\" in radio and film produced for the public, decreeing in late 1942 that 20 per cent of the films should be propaganda and 80 per cent light entertainment. As Gauleiter of Berlin, Goebbels dealt with increasingly serious shortages of necessities such as food and clothing, as well as the need to ration beer and tobacco, which were important for morale. Hitler suggested watering the beer and degrading the quality of the cigarettes so that more could be produced, but Goebbels refused, saying the cigarettes were already of such low quality that it was impossible to make them any worse. Through his propaganda campaigns, he worked hard to maintain an appropriate level of morale among the public about the military situation, neither too optimistic nor too grim. The series of military setbacks the Germans suffered in this period – the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne (May 1942), the Allied victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein (November 1942), and especially the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad (February 1943) – were difficult matters to present to the German public, who were increasingly weary of the war and sceptical that it could be won. On 16 November 1942 Goebbels, like all Gauleiters, was appointed the Reich Defense Commissioner for his Gau. This enabled him to issue direct instructions to authorities within his jurisdiction in matters concerning the civilian war effort. On 15 January 1943, Hitler appointed Goebbels as head of the newly created Air Raid Damage committee, which meant Goebbels was nominally in charge of nationwide civil air defences and shelters as well as the assessment and repair of damaged buildings. In actuality, the defence of areas other than Berlin remained in the hands of the local Gauleiters, and his main tasks were limited to providing immediate aid to the affected civilians and using propaganda to improve their morale.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "By early 1943, the war produced a labour crisis for the regime. Hitler created a three-man committee with representatives of the State, the army, and the Party in an attempt to centralise control of the war economy. The committee members were Hans Lammers (head of the Reich Chancellery), Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command; OKW), and Martin Bormann, who controlled the Party. The committee was intended to independently propose measures regardless of the wishes of various ministries, with Hitler reserving most final decisions to himself. The committee, soon known as the Dreierausschuß (Committee of Three), met eleven times between January and August 1943. However, they ran up against resistance from Hitler's cabinet ministers, who headed deeply entrenched spheres of influence and were excluded from the committee. Seeing it as a threat to their power, Goebbels, Göring, and Speer worked together to bring it down. The result was that nothing changed, and the Committee of Three declined into irrelevance by September 1943.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Partly in response to being excluded from the Committee of Three, Goebbels pressured Hitler to introduce measures that would produce \"total war\", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Some of these measures were implemented in an edict of 13 January, but to Goebbels' dismay, Göring demanded that his favourite restaurants in Berlin should remain open, and Lammers successfully lobbied Hitler to have women with children exempted from conscription, even if they had child care available. After receiving an enthusiastic response to his speech of 30 January 1943 on the topic, Goebbels believed he had the support of the German people in his call for total war. His next speech, the Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943, was a passionate demand for his audience to commit to total war, which he presented as the only way to stop the Bolshevik onslaught and save the German people from destruction. The speech also had a strong antisemitic element and hinted at the extermination of the Jewish people that was already underway. The speech was presented live on radio and was filmed as well. During the live version of the speech, Goebbels accidentally begins to mention the \"extermination\" of the Jews; this is omitted in the published text of the speech.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Goebbels' efforts had little impact for the time being, because Hitler, who in principle was in favour of total war, was not prepared to implement changes over the objections of his ministers. The discovery around this time of a mass grave of Polish officers that had been killed by the Red Army in the 1940 Katyn massacre was made use of by Goebbels in his propaganda in an attempt to drive a wedge between the Soviets and the other western allies.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "After the Allied invasion of Sicily (July 1943) and the strategic Soviet victory in the Battle of Kursk (July–August 1943), Goebbels began to recognise that the war could no longer be won. Following the Allied invasion of Italy and the fall of Mussolini in September, he raised with Hitler the possibility of a separate peace, either with the Soviets or with Britain. Hitler rejected both of these proposals.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "As Germany's military and economic situation grew steadily worse, on 25 August 1943 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler took over the post of interior minister, replacing Wilhelm Frick. Intensive air raids on Berlin and other cities took the lives of thousands of people. In December 1943, Hitler asked Goebbels to take on the job of Stadtpräsident (City President) of Berlin, and Goebbels agreed to this as a means of obtaining more direct control over the municipal authorities, though Hitler delayed the formal appointment for several months. Goebbels took over direct administrative control of the city when he was formally named Stadtpräsident on 7 April 1944, thus uniting under his control the city's most powerful party and governmental offices. As air raids on Berlin continued, Göring's Luftwaffe attempted to retaliate with air raids on London in early 1944, but they no longer had sufficient aircraft to make much of an impact. While Goebbels' propaganda in this period indicated that a huge retaliation was in the offing, the V-1 flying bombs, launched on British targets beginning in mid-June 1944, had little effect, with only around 20 per cent reaching their intended targets. To boost morale, Goebbels continued to publish propaganda to the effect that further improvements to these weapons would have a decisive impact on the outcome of the war. Meanwhile, in the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, the Allies successfully gained a foothold in France.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Throughout July 1944, Goebbels and Speer continued to press Hitler to bring the economy to a total war footing. The 20 July plot, where Hitler was almost killed by a bomb at his field headquarters in East Prussia, played into the hands of those who had been pushing for change: Bormann, Goebbels, Himmler, and Speer. Over the objections of Göring, Goebbels was appointed on 23 July as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War, charged with maximising the manpower for the Wehrmacht and the armaments industry at the expense of sectors of the economy not critical to the war effort. Through these efforts, he was able to free up an additional half a million men for military service. However, as many of these new recruits came from the armaments industry, the move put him in conflict with armaments minister Speer. Untrained workers from elsewhere were not readily absorbed into the armaments industry, and likewise, the new Wehrmacht recruits waited in barracks for their turn to be trained.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Hitler ordered a nationwide militia of men previously considered unsuitable for military service — the Volkssturm (People's Storm) — to be formed on 25 September 1944; it was launched on 18 October. In his capacity as Gauleiter and Reich Defense Commissioner, Goebbels was named Führer des Deutschen Volkssturms im Gau Groß-Berlin on 25 September 1944, and he administered the oath of allegiance to the assembled Berlin Volkssturm troops on 12 November. Goebbels recorded in his diary that 100,000 recruits were sworn in from his Gau alone. However, the men, mostly age 45 to 60, received only rudimentary training and many were not properly armed. Goebbels' notion that these men could effectively serve on the front lines against Soviet tanks and artillery was unrealistic at best. The programme was deeply unpopular.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Goebbels realised that his influence would diminish in wartime. He suffered a series of setbacks as propaganda became less important compared to warfare, the war economy, and the Allied bombing of German cities. Historian Michael Balfour states that from 1942 onward, Goebbels, \"lost control over Nazi policy toward the press and over the handling of news in general.\" Rival agencies expanded. The foreign ministry took charge of propaganda outside Germany. The military set up its own propaganda division, providing daily reports on the progress of the war and the conditions of the armed forces. The Nazi Party also generated and distributed its own propaganda during the war. Goebbels was still influential when he had the opportunity to meet with Hitler, who became less available as he moved his headquarters closer to the military front lines. They were together perhaps one day a month. Furthermore, Hitler rarely gave speeches or rallies of the sort that had dominated propaganda in the 1930s. After Hitler returned to Berlin in 1945, Goebbels' ministry was destroyed by an Allied air raid on 13 March, and Goebbels had great difficulty disseminating propaganda. In April 1945, he finally bested the rival agencies and took full charge of propaganda, but by then the Soviet Red Army had already entered Berlin. Goebbels was an astute observer of the war, and historians have exhaustively mined his diary for insights on how the Nazi leadership tried to maintain public morale.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In the last months of the war, Goebbels' speeches and articles took on an increasingly apocalyptic tone. By the beginning of 1945, with the Soviets on the Oder River and the Western Allies preparing to cross the Rhine River, he could no longer disguise the inevitability of German defeat. Berlin had little in the way of fortifications or artillery, and even Volkssturm units were in short supply, as almost everything and everyone had been sent to the front. Goebbels noted in his diary on 21 January that millions of Germans were fleeing westward. He tentatively discussed with Hitler the issue of making peace overtures to the western allies, but Hitler again refused. Privately, Goebbels was conflicted at pushing the case with Hitler since he did not want to lose Hitler's confidence.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "When other Nazi leaders urged Hitler to leave Berlin and establish a new centre of resistance in the National Redoubt in Bavaria, Goebbels opposed this, arguing for a heroic last stand in Berlin. His family (except for Magda's son Harald, who had served in the Luftwaffe and been captured by the Allies) moved into their house in Berlin to await the end. He and Magda may have discussed suicide and the fate of their young children in a long meeting on the night of 27 January. He knew how the outside world would view the criminal acts committed by the regime and had no desire to subject himself to the \"debacle\" of a trial. He burned his private papers on the night of 18 April.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Goebbels knew how to play on Hitler's fantasies, encouraging him to see the hand of providence in the death of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 12 April. Whether Hitler really saw this event as a turning point as Goebbels proclaimed is not known. By this time, Goebbels had gained the position he had wanted so long—at Hitler's side. Göring was utterly discredited, although he was not stripped of his offices until 23 April. Himmler, whose appointment as commander of Army Group Vistula had led to disaster on the Oder, was also in disgrace with Hitler. Most of Hitler's inner circle, including Göring, Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Speer, prepared to leave Berlin immediately after Hitler's birthday celebration on 20 April. Even Bormann was \"not anxious\" to meet his end at Hitler's side. On 22 April, Hitler announced that he would stay in Berlin until the end and then shoot himself. Goebbels moved with his family into the Vorbunker, connected to the lower Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery garden in central Berlin, that same day. He told Vice-Admiral Hans-Erich Voss that he would not entertain the idea of either surrender or escape. On 23 April, Goebbels made the following proclamation to the people of Berlin:",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "I call on you to fight for your city. Fight with everything you have got, for the sake of your wives and your children, your mothers and your parents. Your arms are defending everything we have ever held dear, and all the generations that will come after us. Be proud and courageous! Be inventive and cunning! Your Gauleiter is amongst you. He and his colleagues will remain in your midst. His wife and children are here as well. He, who once captured the city with 200 men, will now use every means to galvanize the defence of the capital. The battle for Berlin must become the signal for the whole nation to rise up in battle.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "After midnight on 29 April, with the Soviets advancing ever closer to the bunker complex, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in the Führerbunker. Afterward, he hosted a modest wedding breakfast. Hitler then took secretary Traudl Junge to another room and dictated his last will and testament. Goebbels and Bormann were two of the witnesses.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In his last will and testament, Hitler named no successor as Führer or leader of the Nazi Party. Instead, he appointed Goebbels as Reich Chancellor; Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was at Flensburg near the Danish border, as Reich President; and Bormann as Party Minister. Goebbels wrote a postscript to the will stating that he would \"categorically refuse\" to obey Hitler's order to leave Berlin—as he put it, \"the first time in my life\" that he had not complied with Hitler's orders. He felt compelled to remain with Hitler \"for reasons of humanity and personal loyalty\". His wife and children would stay as well. They would end their lives \"side by side with the Führer\".",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In the mid-afternoon of 30 April, Adolf Hitler shot himself. Goebbels was depressed, and said he would walk around the Chancellery garden until he was killed by the Russian shelling. Voss later recounted Goebbels as saying: \"It is a great pity that such a man [Hitler] is not with us any longer. But there is nothing to be done. For us, everything is lost now and the only way out left for us is the one Hitler chose. I shall follow his example.\"",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "On 1 May, Goebbels carried out his sole official act as Chancellor: he dictated a letter to General Vasily Chuikov and ordered German General Hans Krebs to deliver it under a white flag. Chuikov, as commander of the Soviet 8th Guards Army, commanded the Soviet forces in central Berlin. Goebbels' letter informed Chuikov of Hitler's death and requested a ceasefire. After this was rejected, Goebbels decided that further efforts were futile.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Later on 1 May, Voss saw Goebbels for the last time: \"While saying goodbye I asked Goebbels to join us. But he replied: 'The captain must not leave his sinking ship. I have thought about it all and decided to stay here. I have nowhere to go because with little children I will not be able to make it, especially with a leg like mine'.\" On the evening of 1 May, Goebbels arranged for an SS dentist, Helmut Kunz, to inject his six children with morphine so that when they were unconscious, an ampule of a cyanide compound could be then crushed in each of their mouths. According to Kunz's later testimony, he gave the children morphine injections but Magda Goebbels and SS-Obersturmbannführer Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's personal doctor, administered the cyanide.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "At around 20:30, Goebbels and Magda left the bunker and walked up to the garden of the Chancellery, where they killed themselves. There are several different accounts of this event. One is that they each bit on a cyanide ampule near where Hitler had been buried and were given a coup de grâce immediately afterward. Goebbels' SS adjutant Günther Schwägermann testified in 1948 that they walked ahead of him up the stairs and out into the Chancellery garden. He waited in the stairwell and heard shots. Schwägermann then walked up the remaining stairs and, once outside, saw their lifeless bodies. Following Goebbels' prior order, Schwägermann had an SS soldier fire several shots into Goebbels' body, which did not move.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The corpses were then doused with petrol, but they were only partially burned and not buried. A few days later, the Soviets brought Voss back to the bunker to identify the Goebbelses' partly burned bodies. The remains of the Goebbels family, Krebs, and Hitler's dogs were repeatedly buried and exhumed. The last burial was at the SMERSH facility in Magdeburg on 21 February 1946. In 1970, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to destroy the remains. On 4 April 1970, a Soviet KGB team used detailed burial charts to exhume five wooden boxes at the Magdeburg SMERSH facility. They were burned, crushed, and scattered into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Hitler was very fond of Magda and the children. He enjoyed staying at the Goebbels' Berlin apartment, where he could relax. Magda had a close relationship with Hitler, and became a member of his small coterie of female friends. She also became an unofficial representative of the regime, receiving letters from all over Germany from women with questions about domestic matters or child custody issues.",
"title": "Family life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In 1936, Goebbels met the Czech actress Lída Baarová and by the winter of 1937 began an intense affair with her. Magda had a long conversation with Hitler about it on 15 August 1938. Unwilling to put up with a scandal involving one of his top ministers, Hitler demanded that Goebbels break off the relationship. Thereafter, Joseph and Magda seemed to reach a truce until the end of September. The couple had another falling out at that point, and again Hitler became involved, insisting the couple stay together. He arranged for publicity photos to be taken of himself with the reconciled couple in October. Goebbels also had short-term affairs and relationships with numerous other women. Magda too had affairs, including a relationship with Kurt Lüdecke in 1933 and Karl Hanke in 1938.",
"title": "Family life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The Goebbels family included Harald Quandt (Magda's son from her first marriage; b. 1921), plus Helga (b. 1932), Hilde (b. 1934), Helmut (b. 1935), Holde (b. 1937), Hedda (b. 1938), and Heide (b. 1940). Harald was the only member of the family to survive the war. He died in an aeroplane crash in 1967.",
"title": "Family life"
}
]
| Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German philologist and Nazi politician who was the Gauleiter of Berlin, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and most devoted followers, known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust. Goebbels, who aspired to be an author, obtained a doctorate in philology from the University of Heidelberg in 1921. He joined the Nazi Party in 1924, and worked with Gregor Strasser in its northern branch. He was appointed Gauleiter of Berlin in 1926, where he began to take an interest in the use of propaganda to promote the party and its programme. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry quickly gained and exerted control over the news media, arts, and information in Nazi Germany. He was particularly adept at using the relatively new media of radio and film for propaganda purposes. Topics for party propaganda included antisemitism, attacks on the Christian churches, and attempting to shape morale. In 1943, Goebbels began to pressure Hitler to introduce measures that would produce "total war", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Hitler finally appointed him as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War on 23 July 1944, whereby Goebbels undertook largely unsuccessful measures to increase the number of people available for armaments manufacture and the Wehrmacht. As the war drew to a close and Nazi Germany faced defeat, Magda Goebbels and the Goebbels children joined Hitler in Berlin. They moved into the underground Vorbunker, part of Hitler's underground bunker complex, on 22 April 1945. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April. In accordance with Hitler's will, Goebbels succeeded him as Chancellor of Germany; he served one day in this post. The following day, Goebbels and his wife Magda committed suicide, after having poisoned their six children with a cyanide compound. | 2001-05-21T21:45:26Z | 2023-12-30T22:00:42Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels |
15,780 | Coen brothers | Joel Daniel Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957), collectively known as the Coen brothers (/ˈkoʊən/ KOH-ən), are an American filmmaking duo. Their films span many genres and styles, which they frequently subvert or parody. Their most acclaimed works include Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), A Serious Man (2009), True Grit (2010) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Many of their films are distinctly American, often examining the culture of the American South and American West in both modern and historical contexts.
The brothers generally write, direct and produce their films jointly, although since The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), directed by Joel without Ethan's involvement, the duo started directing solo pieces, with the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022) serving as Ethan's first directing effort without Joel's involvement, followed by Drive-Away Dolls (2023). Until The Ladykillers (2004) Joel had received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing, or shared editing credits under an alias, Roderick and Reginald Jaynes. They have been nominated for 13 Academy Awards together, and individually for one award each, both won Best Original Screenplay for Fargo, and Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay for No Country for Old Men. The duo also won the Palme d'Or for Barton Fink in the 1991 Cannes Film Festival.
The Coens have written a number of films they did not direct, including Angelina Jolie's biographical war drama Unbroken (2014), Steven Spielberg's historical cold war film Bridge of Spies (2015), and lesser-known, commercially unsuccessful comedies such as Crimewave (1985), The Naked Man (1998), and Gambit (2012). Ethan is also a writer of short stories, theater, and poetry.
They are known for their distinctive stylistic trademarks including genre hybridity. No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis have been ranked in the BBC's 2016 poll of the greatest motion pictures since 2000. In 1998, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked Fargo among the 100 greatest American movies ever made.
Joel Daniel Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957) were born and raised in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their mother, Rena (née Neumann; 1925–2001), was an art historian at St. Cloud State University, and their father, Edward Coen (1919–2012), was a Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota. The brothers have an older sister, Deborah, who is a psychiatrist in Israel.
In regards to whether our background influences our film making ... who knows? We don't think about it ... There's no doubt that our Jewish heritage affects how we see things.
—Joel Coen, on the Coens' Jewish heritage.
Both sides of the Coen family were Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. Their paternal grandfather, Victor Coen, was a barrister in the Inns of Court in London before retiring to Hove with their grandmother. Edward Coen was an American citizen born in the United States, but grew up in Croydon, London and studied at the London School of Economics. Afterwards he moved to the United States, where he met the Coens' mother, and served in the United States Army during World War II.
The Coens developed an early interest in cinema through television. They grew up watching Italian films (ranging from the works of Federico Fellini to the Sons of Hercules films) aired on a Minneapolis station, the Tarzan films, and comedies (Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope and Doris Day).
In the mid-1960s, Joel saved money from mowing lawns to buy a Vivitar Super 8 camera. Together, the brothers remade movies they saw on television, with their neighborhood friend Mark Zimering ("Zeimers") as the star. Cornel Wilde's 1965 film The Naked Prey became their Zeimers in Zambezi, which featured Ethan as a native with a spear. The 1943 film Lassie Come Home was reinterpreted as their Ed... A Dog, with Ethan playing the mother role in his sister's tutu. They also made original films like Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go, Lumberjacks of the North and The Banana Film.
Joel and Ethan graduated from St. Louis Park High School in 1973 and 1976, respectively, and from Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
After Simon's Rock, Joel spent four years in the undergraduate film program at New York University, where he made a 30-minute thesis film called Soundings. In 1979, he briefly enrolled in the graduate film program at the University of Texas at Austin, following a woman he had married who was in the graduate linguistics program. The marriage soon ended in divorce and Joel left UT Austin after nine months.
Ethan went on to Princeton University and earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1979. His senior thesis was a 41-page essay, "Two Views of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy", which was supervised by Raymond Geuss.
Joel has been married to actress Frances McDormand since 1984. In 1995, they adopted a son, Pedro McDormand Coen, from Paraguay when he was six months old. McDormand has acted in several Coen Brothers films: Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Man Who Wasn't There, Burn After Reading, and Hail, Caesar! For her performance in Fargo, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Ethan married film editor Tricia Cooke in 1990. They have two children: daughter Dusty and son Buster Jacob.
Ethan Coen and family live in New York, while Joel Coen and Frances McDormand live in Marin County, California.
After graduating from New York University, Joel worked as a production assistant on a variety of industrial films and music videos. He developed a talent for film editing and met Sam Raimi while assisting Edna Ruth Paul in editing Raimi's first feature film, The Evil Dead (1981).
In 1984, the brothers wrote and directed Blood Simple, their first commercial film together. Set in Texas, the film tells the tale of a shifty, sleazy bar owner who hires a private detective to kill his wife and her lover. The film contains elements that point to their future direction: distinctive homages to genre movies (in this case noir and horror), plot twists layered over a simple story, dark humor, and mise-en-scène. The film starred Frances McDormand, who went on to feature in many of the Coen brothers' films (and marry Joel). Upon release the film received much praise and won awards for Joel's direction at both the Sundance and Independent Spirit awards.
Their next project was Crimewave (1985), directed by Sam Raimi and written by the Coens and Raimi. Joel and Raimi also made cameo appearances in Spies Like Us (1985).
The brothers' next film was Raising Arizona (1987), the story of an unlikely married couple: ex-convict H.I. (Nicolas Cage) and police officer Ed (Holly Hunter), who long for a baby but are unable to conceive. When a local furniture tycoon (Trey Wilson) appears on television with his newly born quintuplets and jokes that they "are more than we can handle", H.I. steals one of the quintuplets to bring up as their own. The film featured Frances McDormand, John Goodman, William Forsythe, Sam McMurray, and Randall "Tex" Cobb.
Miller's Crossing, released in 1990, starred Albert Finney, Gabriel Byrne, and John Turturro. The film is about feuding gangsters in the Prohibition era, inspired by Dashiell Hammett's novels Red Harvest (1929) and The Glass Key (serialized in 1930).
The following year, they released Barton Fink (1991); set in 1941, in which a New York playwright, the eponymous Barton Fink (played by John Turturro), moves to Los Angeles to write a B-movie. He settles down in his hotel room to commence writing but suffers writer's block until his room is invaded by the man next door (John Goodman). Barton Fink was a critical success, earning Oscar nominations and winning three major awards at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, including the Palme d'Or. It was their first film with cinematographer Roger Deakins, a key collaborator for the next 25 years.
The Hudsucker Proxy (co-written with Raimi) was released in 1994. In it, the board of a large corporation in 1958 New York City appoints a naive schmo as president (Tim Robbins) for underhanded reasons. The film bombed at the box office ($30 million budget, $3 million gross in the US), even though it featured Paul Newman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Frances McDormand appears in a brief uncredited role.
The Coens wrote and directed the crime thriller Fargo (1996), set in their home state of Minnesota. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), who has serious financial problems, has his wife kidnapped so that his wealthy father-in-law will pay the ransom. His plan goes wrong when the kidnappers deviate from the plan and local cop Marge Gunderson (McDormand) starts to investigate. Produced on a small budget of $7 million, Fargo was a critical and commercial success, with particular praise for its dialogue and McDormand's performance. The film received several awards, including a BAFTA award and Cannes award for direction, and two Oscars: a Best Original Screenplay and a Best Actress Oscar for McDormand.
In the Coens' next film, the black comedy The Big Lebowski (1998), "The Dude" (Jeff Bridges), a Los Angeles slacker, is used as an unwitting pawn in a kidnapping plot with his bowling buddies (Steve Buscemi and John Goodman). Despite initially receiving mixed reviews and underperforming at the box office, it is now well received by critics, and is regarded as a classic cult film. An annual festival, Lebowski Fest, began in 2002, and many adhere to the philosophy of "Dudeism". Entertainment Weekly ranked it 8th on their Funniest Movies of the Past 25 Years list in 2008.
Gates of Eden, a collection of short stories written by Ethan Coen, was published in 1998. The same year, Ethan co-wrote the comedy The Naked Man, directed by their storyboard artist J. Todd Anderson.
The Coen brothers' next film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), was another critical and commercial success. The title was borrowed from the Preston Sturges film Sullivan's Travels (1941), whose lead character, movie director John Sullivan, had planned to make a film with that title. Based loosely on Homer's Odyssey (complete with a Cyclops, sirens, et al.), the story is set in Mississippi in the 1930s and follows a trio of escaped convicts who, after absconding from a chain gang, journey home to recover bank-heist loot the leader has buried—but they have no clear perception of where they are going. The film highlighted the comic abilities of George Clooney as the oddball lead character Ulysses Everett McGill, and of Tim Blake Nelson and John Turturro, his sidekicks. The film's bluegrass and old-time soundtrack, offbeat humor and digitally desaturated cinematography made it a critical and commercial hit. It was the first feature film to use all-digital color grading. The film's soundtrack CD was also successful, spawning a concert and concert/documentary DVD, Down from the Mountain.
The Coens next produced another noirish thriller, The Man Who Wasn't There (2001).
The Coens directed the 2003 film Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, a throwback to the romantic comedies of the 1940s. It focuses on hotshot divorce lawyer Miles Massey and a beautiful divorcée whom Massey managed to prevent from receiving any money in her divorce. She vows to get even with him while, at the same time, he becomes smitten with her. Intolerable Cruelty received generally positive reviews, although it is considered one of the duo's weaker films. Also that year, they executive produced and did an uncredited rewrite of the Christmas black comedy Bad Santa, which garnered positive reviews.
In 2004, the Coens made The Ladykillers, a remake of the British classic by Ealing Studios. A professor, played by Tom Hanks, assembles a team to rob a casino. They rent a room in an elderly woman's home to plan the heist. When the woman discovers the plot, the gang decides to murder her to ensure her silence. The Coens received some of the most lukewarm reviews of their careers in response to this film.
They directed two short films for two separate anthology films—Paris, je t'aime (Tuileries, 2006) starring Steve Buscemi, and To Each His Own Cinema (World Cinema, 2007) starring Josh Brolin. Both films received highly positive reviews.
No Country for Old Men, released in November 2007, closely follows the 2005 novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), living near the Texas/Mexico border, stumbles upon, and decides to take, two million dollars in drug money. He must then go on the run to avoid those trying to recover the money, including sociopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who confounds both Llewelyn and local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). The plotline is a return to noir themes, but in some respects it was a departure for the Coens; with the exception of Stephen Root, none of the stable of regular actors appears in the film. No Country received nearly universal critical praise, garnering a 94% "Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes. It won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, all of which were received by the Coens, as well as Best Supporting Actor received by Bardem. The Coens, as "Roderick Jaynes", were also nominated for Best Editing, but lost. It was the first time since 1961 (when Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise won for West Side Story) that two directors received the Academy Award for Best Director at the same time.
In January 2008, Ethan Coen's play Almost an Evening premiered off-broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company Stage 2, opening to mostly enthusiastic reviews. The initial run closed on February 10, 2008, but the same production was moved to a new theatre for a commercial off-Broadway run at the Bleecker Street Theater in New York City. Produced by The Atlantic Theater Company, it ran there from March 2008 through June 1, 2008. and Art Meets Commerce. In May 2009, the Atlantic Theater Company produced Coen's Offices, as part of their mainstage season at the Linda Gross Theater.
Burn After Reading, a comedy starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney, was released September 12, 2008, and portrays a collision course between two gym instructors, spies and Internet dating. Released to positive reviews, it debuted at No. 1 in North America.
In 2009, the Coens directed a television commercial titled "Air Freshener" for the Reality Coalition.
They next directed A Serious Man, released October 2, 2009, a "gentle but dark" period comedy (set in 1967) with a low budget. The film is based loosely on the Coens' childhoods in an academic family in the largely Jewish suburb of Saint Louis Park, Minnesota; it also drew comparisons to the Book of Job. Filming took place late in the summer of 2008, in the neighborhoods of Roseville and Bloomington, Minnesota, at Normandale Community College, and at St. Olaf College. The film was nominated for the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
True Grit (2010) is based on the 1968 novel of the same name by Charles Portis. Filming was done in Texas and New Mexico. Hailee Steinfeld stars as Mattie Ross along with Jeff Bridges as Marshal Rooster Cogburn. Matt Damon and Josh Brolin also appear in the movie. True Grit was nominated for ten Academy Awards including Best Picture.
Ethan Coen wrote the one-act comedy Talking Cure, which was produced on Broadway in 2011 as part of Relatively Speaking, an anthology of three one-act plays by Coen, Elaine May, and Woody Allen.
In 2011, the Coen brothers won the $1 million Dan David Prize for their contribution to cinema and society.
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) is a treatise on the 1960s folk music scene in New York City's Greenwich Village, and very loosely based on the life of Dave Van Ronk. The film stars Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake, and Carey Mulligan. It won the Grand Prix at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where it was highly praised by critics. They received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Song for "Please Mr. Kennedy", which is heard in the film.
Fargo, a television series inspired by their film of the same name, premiered in April 2014 on the FX network. It is created by Noah Hawley and executive produced by the brothers.
The Coens also contributed to the screenplay for Unbroken, along with Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson. The film is directed by Angelina Jolie and based on Laura Hillenbrand's non-fiction book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010) which itself was based on the life of Louis Zamperini. It was released on December 25, 2014, to average reviews.
The Coens co-wrote, with playwright Matt Charman, the screenplay for the dramatic historical thriller Bridge of Spies, about the 1960 U-2 Incident. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and released on October 4, 2015, to critical acclaim. They were nominated for the Best Original Screenplay at the 88th Academy Awards.
The Coens directed the film Hail, Caesar!, about a "fixer" in 1950s Hollywood trying to discover what happened to a cast member who vanishes during filming. It stars Coen regulars George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johansson and Tilda Swinton, as well as Channing Tatum, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, and Alden Ehrenreich. The film was released on February 5, 2016.
In 2016, the Coens gave to their longtime friend and collaborator John Turturro the right to use his character of Jesus Quintana from The Big Lebowski in his own spin-off, The Jesus Rolls, which he would also write and direct. The Coens have no involvement in the production. In August 2016, the film began principal photography.
The Coens first wrote the script for Suburbicon in 1986. The film was eventually directed by George Clooney and began filming in October 2016. It was released by Paramount Pictures in the fall of 2017.
The Coens directed The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Western anthology starring Tim Blake Nelson, Liam Neeson, and James Franco. It began streaming on Netflix on November 16, 2018, after a brief theatrical run.
It was announced in March 2019 that Joel Coen would be directing an adaptation of Macbeth starring Denzel Washington. The film, titled The Tragedy of Macbeth, would be Joel's first directorial effort without his brother, who was taking a break from films to focus on theater. The film premiered at the 2021 New York Film Festival. In 2022, it was announced that Ethan Coen would be directing Drive-Away Dolls for Focus Features and Working Title. It would be Ethan's first directorial effort without his brother. The 2022 Cannes Film Festival had a special screening of Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, an archival documentary film directed solely by Ethan and edited by his wife Tricia Cooke.
The Coen brothers' own film production company, Mike Zoss Productions located in New York City, has been credited on their films from O Brother, Where Art Thou? onwards. It was named after Mike Zoss Drug, an independent pharmacy in St. Louis Park since 1950 that was the brothers' beloved hangout when they were growing up in the Twin Cities. The name was also used for the pharmacy in No Country for Old Men. The Mike Zoss logo consists of a crayon drawing of a horse, standing in a field of grass with its head turned around as it looks back over its hindquarters.
Up to 2003, Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing, due to guild rules that disallowed multiple director credits to prevent dilution of the position's significance. The only exception to this rule is if the co-directors are an "established duo". Since 2004 they have been able to share the director credit and the Coen brothers have become only the third duo to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director.
With four Academy Award nominations for No Country for Old Men for the duo (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing as Roderick Jaynes), the Coen brothers have tied the record for the most nominations by a single nominee (counting an "established duo" as one nominee) for the same film. Orson Welles set the record in 1941 with Citizen Kane being nominated for Best Picture (though at the time, individual producers were not named as nominees), Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay. Warren Beatty received the same nominations, first for Heaven Can Wait in 1978 and again in 1981 with Reds. Alan Menken also then achieved the same feat when he was nominated for Best Score and triple-nominated for Best Song for Beauty and the Beast in 1991. In 2018, Alfonso Cuarón was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography for Roma. Most recently Chloé Zhao matched this record in 2021 when she was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing for Nomadland (which also starred McDormand in her third Oscar-winning role). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Joel Daniel Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957), collectively known as the Coen brothers (/ˈkoʊən/ KOH-ən), are an American filmmaking duo. Their films span many genres and styles, which they frequently subvert or parody. Their most acclaimed works include Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), A Serious Man (2009), True Grit (2010) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Many of their films are distinctly American, often examining the culture of the American South and American West in both modern and historical contexts.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The brothers generally write, direct and produce their films jointly, although since The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), directed by Joel without Ethan's involvement, the duo started directing solo pieces, with the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022) serving as Ethan's first directing effort without Joel's involvement, followed by Drive-Away Dolls (2023). Until The Ladykillers (2004) Joel had received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing, or shared editing credits under an alias, Roderick and Reginald Jaynes. They have been nominated for 13 Academy Awards together, and individually for one award each, both won Best Original Screenplay for Fargo, and Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay for No Country for Old Men. The duo also won the Palme d'Or for Barton Fink in the 1991 Cannes Film Festival.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Coens have written a number of films they did not direct, including Angelina Jolie's biographical war drama Unbroken (2014), Steven Spielberg's historical cold war film Bridge of Spies (2015), and lesser-known, commercially unsuccessful comedies such as Crimewave (1985), The Naked Man (1998), and Gambit (2012). Ethan is also a writer of short stories, theater, and poetry.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "They are known for their distinctive stylistic trademarks including genre hybridity. No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis have been ranked in the BBC's 2016 poll of the greatest motion pictures since 2000. In 1998, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked Fargo among the 100 greatest American movies ever made.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Joel Daniel Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957) were born and raised in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their mother, Rena (née Neumann; 1925–2001), was an art historian at St. Cloud State University, and their father, Edward Coen (1919–2012), was a Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota. The brothers have an older sister, Deborah, who is a psychiatrist in Israel.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In regards to whether our background influences our film making ... who knows? We don't think about it ... There's no doubt that our Jewish heritage affects how we see things.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "—Joel Coen, on the Coens' Jewish heritage.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Both sides of the Coen family were Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. Their paternal grandfather, Victor Coen, was a barrister in the Inns of Court in London before retiring to Hove with their grandmother. Edward Coen was an American citizen born in the United States, but grew up in Croydon, London and studied at the London School of Economics. Afterwards he moved to the United States, where he met the Coens' mother, and served in the United States Army during World War II.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Coens developed an early interest in cinema through television. They grew up watching Italian films (ranging from the works of Federico Fellini to the Sons of Hercules films) aired on a Minneapolis station, the Tarzan films, and comedies (Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope and Doris Day).",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In the mid-1960s, Joel saved money from mowing lawns to buy a Vivitar Super 8 camera. Together, the brothers remade movies they saw on television, with their neighborhood friend Mark Zimering (\"Zeimers\") as the star. Cornel Wilde's 1965 film The Naked Prey became their Zeimers in Zambezi, which featured Ethan as a native with a spear. The 1943 film Lassie Come Home was reinterpreted as their Ed... A Dog, with Ethan playing the mother role in his sister's tutu. They also made original films like Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go, Lumberjacks of the North and The Banana Film.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Joel and Ethan graduated from St. Louis Park High School in 1973 and 1976, respectively, and from Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "After Simon's Rock, Joel spent four years in the undergraduate film program at New York University, where he made a 30-minute thesis film called Soundings. In 1979, he briefly enrolled in the graduate film program at the University of Texas at Austin, following a woman he had married who was in the graduate linguistics program. The marriage soon ended in divorce and Joel left UT Austin after nine months.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Ethan went on to Princeton University and earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1979. His senior thesis was a 41-page essay, \"Two Views of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy\", which was supervised by Raymond Geuss.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Joel has been married to actress Frances McDormand since 1984. In 1995, they adopted a son, Pedro McDormand Coen, from Paraguay when he was six months old. McDormand has acted in several Coen Brothers films: Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Man Who Wasn't There, Burn After Reading, and Hail, Caesar! For her performance in Fargo, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Ethan married film editor Tricia Cooke in 1990. They have two children: daughter Dusty and son Buster Jacob.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Ethan Coen and family live in New York, while Joel Coen and Frances McDormand live in Marin County, California.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "After graduating from New York University, Joel worked as a production assistant on a variety of industrial films and music videos. He developed a talent for film editing and met Sam Raimi while assisting Edna Ruth Paul in editing Raimi's first feature film, The Evil Dead (1981).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1984, the brothers wrote and directed Blood Simple, their first commercial film together. Set in Texas, the film tells the tale of a shifty, sleazy bar owner who hires a private detective to kill his wife and her lover. The film contains elements that point to their future direction: distinctive homages to genre movies (in this case noir and horror), plot twists layered over a simple story, dark humor, and mise-en-scène. The film starred Frances McDormand, who went on to feature in many of the Coen brothers' films (and marry Joel). Upon release the film received much praise and won awards for Joel's direction at both the Sundance and Independent Spirit awards.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Their next project was Crimewave (1985), directed by Sam Raimi and written by the Coens and Raimi. Joel and Raimi also made cameo appearances in Spies Like Us (1985).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The brothers' next film was Raising Arizona (1987), the story of an unlikely married couple: ex-convict H.I. (Nicolas Cage) and police officer Ed (Holly Hunter), who long for a baby but are unable to conceive. When a local furniture tycoon (Trey Wilson) appears on television with his newly born quintuplets and jokes that they \"are more than we can handle\", H.I. steals one of the quintuplets to bring up as their own. The film featured Frances McDormand, John Goodman, William Forsythe, Sam McMurray, and Randall \"Tex\" Cobb.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Miller's Crossing, released in 1990, starred Albert Finney, Gabriel Byrne, and John Turturro. The film is about feuding gangsters in the Prohibition era, inspired by Dashiell Hammett's novels Red Harvest (1929) and The Glass Key (serialized in 1930).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The following year, they released Barton Fink (1991); set in 1941, in which a New York playwright, the eponymous Barton Fink (played by John Turturro), moves to Los Angeles to write a B-movie. He settles down in his hotel room to commence writing but suffers writer's block until his room is invaded by the man next door (John Goodman). Barton Fink was a critical success, earning Oscar nominations and winning three major awards at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, including the Palme d'Or. It was their first film with cinematographer Roger Deakins, a key collaborator for the next 25 years.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Hudsucker Proxy (co-written with Raimi) was released in 1994. In it, the board of a large corporation in 1958 New York City appoints a naive schmo as president (Tim Robbins) for underhanded reasons. The film bombed at the box office ($30 million budget, $3 million gross in the US), even though it featured Paul Newman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Frances McDormand appears in a brief uncredited role.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Coens wrote and directed the crime thriller Fargo (1996), set in their home state of Minnesota. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), who has serious financial problems, has his wife kidnapped so that his wealthy father-in-law will pay the ransom. His plan goes wrong when the kidnappers deviate from the plan and local cop Marge Gunderson (McDormand) starts to investigate. Produced on a small budget of $7 million, Fargo was a critical and commercial success, with particular praise for its dialogue and McDormand's performance. The film received several awards, including a BAFTA award and Cannes award for direction, and two Oscars: a Best Original Screenplay and a Best Actress Oscar for McDormand.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In the Coens' next film, the black comedy The Big Lebowski (1998), \"The Dude\" (Jeff Bridges), a Los Angeles slacker, is used as an unwitting pawn in a kidnapping plot with his bowling buddies (Steve Buscemi and John Goodman). Despite initially receiving mixed reviews and underperforming at the box office, it is now well received by critics, and is regarded as a classic cult film. An annual festival, Lebowski Fest, began in 2002, and many adhere to the philosophy of \"Dudeism\". Entertainment Weekly ranked it 8th on their Funniest Movies of the Past 25 Years list in 2008.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Gates of Eden, a collection of short stories written by Ethan Coen, was published in 1998. The same year, Ethan co-wrote the comedy The Naked Man, directed by their storyboard artist J. Todd Anderson.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Coen brothers' next film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), was another critical and commercial success. The title was borrowed from the Preston Sturges film Sullivan's Travels (1941), whose lead character, movie director John Sullivan, had planned to make a film with that title. Based loosely on Homer's Odyssey (complete with a Cyclops, sirens, et al.), the story is set in Mississippi in the 1930s and follows a trio of escaped convicts who, after absconding from a chain gang, journey home to recover bank-heist loot the leader has buried—but they have no clear perception of where they are going. The film highlighted the comic abilities of George Clooney as the oddball lead character Ulysses Everett McGill, and of Tim Blake Nelson and John Turturro, his sidekicks. The film's bluegrass and old-time soundtrack, offbeat humor and digitally desaturated cinematography made it a critical and commercial hit. It was the first feature film to use all-digital color grading. The film's soundtrack CD was also successful, spawning a concert and concert/documentary DVD, Down from the Mountain.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Coens next produced another noirish thriller, The Man Who Wasn't There (2001).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Coens directed the 2003 film Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, a throwback to the romantic comedies of the 1940s. It focuses on hotshot divorce lawyer Miles Massey and a beautiful divorcée whom Massey managed to prevent from receiving any money in her divorce. She vows to get even with him while, at the same time, he becomes smitten with her. Intolerable Cruelty received generally positive reviews, although it is considered one of the duo's weaker films. Also that year, they executive produced and did an uncredited rewrite of the Christmas black comedy Bad Santa, which garnered positive reviews.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 2004, the Coens made The Ladykillers, a remake of the British classic by Ealing Studios. A professor, played by Tom Hanks, assembles a team to rob a casino. They rent a room in an elderly woman's home to plan the heist. When the woman discovers the plot, the gang decides to murder her to ensure her silence. The Coens received some of the most lukewarm reviews of their careers in response to this film.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "They directed two short films for two separate anthology films—Paris, je t'aime (Tuileries, 2006) starring Steve Buscemi, and To Each His Own Cinema (World Cinema, 2007) starring Josh Brolin. Both films received highly positive reviews.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "No Country for Old Men, released in November 2007, closely follows the 2005 novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), living near the Texas/Mexico border, stumbles upon, and decides to take, two million dollars in drug money. He must then go on the run to avoid those trying to recover the money, including sociopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who confounds both Llewelyn and local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). The plotline is a return to noir themes, but in some respects it was a departure for the Coens; with the exception of Stephen Root, none of the stable of regular actors appears in the film. No Country received nearly universal critical praise, garnering a 94% \"Fresh\" rating at Rotten Tomatoes. It won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, all of which were received by the Coens, as well as Best Supporting Actor received by Bardem. The Coens, as \"Roderick Jaynes\", were also nominated for Best Editing, but lost. It was the first time since 1961 (when Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise won for West Side Story) that two directors received the Academy Award for Best Director at the same time.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In January 2008, Ethan Coen's play Almost an Evening premiered off-broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company Stage 2, opening to mostly enthusiastic reviews. The initial run closed on February 10, 2008, but the same production was moved to a new theatre for a commercial off-Broadway run at the Bleecker Street Theater in New York City. Produced by The Atlantic Theater Company, it ran there from March 2008 through June 1, 2008. and Art Meets Commerce. In May 2009, the Atlantic Theater Company produced Coen's Offices, as part of their mainstage season at the Linda Gross Theater.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Burn After Reading, a comedy starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney, was released September 12, 2008, and portrays a collision course between two gym instructors, spies and Internet dating. Released to positive reviews, it debuted at No. 1 in North America.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 2009, the Coens directed a television commercial titled \"Air Freshener\" for the Reality Coalition.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "They next directed A Serious Man, released October 2, 2009, a \"gentle but dark\" period comedy (set in 1967) with a low budget. The film is based loosely on the Coens' childhoods in an academic family in the largely Jewish suburb of Saint Louis Park, Minnesota; it also drew comparisons to the Book of Job. Filming took place late in the summer of 2008, in the neighborhoods of Roseville and Bloomington, Minnesota, at Normandale Community College, and at St. Olaf College. The film was nominated for the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "True Grit (2010) is based on the 1968 novel of the same name by Charles Portis. Filming was done in Texas and New Mexico. Hailee Steinfeld stars as Mattie Ross along with Jeff Bridges as Marshal Rooster Cogburn. Matt Damon and Josh Brolin also appear in the movie. True Grit was nominated for ten Academy Awards including Best Picture.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Ethan Coen wrote the one-act comedy Talking Cure, which was produced on Broadway in 2011 as part of Relatively Speaking, an anthology of three one-act plays by Coen, Elaine May, and Woody Allen.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In 2011, the Coen brothers won the $1 million Dan David Prize for their contribution to cinema and society.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) is a treatise on the 1960s folk music scene in New York City's Greenwich Village, and very loosely based on the life of Dave Van Ronk. The film stars Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake, and Carey Mulligan. It won the Grand Prix at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where it was highly praised by critics. They received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Song for \"Please Mr. Kennedy\", which is heard in the film.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Fargo, a television series inspired by their film of the same name, premiered in April 2014 on the FX network. It is created by Noah Hawley and executive produced by the brothers.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The Coens also contributed to the screenplay for Unbroken, along with Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson. The film is directed by Angelina Jolie and based on Laura Hillenbrand's non-fiction book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010) which itself was based on the life of Louis Zamperini. It was released on December 25, 2014, to average reviews.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The Coens co-wrote, with playwright Matt Charman, the screenplay for the dramatic historical thriller Bridge of Spies, about the 1960 U-2 Incident. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and released on October 4, 2015, to critical acclaim. They were nominated for the Best Original Screenplay at the 88th Academy Awards.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Coens directed the film Hail, Caesar!, about a \"fixer\" in 1950s Hollywood trying to discover what happened to a cast member who vanishes during filming. It stars Coen regulars George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johansson and Tilda Swinton, as well as Channing Tatum, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, and Alden Ehrenreich. The film was released on February 5, 2016.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In 2016, the Coens gave to their longtime friend and collaborator John Turturro the right to use his character of Jesus Quintana from The Big Lebowski in his own spin-off, The Jesus Rolls, which he would also write and direct. The Coens have no involvement in the production. In August 2016, the film began principal photography.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Coens first wrote the script for Suburbicon in 1986. The film was eventually directed by George Clooney and began filming in October 2016. It was released by Paramount Pictures in the fall of 2017.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Coens directed The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Western anthology starring Tim Blake Nelson, Liam Neeson, and James Franco. It began streaming on Netflix on November 16, 2018, after a brief theatrical run.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "It was announced in March 2019 that Joel Coen would be directing an adaptation of Macbeth starring Denzel Washington. The film, titled The Tragedy of Macbeth, would be Joel's first directorial effort without his brother, who was taking a break from films to focus on theater. The film premiered at the 2021 New York Film Festival. In 2022, it was announced that Ethan Coen would be directing Drive-Away Dolls for Focus Features and Working Title. It would be Ethan's first directorial effort without his brother. The 2022 Cannes Film Festival had a special screening of Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, an archival documentary film directed solely by Ethan and edited by his wife Tricia Cooke.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Coen brothers' own film production company, Mike Zoss Productions located in New York City, has been credited on their films from O Brother, Where Art Thou? onwards. It was named after Mike Zoss Drug, an independent pharmacy in St. Louis Park since 1950 that was the brothers' beloved hangout when they were growing up in the Twin Cities. The name was also used for the pharmacy in No Country for Old Men. The Mike Zoss logo consists of a crayon drawing of a horse, standing in a field of grass with its head turned around as it looks back over its hindquarters.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Up to 2003, Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing, due to guild rules that disallowed multiple director credits to prevent dilution of the position's significance. The only exception to this rule is if the co-directors are an \"established duo\". Since 2004 they have been able to share the director credit and the Coen brothers have become only the third duo to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director.",
"title": "Directing distinctions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "With four Academy Award nominations for No Country for Old Men for the duo (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing as Roderick Jaynes), the Coen brothers have tied the record for the most nominations by a single nominee (counting an \"established duo\" as one nominee) for the same film. Orson Welles set the record in 1941 with Citizen Kane being nominated for Best Picture (though at the time, individual producers were not named as nominees), Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay. Warren Beatty received the same nominations, first for Heaven Can Wait in 1978 and again in 1981 with Reds. Alan Menken also then achieved the same feat when he was nominated for Best Score and triple-nominated for Best Song for Beauty and the Beast in 1991. In 2018, Alfonso Cuarón was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography for Roma. Most recently Chloé Zhao matched this record in 2021 when she was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing for Nomadland (which also starred McDormand in her third Oscar-winning role).",
"title": "Directing distinctions"
}
]
| Joel Daniel Coen and Ethan Jesse Coen, collectively known as the Coen brothers, are an American filmmaking duo. Their films span many genres and styles, which they frequently subvert or parody. Their most acclaimed works include Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), A Serious Man (2009), True Grit (2010) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Many of their films are distinctly American, often examining the culture of the American South and American West in both modern and historical contexts. The brothers generally write, direct and produce their films jointly, although since The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), directed by Joel without Ethan's involvement, the duo started directing solo pieces, with the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022) serving as Ethan's first directing effort without Joel's involvement, followed by Drive-Away Dolls (2023). Until The Ladykillers (2004) Joel had received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing, or shared editing credits under an alias, Roderick and Reginald Jaynes. They have been nominated for 13 Academy Awards together, and individually for one award each, both won Best Original Screenplay for Fargo, and Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay for No Country for Old Men. The duo also won the Palme d'Or for Barton Fink in the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. The Coens have written a number of films they did not direct, including Angelina Jolie's biographical war drama Unbroken (2014), Steven Spielberg's historical cold war film Bridge of Spies (2015), and lesser-known, commercially unsuccessful comedies such as Crimewave (1985), The Naked Man (1998), and Gambit (2012). Ethan is also a writer of short stories, theater, and poetry. They are known for their distinctive stylistic trademarks including genre hybridity. No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis have been ranked in the BBC's 2016 poll of the greatest motion pictures since 2000. In 1998, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked Fargo among the 100 greatest American movies ever made. | 2001-09-03T19:58:52Z | 2023-12-29T00:22:39Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coen_brothers |
15,781 | Jorge Luis Borges | Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (/ˈbɔːrhɛs/ BOR-hess, Spanish: [ˈxoɾxe ˈlwis ˈβoɾxes] ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages.
In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the growing number of English translations, the Latin American Boom, and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists."
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born into an educated middle-class family on 24 August 1899. They were in comfortable circumstances but not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires so the family resided in Palermo, then a poorer neighbourhood. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of criollo (Spanish) origin. Her family had been much involved in the European settling of South America and the Argentine War of Independence, and she spoke often of their heroic actions.
His 1929 book Cuaderno San Martín includes the poem "Isidoro Acevedo", commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, Acevedo Laprida fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, and Los Corrales in 1880. Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born.
According to a study by Antonio Andrade, Jorge Luis Borges had Portuguese ancestry: Borges's great-grandfather, Francisco, was born in Portugal in 1770, and lived in Torre de Moncorvo, in the North of the country before he emigrated to Argentina, where he married Cármen Lafinur.
Borges's own father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer, and wrote the novel El caudillo in 1921. Borges Haslam was born in Entre Ríos of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent, the son of Francisco Borges Lafinur, a colonel, and Frances Ann Haslam, an Englishwoman. Borges Haslam grew up speaking English at home. The family frequently traveled to Europe. Borges Haslam wed Leonor Acevedo Suárez in 1898 and their offspring also included the painter Norah Borges, sister of Jorge Luis Borges.
Aged ten, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish. It was published in a local journal, but Borges's friends thought the real author was his father. Borges Haslam was a lawyer and psychology teacher who harboured literary aspirations. Borges said his father "tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt", despite the 1921 opus El caudillo. Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "as most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action."
Jorge Luis Borges was taught at home until the age of 11, was bilingual in Spanish and English, reading Shakespeare in the latter at the age of twelve. The family lived in a large house with an English library of over one thousand volumes; Borges would later remark that "if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library."
His father gave up practicing law due to the failing eyesight that would eventually affect his son. In 1914, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and spent the next decade in Europe. In Geneva, Borges Haslam was treated by an eye specialist, while his son and daughter attended school. Jorge Luis learned French, read Thomas Carlyle in English, and began to read philosophy in German. In 1917, when he was eighteen, he met writer Maurice Abramowicz and began a literary friendship that would last for the remainder of his life. He received his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The Borges family decided that, due to political unrest in Argentina, they would remain in Switzerland during the war. After World War I, the family spent three years living in various cities: Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. They remained in Europe until 1921.
At that time, Borges discovered the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem (1915) which became influential to his work. In Spain, Borges fell in with and became a member of the avant-garde, anti-Modernismo Ultraist literary movement, inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, close to the Imagists. His first poem, "Hymn to the Sea," written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia. While in Spain, he met such noted Spanish writers as Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.
In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires. He had little formal education, no qualifications and few friends. He wrote to a friend that Buenos Aires was now "overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and decorative young ladies". He brought with him the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career, publishing surreal poems and essays in literary journals. In 1923, Borges first published his poetry, a collection called Fervor de Buenos Aires and contributed to the avant-garde review Martín Fierro.
Borges co-founded the journals Prisma, a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires, and Proa. Later in life, Borges regretted some of these early publications, attempting to purchase all known copies to ensure their destruction.
By the mid-1930s, he began to explore existential questions and fiction. He worked in a style that Argentine critic Ana María Barrenechea has called "irreality." Many other Latin American writers, such as Juan Rulfo, Juan José Arreola, and Alejo Carpentier, were investigating these themes, influenced by the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. In this vein, Borges biographer Edwin Williamson underlines the danger of inferring an autobiographically inspired basis for the content or tone of certain of his works: books, philosophy, and imagination were as much a source of real inspiration to him as his own lived experience, if not more so.
From the first issue, Borges was a regular contributor to Sur, founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo. It was then Argentina's most important literary journal and helped Borges find his fame. Ocampo introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy Casares, another well-known figure of Argentine literature who was to become a frequent collaborator and close friend. They wrote a number of works together, some under the nom de plume H. Bustos Domecq, including a parody detective series and fantasy stories. During these years, a family friend, Macedonio Fernández, became a major influence on Borges. The two would preside over discussions in cafés, at country retreats, or in Fernandez's tiny apartment in the Balvanera district. He appears by name in Borges's Dialogue about a Dialogue, in which the two discuss the immortality of the soul.
In 1933, Borges gained an editorial appointment at Revista Multicolor de los Sábados (the literary supplement of the Buenos Aires newspaper Crítica), where he first published the pieces collected as Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) in 1935. The book includes two types of writing: the first lies somewhere between non-fiction essays and short stories, using fictional techniques to tell essentially true stories. The second consists of literary forgeries, which Borges initially passed off as translations of passages from famous but seldom-read works.
In the following years, he served as a literary adviser for the publishing house Emecé Editores, and from 1936 to 1939 wrote weekly columns for El Hogar. In 1938, Borges found work as the first assistant at the Miguel Cané Municipal Library. It was in a working-class area and there were so few books that cataloging more than one hundred books per day, he was told, would leave little to do for the other staff and would make them look bad. The task took him about an hour each day and the rest of his time he spent in the basement of the library, writing and translating.
Borges's father died in 1938, shortly before his 64th birthday. On Christmas Eve that year, Borges had a severe head injury; during treatment, he nearly died of sepsis. While recovering from the accident, Borges began exploring a new style of writing for which he would become famous. His first story written after his accident, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," came out in May 1939. One of his most famous works, "Menard" examines the nature of authorship, as well as the relationship between an author and his historical context. His first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), appeared in 1941, composed mostly of works previously published in Sur.
The title story concerns a Chinese professor in England, Dr. Yu Tsun, who spies for Germany during World War I, in an attempt to prove to the authorities that an Asian person is able to obtain the information that they seek. A combination of book and maze, it can be read in many ways. Through it, Borges arguably invented the hypertext novel and went on to describe a theory of the universe based upon the structure of such a novel.
Composed of stories taking up over sixty pages, the book was generally well received, but El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan failed to garner for him the literary prizes many in his circle expected. Victoria Ocampo dedicated a large portion of the July 1942 issue of Sur to a "Reparation for Borges." Numerous leading writers and critics from Argentina and throughout the Spanish-speaking world contributed writings to the "reparation" project.
With his vision beginning to fade in his early thirties and unable to support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer. He became an increasingly public figure, obtaining appointments as president of the Argentine Society of Writers and as professor of English and American Literature at the Argentine Association of English Culture. His short story "Emma Zunz" was made into a film (under the name of Días de odio, Days of Hate, directed in 1954 by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson). Around this time, Borges also began writing screenplays.
In 1955, he became director of the Argentine National Library. By the late 1950s he had become completely blind. Neither the coincidence nor the irony of his blindness as a writer escaped Borges:
His later collection of poetry, Elogio de la Sombra (In Praise of Darkness), develops this theme. In 1956 the University of Cuyo awarded Borges the first of many honorary doctorates and the following year he received the National Prize for Literature. From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and other temporary appointments at other universities. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1964. In the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University.
As his eyesight deteriorated, Borges relied increasingly on his mother's help. When he was not able to read and write anymore (he never learned to read Braille), his mother, to whom he had always been close, became his personal secretary. When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.
Eight of Borges's poems appear in the 1943 anthology of Spanish American Poets by H. R. Hays. "The Garden of Forking Paths", one of the first Borges stories to be translated into English, appeared in the August 1948 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, translated by Anthony Boucher. Though several other Borges translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies during the 1950s (and one story appeared in the science fiction magazine Fantastic Universe in 1960), his international fame dates from the early 1960s.
In 1961, Borges received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. While Beckett had garnered a distinguished reputation in Europe and America, Borges had been largely unknown and untranslated in the English-speaking world and the prize stirred great interest in his work. The Italian government named Borges Commendatore and the University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker Chair. This led to his first lecture tour in the United States. In 1962, two major anthologies of Borges's writings were published in English by New York presses: Ficciones and Labyrinths. In that year, Borges began lecture tours of Europe. Numerous honors were to accumulate over the years such as a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America "for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre" (1976), the Balzan Prize (for Philology, Linguistics and literary Criticism) and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (all 1980), as well as the French Legion of Honour (1983) and the Diamond Konex Award for Literature Arts as the most important writer in the last decade in his country.
In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, through whom he became better known in the English-speaking world. Di Giovanni contended that Borges's popularity was due to his writing with multiple languages in mind and deliberately using Latin words as a bridge from Spanish to English.
Borges continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios (Book of Imaginary Beings, 1967, co-written with Margarita Guerrero), El informe de Brodie (Dr. Brodie's Report, 1970), and El libro de arena (The Book of Sand, 1975). He lectured prolifically. Many of these lectures were anthologized in volumes such as Siete noches (Seven Nights) and Nueve ensayos dantescos (Nine Dantesque Essays).
His presence in 1967 on campus at the University of Virginia (UVA) in the U.S. influenced a group of students among whom was Jared Loewenstein, who would later become founder and curator of the Jorge Luis Borges Collection at UVA, one of the largest repositories of documents and manuscripts pertaining to Borges's early works. In 1984, he travelled to Athens, Greece, and later to Rethymnon, Crete, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the School of Philosophy at the University of Crete.
In the mid-1960s, Borges became acquainted with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, who was at the time a young Jesuit priest. In 1979, Borges spoke appreciatively and at some length about Bergoglio to the Argentine poet and essayist Roberto Alifano.
In 1967, Borges married the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. Friends believed that his mother, who was 90 and anticipating her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. The marriage lasted less than three years. After a legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at age 99. Thereafter, he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her, cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper of many decades.
From 1975 until the time of his death, Borges traveled internationally. He was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry. In April 1986, a few months before his death, he married her via an attorney in Paraguay, in what was then a common practice among Argentines wishing to circumvent the Argentine laws of the time regarding divorce. On his religious views, Borges declared himself an agnostic, clarifying: "Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen." Borges was taught to read the Bible by his English Protestant grandmother and he prayed the Our Father each night because of a promise he made to his mother. He also died in the presence of a priest.
During his final days in Geneva, Borges began brooding about the possibility of an afterlife. Although calm and collected about his own death, Borges began probing Kodama as to whether she inclined more towards the Shinto beliefs of her father or the Catholicism of her mother. Kodama "had always regarded Borges as an Agnostic, as she was herself", but given the insistence of his questioning, she offered to call someone more "qualified". Borges responded, "You are asking me if I want a priest." He then instructed her to call two clergymen, a Catholic priest, in memory of his mother, and a Protestant minister, in memory of his English grandmother. He was visited first by Father Pierre Jacquet and by Pastor Edouard de Montmollin.
Borges died of liver cancer on 14 June 1986, aged 86, in Geneva. His burial was preceded by an ecumenical service at the Protestant Cathédrale de Saint Pierre on 18 June. With many Swiss and Argentine dignitaries present, Pastor de Montmollin read the First Chapter of St John's Gospel. He then preached that "Borges was a man who had unceasingly searched for the right word, the term that could sum up the whole, the final meaning of things." He said, however, that no man can reach that word through his own efforts and in trying becomes lost in a labyrinth. Pastor de Montmollin concluded, "It is not man who discovers the word, it is the Word that comes to him."
Father Jacquet also preached, saying that, when visiting Borges before his death, he had found "a man full of love, who received from the Church the forgiveness of his sins". After the funeral, Borges was laid to rest in Geneva's Cimetière de Plainpalais. His grave, marked by a rough-hewn headstone, is adorned with carvings derived from Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse art and literature.
Maria Kodama, his widow and heir on the basis of the marriage and two wills, gained control over his works. Her assertive administration of his estate resulted in a bitter dispute with the French publisher Gallimard regarding the republication of the complete works of Borges in French, with Pierre Assouline in Le Nouvel Observateur (August 2006) calling her "an obstacle to the dissemination of the works of Borges". Kodama took legal action against Assouline, considering the remark unjustified and defamatory, asking for a symbolic compensation of one euro.
Kodama also rescinded all publishing rights for existing collections of his work in English, including the translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in which Borges himself collaborated, and from which di Giovanni would have received an unusually high fifty percent of the royalties. Kodama commissioned new translations by Andrew Hurley, which have become the official translations in English.
David Foster Wallace wrote: "The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations of religious or ideological certainty -- a mind turned wholly inward on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything."
During the 1920s and 1930s, Borges was a vocal supporter of Hipólito Yrigoyen and the social democratic Radical Civic Union. In 1945, Borges signed a manifesto calling for an end to military rule and the establishment of political liberty and democratic elections. By the 1960s, he had grown more skeptical of democracy. During a 1971 conference at Columbia University, a creative writing student asked Borges what he regarded as "a writer's duty to his time". Borges replied, "I think a writer's duty is to be a writer, and if he can be a good writer, he is doing his duty. Besides, I think of my own opinions as being superficial. For example, I am a Conservative, I hate the Communists, I hate the Nazis, I hate the anti-Semites, and so on; but I don't allow these opinions to find their way into my writings—except, of course, when I was greatly elated about the Six-Day War. Generally speaking, I think of keeping them in watertight compartments. Everybody knows my opinions, but as for my dreams and my stories, they should be allowed their full freedom, I think. I don't want to intrude into them, I'm writing fiction, not fables." In the 1980s, towards the end of his life, Borges regained his earlier faith in democracy and held it out as the only hope for Argentina. In 1983, Borges applauded the election of the Radical Civic Union's Raúl Alfonsín and welcomed the end of military rule with the following words: "I once wrote that democracy is the abuse of statistics ... On October 30, 1983, Argentine democracy refuted me splendidly. Splendidly and resoundingly."
Borges recurrently declared himself a "Spencerian anarchist who believes in the individual and not in the State" due to his father's influence. In an interview with Richard Burgin during the late 1960s, Borges described himself as a "mild" adherent of classical liberalism. He further recalled that his opposition to communism and to Marxism was absorbed in his childhood, stating: "Well, I have been brought up to think that the individual should be strong and the State should be weak. I couldn't be enthusiastic about theories where the State is more important than the individual." After the overthrow via coup d'état of President Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, Borges supported efforts to purge Argentina's Government of Peronists and dismantle the former President's welfare state. He was enraged that the Communist Party of Argentina opposed these measures and sharply criticized them in lectures and in print. Borges's opposition to the Party in this matter ultimately led to a permanent rift with his longtime lover, Argentine Communist Estela Canto.
In a 1956 interview given to El Hogar, he stated that "[Communists] are in favor of totalitarian regimes and systematically combat freedom of thought, oblivious of the fact that the principal victims of dictatorships are, precisely, intelligence and culture." Borges elaborated: "Many people are in favor of dictatorships because they allow them to avoid thinking for themselves. Everything is presented to them ready-made. There are even agencies of the State that supply them with opinions, passwords, slogans, and even idols to exalt or cast down according to the prevailing wind or in keeping with the directives of the thinking heads of the single party."
In later years, Borges frequently expressed contempt for Marxist and Communist authors, poets, and intellectuals. In an interview with Burgin, Borges referred to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as "a very fine poet" but a "very mean man" for unconditionally supporting the Soviet Union and demonizing the United States. Borges commented about Neruda, "Now he knows that's rubbish."
In the same interview, Borges also criticized famed poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was abducted by Nationalist soldiers and executed without trial during the Spanish Civil War. In Borges's opinion, Lorca's poetry and plays, when examined against his tragic death, appeared better than they actually were.
In 1934, Argentine ultra-nationalists, sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, asserted Borges was secretly Jewish, and by implication, not truly Argentinian. Borges responded with the essay "Yo, Judío" ("I, a Jew"), a reference to the old phrase "Yo, Argentino" ("I, an Argentine") uttered by potential victims during pogroms against Argentine Jews, to signify one was not Jewish. In the essay, Borges declares he would be proud to be a Jew, and remarks that any pure Castilian is likely to come from ancient Jewish descent, from a millennium ago.
Both before and during the Second World War, Borges regularly published essays attacking the Nazi police state and its racist ideology. His outrage was fueled by his deep love for German literature. In an essay published in 1937, Borges attacked the Nazi Party's use of children's books to inflame antisemitism. He wrote, "I don't know if the world can do without German civilization, but I do know that its corruption by the teachings of hatred is a crime."
In a 1938 essay, Borges reviewed an anthology which rewrote German authors of the past to fit the Nazi party line. He was disgusted by what he described as Germany's "chaotic descent into darkness" and the attendant rewriting of history. He argued that such books sacrificed the German people's culture, history and integrity in the name of restoring their national honour. Such use of children's books for propaganda he writes, "perfect the criminal arts of barbarians."
In a 1944 essay, Borges postulated,
Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena's hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have known that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules."
In 1946, Borges published the short story "Deutsches Requiem", which masquerades as the last testament of a condemned Nazi war criminal named Otto Dietrich zur Linde.
In a 1971 conference at Columbia University, Borges was asked about the story by a student from the creative writing program. He recalled, "When the Germans were defeated I felt great joy and relief, but at the same time I thought of the German defeat as being somehow tragic, because here we have perhaps the most educated people in Europe, who have a fine literature, a fine tradition of philosophy and poetry. Yet these people were bamboozled by a madman named Adolf Hitler, and I think there is tragedy there."
In a 1967 interview with Burgin, Borges recalled how his interactions with Argentina's Nazi sympathisers led him to create the story. He recalled, "And then I realized that those people that were on the side of Germany, that they never thought of German victories or the German glory. What they really liked was the idea of the Blitzkrieg, of London being on fire, of the country being destroyed. As to the German fighters, they took no stock in them. Then I thought, well now Germany has lost, now America has saved us from this nightmare, but since nobody can doubt on which side I stood, I'll see what can be done from a literary point of view in favor of the Nazis. And then I created the ideal Nazi."
At Columbia University in 1971, Borges further elaborated on the story's creation, "I tried to imagine what a real Nazi might be like. I mean someone who thought of violence as being praiseworthy for its own sake. Then I thought that this archetype of the Nazis wouldn't mind being defeated; after all, defeats and victories are mere matters of chance. He would still be glad of the fact, even if the Americans and British won the war. Naturally, when I am with Nazis, I find they are not my idea of what a Nazi is, but this wasn't meant to be a political tract. It was meant to stand for the fact that there was something tragic in the fate of a real Nazi. Except that I wonder if a real Nazi ever existed. At least, when I went to Germany, I never met one. They were all feeling sorry for themselves and wanted me to feel sorry for them as well."
In 1946, Argentine President Juan Perón began transforming Argentina into a one-party state with the assistance of his wife, Evita. Almost immediately, the spoils system was the rule of the day, as ideological critics of the ruling Partido Justicialista were fired from government jobs. During this period, Borges was informed that he was being "promoted" from his position at the Miguel Cané Library to a post as inspector of poultry and rabbits at the Buenos Aires municipal market. Upon demanding to know the reason, Borges was told, "Well, you were on the side of the Allies, what do you expect?" Borges resigned the following day.
Perón's treatment of Borges became a cause célèbre for the Argentine intelligentsia. The Argentine Society of Writers (SADE) held a formal dinner in his honour. At the dinner, a speech was read which Borges had written for the occasion. It said:
Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy. Bellboys babbling orders, portraits of caudillos, prearranged cheers or insults, walls covered with names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking ... Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the duties of a writer. Need I remind readers of Martín Fierro or Don Segundo that individualism is an old Argentine virtue.
In the aftermath, Borges found himself much in demand as a lecturer and one of the intellectual leaders of the Argentine opposition. In 1951 he was asked by anti-Peronist friends to run for president of SADE. Borges, then having depression caused by a failed romance, reluctantly accepted. He later recalled that he would awake every morning and remember that Perón was president and feel deeply depressed and ashamed. Perón's government had seized control of the Argentine mass media and regarded SADE with indifference. Borges later recalled, however, "Many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside its doors." Meanwhile, SADE became an increasing refuge for critics of the Perón government. SADE official Luisa Mercedes Levinson noted, "We would gather every week to tell the latest jokes about the ruling couple and even dared to sing the songs of the French Resistance, as well as 'La Marseillaise'".
After Evita Perón's death on 26 July 1952, Borges received a visit from two policemen, who ordered him to put up two portraits of the ruling couple on the premises of SADE. Borges indignantly refused, calling it a ridiculous demand. The policemen replied that he would soon face the consequences. The Justicialist Party placed Borges under 24-hour surveillance and sent policemen to sit in on his lectures; in September they ordered SADE to be permanently closed down. Like much of the Argentine opposition to Perón, SADE had become marginalized due to persecution by the State, and very few active members remained.
According to Edwin Williamson,
Borges had agreed to stand for the presidency of the SADE in order [to] fight for intellectual freedom, but he also wanted to avenge the humiliation he believed he had suffered in 1946, when the Peronists had proposed to make him an inspector of chickens. In his letter of 1950 to Attilio Rossi, he claimed that his infamous promotion had been a clever way the Peronists had found of damaging him and diminishing his reputation. The closure of the SADE meant that the Peronists had damaged him a second time, as was borne out by the visit of the Spanish writer Julián Marías, who arrived in Buenos Aires shortly after the closure of the SADE. It was impossible for Borges, as president, to hold the usual reception for the distinguished visitor; instead, one of Borges's friends brought a lamb from his ranch, and they had it roasted at a tavern across the road from the SADE building on Calle Mexico. After dinner, a friendly janitor let them into the premises, and they showed Marías around by candlelight. That tiny group of writers leading a foreign guest through a dark building by the light of guttering candles was vivid proof of the extent to which the SADE had been diminished under the rule of Juan Perón.
On 16 September 1955, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu's Revolución Libertadora toppled the ruling party and forced Perón into exile. Borges was overjoyed and joined demonstrators marching through the streets of Buenos Aires. According to Williamson, Borges shouted, "Viva la Patria", until his voice grew hoarse. Due to the influence of Borges's mother and his own role on the opposition to Peron, the provisional government appointed Borges as the Director of the National Library.
In his essay L'Illusion Comique, Borges wrote there were two histories of Peronism in Argentina. The first he described as "the criminal one", composed of the police state tactics used against both real and imagined anti-Peronists. The second history was, according to Borges, "the theatrical one" composed of "tales and fables made for consumption by dolts." He argued that, despite their claims to detest capitalism, Juan and Eva Perón "copied its methods, dictating names and slogans to the people" in the same way that multi-national corporations "impose their razor blades, cigarettes, and washing machines." Borges then listed the numerous conspiracy theories the ruling couple dictated to their followers and how those theories were accepted without question.
Borges concluded:
It is useless to list the examples; one can only denounce the duplicity of the fictions of the former regime, which can't be believed and were believed. It will be said that the public's lack of sophistication is enough to explain the contradiction; I believe that the cause is more profound. Coleridge spoke of the "willing suspension of disbelief," that is, poetic faith; Samuel Johnson said, in defense of Shakespeare, that the spectators at a tragedy do not believe they are in Alexandria in the first act and Rome in the second but submit to the pleasure of a fiction. Similarly, the lies of a dictatorship are neither believed nor disbelieved; they pertain to an intermediate plane, and their purpose is to conceal or justify sordid or atrocious realities. They pertain to the pathetic or the clumsily sentimental. Happily, for the enlightenment and security of the Argentines, the current regime has understood that the function of government is not to inspire pathos.
In a 1967 interview, Borges said, "Perón was a humbug, and he knew it, and everybody knew it. But Perón could be very cruel. I mean, he had people tortured, killed. And his wife was a common prostitute."
When Perón returned from exile in 1973 and regained the Presidency, Borges was enraged. In a 1975 interview for National Geographic, he said "Damn, the snobs are back in the saddle. If their posters and slogans again defile the city, I'll be glad I've lost my sight. Well, they can't humiliate me as they did before my books sold well."
After being accused of being unforgiving, Borges quipped, "I resented Perón's making Argentina look ridiculous to the world ... as in 1951, when he announced control over thermonuclear fusion, which still hasn't happened anywhere but in the sun and the stars. For a time, Argentines hesitated to wear band aids for fear friends would ask, 'Did the atomic bomb go off in your hand?' A shame, because Argentina really has world-class scientists."
After Borges's death in 1986, the Peronist Partido Justicialista declined to send a delegate to the writer's memorial service in Buenos Aires. A spokesman for the Party said that this was in reaction to "certain declarations he had made about the country." Later, at the City Council of Buenos Aires, Peronist politicians refused to honor Borges as an Argentine, commenting that he "chose to die abroad." When infuriated politicians from the other parties demanded to know the real reason, the Peronists finally explained that Borges had made statements about Evita Perón which they called "unacceptable".
During the 1970s, Borges at first expressed support for Argentina's military junta, but was scandalized by the junta's actions during the Dirty War. In protest against their support of the regime, Borges ceased publishing in the newspaper La Nación.
In 1985, he wrote a short poem about the Falklands War called Juan López y John Ward, about two fictional soldiers (one from each side), who died in the Falklands, in which he refers to "islands that were too famous". He also said about the war: "The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb."
Borges was an observer at the trials of the military junta in 1985 and wrote that "not to judge and condemn the crimes would be to encourage impunity and to become, somehow, its accomplice." Borges added that "the news of the missing people, the crimes and atrocities [the military] committed" had inspired him to return to his earlier Emersonian faith in democracy.
Borges believed that indigenous peoples in what is now called Argentina had no traditions: "There's no native tradition of any kind since the Indians here were mere barbarians. We have to fall back on the European tradition, why not? It's a very fine tradition."
Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort argue that Borges "may have been the most important figure in Spanish-language literature since Cervantes. He was clearly of tremendous influence, writing intricate poems, short stories, and essays that instantiated concepts of dizzying power." Borges's work has been compared to that of Homer and Milton. Indeed, the critic Harold Bloom numbers Borges among the key figures of the Western literary canon.
In addition to short stories for which he is most noted, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, literary criticism, and edited numerous anthologies. His longest work of fiction is a fourteen-page story, "The Congress", first published in 1971. His late-onset blindness strongly influenced his later writing. Borges wrote: "When I think of what I've lost, I ask, 'Who know themselves better than the blind?' – for every thought becomes a tool."
Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, integrating these through literature, sometimes playfully, sometimes with great seriousness.
Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned (it came and went, with a struggle between advancing age and advances in eye surgery), he increasingly focused on writing poetry, since he could memorize an entire work in progress.
His poems embrace the same wide range of interests as his fiction, along with issues that emerge in his critical works and translations, and from more personal musings. For example, his interest in idealism runs through his work, reflected in the fictional world of Tlön in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and in his essay "A New Refutation of Time".
Borges was a notable translator. He translated works of literature in English, French, German, Old English, and Old Norse into Spanish. His first publication, for a Buenos Aires newspaper, was a translation of Oscar Wilde's story "The Happy Prince" into Spanish when he was nine. At the end of his life he produced a Spanish-language version of a part of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. He also translated (while simultaneously subtly transforming) the works of, among others, Ambrose Bierce, William Faulkner, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf. Borges wrote and lectured extensively on the art of translation, holding that a translation may improve upon the original, may even be unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid. Borges employed the devices of literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work, both forms of modern pseudo-epigrapha.
Borges's best-known set of literary forgeries date from his early work as a translator and literary critic with a regular column in the Argentine magazine El Hogar. Along with publishing numerous legitimate translations, he also published original works, for example, in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg or One Thousand and One Nights, originally claiming them to be translations of works he had chanced upon. In another case, he added three short, falsely attributed pieces into his otherwise legitimate and carefully researched anthology El matrero. Several of these are gathered in the A Universal History of Infamy.
While Borges was the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, he had developed the idea from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book-length review of a non-existent German transcendentalist work, and the biography of its equally non-existent author. In This Craft of Verse, Borges says that in 1916 in Geneva "[I] discovered, and was overwhelmed by, Thomas Carlyle. I read Sartor Resartus, and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart."
In the introduction to his first published volume of fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges remarks, "It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." He then cites both Sartor Resartus and Samuel Butler's The Fair Haven, remarking, however, that "those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books."
On the other hand, some works were wrongly attributed to Borges, like the poem "Instantes".
Borges's change in style from regionalist criollismo to a more cosmopolitan style brought him much criticism from journals such as Contorno, a leftist, Sartre-influenced Argentine publication founded by David Viñas and his brother, along with other intellectuals such as Noé Jitrik and Adolfo Prieto. In the post-Peronist Argentina of the early 1960s, Contorno met with wide approval from the youth who challenged the authenticity of older writers such as Borges and questioned their legacy of experimentation. Magic realism and exploration of universal truths, they argued, had come at the cost of responsibility and seriousness in the face of society's problems.
The Contorno writers acknowledged Borges and Eduardo Mallea for being "doctors of technique" but argued that their work lacked substance due to their lack of interaction with the reality that they inhabited, an existentialist critique of their refusal to embrace existence and reality in their artwork.
The story "The Sect of the Phoenix" is famously interpreted to allude to the ubiquity of sexual intercourse among humans – a concept whose essential qualities the narrator of the story is not able to relate to.
With a few notable exceptions, women are almost entirely absent from Borges's fiction. However, there are some instances in Borges's later writings of romantic love, for example the story "Ulrikke" from The Book of Sand. The protagonist of the story "El muerto" also lusts after the "splendid, contemptuous, red-haired woman" of Azevedo Bandeira and later "sleeps with the woman with shining hair". Although they do not appear in the stories, women are significantly discussed as objects of unrequited love in his short stories "The Zahir" and "The Aleph". The plot of La Intrusa was based on a true story of two friends. Borges turned their fictional counterparts into brothers, excluding the possibility of a homosexual relationship.
"Emma Zunz" is Borges's only story with a female protagonist. Originally published in 1948, this work tells the tale of a young Jewish woman who kills a man in order to avenge the disgrace and suicide of her father. She carefully plans the crime, submitting to an unpleasant sexual encounter with a stranger in order to create the appearance of sexual impropriety in her intended victim. Despite the fact that she premeditates and executes a murder, the eponymous heroine of this story is surprisingly likable, both because of intrinsic qualities in the character (interestingly enough, she believes in nonviolence) and because the story is narrated from a "remote but sympathetic" point of view that highlights the poignancy of her situation.
Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, something which continually distressed the writer. He was one of several distinguished authors who never received the honour. Borges commented, "Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me".
Some observers speculated that Borges did not receive the award in his later life because of his conservative political views, or, more specifically, because he had accepted an honour from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Borges was however among the short-listed candidates several times. In 1965 he was considered along with Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda and Mikhail Sholokhov, and in 1966 a shared prize to Borges and Miguel Ángel Asturias was proposed. Borges was nominated again in 1967, and was among the final three choices considered by the committee, according to Nobel records unsealed on the 50th anniversary, in 2017. The committee considered Borges, Graham Greene and Miguel Ángel Asturias, choosing Asturias as the winner.
Many of Borges's best-known stories deal with themes of time ("The Secret Miracle"), infinity ("The Aleph"), mirrors ("Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") and labyrinths ("The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths", "The House of Asterion", "The Immortal", "The Garden of Forking Paths"). Williamson writes, "His basic contention was that fiction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an author's ability to generate 'poetic faith' in his reader."
His stories often have fantastical themes, such as a library containing every possible 410-page text ("The Library of Babel"), a man who forgets nothing he experiences ("Funes, the Memorious"), an artifact through which the user can see everything in the universe ("The Aleph"), and a year of still time given to a man standing before a firing squad ("The Secret Miracle"). Borges told realistic stories of South American life, of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, and historical figures. He mixed the real and the fantastic, fact with fiction. His interest in compounding fantasy, philosophy, and the art of translation are evident in articles such as "The Translators of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights". In the Book of Imaginary Beings, a thoroughly researched bestiary of mythical creatures, Borges wrote, "There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition." Borges's interest in fantasy was shared by Bioy Casares, with whom he coauthored several collections of tales between 1942 and 1967.
Often, especially early in his career, the mixture of fact and fantasy crossed the line into the realm of hoax or literary forgery.
"The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) presents the idea of forking paths through networks of time, none of which is the same, all of which are equal. Borges uses the recurring image of "a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression" so we "become aware of all the possible choices we might make." The forking paths have branches to represent these choices that ultimately lead to different endings. Borges saw man's search for meaning in a seemingly infinite universe as fruitless and instead uses the maze as a riddle for time, not space. He examined the themes of universal randomness ("The Lottery in Babylon") and madness ("The Zahir"). Due to the success of the "Forking Paths" story, the term "Borgesian" came to reflect a quality of narrative non-linearity.
John Clute writes: "as was earlier the case with Franz Kafka, a collection of whose work he translated as La Metamorfosis (coll. 1938), Borges's influence on twentieth century literature worldwide has been so deep and pervasive that any sf written in English since about 1960 may consciously or subliminally reflect his work. Any sf story whose structure or arguments question or play with the nature of reality - or which makes fantastic use of images of the Labyrinth, the Mirror, the Library, the Map, and/or the Book and/or the Dream to inform the world - will necessarily navigate seas of imagination he has already plumbed, apodictically, in ten or twenty short stories." Clute notes that Borges "revealed a first-hand (if at points inaccurate) knowledge of sf and its authors, including H. P. Lovecraft, Robert A Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt and Ray Bradbury" and cites Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut and Gene Wolfe as being directly influenced by Borges.
William Gibson recalls "the sensation, both complex and eerily simple", of reading "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in Labyrinths as a young man, seated at a writing desk said to have belonged to Francis Marion: "Had the concept of software been available to me, I imagine I would have felt as though I were installing something that exponentially increased what one day would be called bandwidth, though bandwidth of what, exactly, I remain unable to say. This sublime and cosmically comic fable of utterly pure information (i.e. the utterly fictive) gradually and relentlessly infiltrating and eventually consuming the quotidian, opened something within me which has never yet closed... Works we all our lives recall reading for the first time are among the truest milestones, but Labyrinths was a profoundly singular one, for me, and I believe I knew that, then, in my early adolescence. It was demonstrated to me, that afternoon. Proven. For, by the time I had finished with 'Tlön' (though one never finishes with Tlön, nor indeed any story by Borges) and had traversed 'The Garden of Forking Paths' and had wondered, literally bug-eyed, at ''Pierre Menaud, Author of the Quixote', I discovered that I had ceased to be afraid of any influence that might dwell within Francis Marion's towering desk."
The philosophical term "Borgesian conundrum" is named after him and has been defined as the ontological question of "whether the writer writes the story, or it writes him." The original concept was put forward by Borges in his essay "Kafka and His Precursors". After reviewing works that were written before those of Kafka, Borges wrote:
If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem "Fears and Scruples" by Browning foretells Kafka's work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics' vocabulary, the word 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future."
Along with other young Argentine writers of his generation, Borges initially rallied around the fictional character of Martín Fierro. Martín Fierro, a poem by José Hernández, was a dominant work of 19th century Argentine literature. Its eponymous hero became a symbol of Argentine sensibility, untied from European values – a gaucho, free, poor, pampas-dwelling.
The character Fierro is illegally drafted to serve at a border fort to defend it against the indigenous population but ultimately deserts to become a gaucho matrero, the Argentine equivalent of a North American western outlaw. Borges contributed keenly to the avant garde Martín Fierro magazine in the early 1920s.
As Borges matured, he came to a more nuanced attitude toward the Hernández poem. In his book of essays on the poem, Borges separates his admiration for the aesthetic virtues of the work from his mixed opinion of the moral virtues of its protagonist. In his essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition" (1951), Borges celebrates how Hernández expresses the Argentine character. In a key scene in the poem, Martín Fierro and El Moreno compete by improvising songs on universal themes such as time, night, and the sea, reflecting the real-world gaucho tradition of payadas, improvised musical dialogues on philosophical themes. Borges points out that Hernández evidently knew the difference between actual gaucho tradition of composing poetry versus the "gauchesque" fashion among Buenos Aires literati.
In his works he refutes the arch-nationalist interpreters of the poem and disdains others, such as critic Eleuterio Tiscornia, for their Europeanising approach. Borges denies that Argentine literature should distinguish itself by limiting itself to "local colour", which he equates with cultural nationalism. Racine and Shakespeare's work, he says, looked beyond their countries' borders. Neither, he argues, need the literature be bound to the heritage of old world Spanish or European tradition. Nor should it define itself by the conscious rejection of its colonial past. He asserts that Argentine writers need to be free to define Argentine literature anew, writing about Argentina and the world from the point of view of those who have inherited the whole of world literature. Williamson says "Borges's main argument is that the very fact of writing from the margins provides Argentine writers with a special opportunity to innovate without being bound to the canons of the centre, ... at once a part of and apart from the centre, which gives them much potential freedom".
Borges focused on universal themes, but also composed a substantial body of literature on themes from Argentine folklore and history. His first book, the poetry collection Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion for Buenos Aires), appeared in 1923. Borges's writings on things Argentine include Argentine culture ("History of the Tango"; "Inscriptions on Horse Wagons"), folklore ("Juan Muraña", "Night of the Gifts"), literature ("The Argentine Writer and Tradition", "Almafuerte"; "Evaristo Carriego"), and national concerns ("Celebration of the Monster", "Hurry, Hurry", "The Mountebank", "Pedro Salvadores"). Ultranationalists, however, continued to question his Argentine identity.
Borges's interest in Argentine themes reflects, in part, the inspiration of his family tree. Borges had an English paternal grandmother who, around 1870, married the criollo Francisco Borges, a man with a military command and a historic role in the Argentine Civil Wars in what are now Argentina and Uruguay.
Spurred by pride in his family's heritage, Borges often used those civil wars as settings in fiction and quasi-fiction (for example, "The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz," "The Dead Man," "Avelino Arredondo") as well as poetry ("General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage"). Borges's maternal great-grandfather, Manuel Isidoro Suárez, was another military hero, whom Borges immortalized in the poem "A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín". His nonfiction explores many of the themes found in his fiction. Essays such as "The History of the Tango" or his writings on the epic poem "Martín Fierro" explore Argentine themes, such as the identity of the Argentine people and of various Argentine subcultures. The varying genealogies of characters, settings, and themes in his stories, such as "La muerte y la brújula", used Argentine models without pandering to his readers or framing Argentine culture as "exotic".
In fact, contrary to what is usually supposed, the geographies found in his fictions often do not correspond to those of real-world Argentina. In his essay "El escritor argentino y la tradición", Borges notes that the very absence of camels in the Qur'an was proof enough that it was an Arabian work (despite the fact that camels are, in fact, mentioned in the Qur'an). He suggested that only someone trying to write an "Arab" work would purposefully include a camel. He uses this example to illustrate how his dialogue with universal existential concerns was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos and tangos.
At the time of the Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816, the population was predominantly criollo (of Spanish ancestry). From the mid-1850s on waves of immigration from Europe, especially Italy and Spain, arrived in the country, and in the following decades the Argentine national identity diversified. Borges was writing in a strongly European literary context, immersed in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature. He also read translations of Near Eastern and Far Eastern works. Borges's writing is also informed by scholarship of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, including prominent religious figures, heretics, and mystics.
Religion and heresy are explored in such stories as "Averroes's Search", "The Writing of the God", "The Theologians", and "Three Versions of Judas". The curious inversion of mainstream Christian concepts of redemption in the last story is characteristic of Borges's approach to theology in his literature.
In describing himself, he said, "I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors." As a young man, he visited the frontier pampas which extend beyond Argentina into Uruguay and Brazil. Borges said that his father wished him "to become a citizen of the world, a great cosmopolitan," in the way of Henry and William James.
Borges lived and studied in Switzerland and Spain as a young student. As Borges matured, he traveled through Argentina as a lecturer and, internationally, as a visiting professor; he continued to tour the world as he grew older, finally settling in Geneva where he had spent some of his youth. Drawing on the influence of many times and places, Borges's work belittled nationalism and racism. However, Borges also scorned his own Basque ancestry and criticised the abolition of slavery in America because he believed black people were happier remaining uneducated and without freedom. Portraits of diverse coexisting cultures characteristic of Argentina are especially pronounced in the book Six Problems for don Isidoro Parodi (co-authored with Bioy Casares) and Death and the Compass. Borges wrote that he considered Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes to be "the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time."
Borges was also an admirer of Asian culture, e.g. the ancient Chinese board game of Go, about which he penned some verses, while "The Garden of Forking Paths" had a strong Chinese theme.
Borges was rooted in the Modernism predominant in its early years and was influenced by Symbolism. Like Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, he combined an interest in his native culture with broader perspectives, also sharing their multilingualism and inventiveness with language. However, while Nabokov and Joyce tended toward progressively larger works, Borges remained a miniaturist. His work progressed away from what he referred to as "the baroque": his later style is far more transparent and naturalistic than his earlier works. Borges represented the humanist view of media that stressed the social aspect of art driven by emotion. If art represented the tool, then Borges was more interested in how the tool could be used to relate to people.
Existentialism saw its apogee during the years of Borges's greatest artistic production. It has been argued that his choice of topics largely ignored existentialism's central tenets. Critic Paul de Man notes, "Whatever Borges's existential anxieties may be, they have little in common with Sartre's robustly prosaic view of literature, with the earnestness of Camus' moralism, or with the weighty profundity of German existential thought. Rather, they are the consistent expansion of a purely poetic consciousness to its furthest limits."
The essay collection Borges y la Matemática (Borges and Mathematics, 2003) by Argentine mathematician and writer Guillermo Martínez outlines how Borges used concepts from mathematics in his work. Martínez states that Borges had, for example, at least a superficial knowledge of set theory, which he handles with elegance in stories such as "The Book of Sand". Other books such as The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch (2008) and Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics by Floyd Merrell (1991) also explore this relationship.
Fritz Mauthner, philosopher of language and author of the Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Dictionary of Philosophy), had an important influence on Borges. Borges always recognized the influence of this German philosopher. According to the literary review Sur, the book was one of the five books most noted and read by Borges. The first time that Borges mentioned Mauthner was in 1928 in his book The language of the Argentines (El idioma de los argentinos). In a 1962 interview Borges described Mauthner as possessing a fine sense of humor as well as great knowledge and erudition.
In an interview, Denis Dutton asked Borges who were the "philosophers who have influenced your works, in whom you've been the most interested". In reply, Borges named Berkeley and Schopenhauer. He was also influenced by Spinoza, about whom Borges wrote a famous poem.
It is not without humour that Borges once wrote "Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca." (I always imagined Paradise to be some kind of a library.) | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (/ˈbɔːrhɛs/ BOR-hess, Spanish: [ˈxoɾxe ˈlwis ˈβoɾxes] ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the growing number of English translations, the Latin American Boom, and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: \"He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born into an educated middle-class family on 24 August 1899. They were in comfortable circumstances but not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires so the family resided in Palermo, then a poorer neighbourhood. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of criollo (Spanish) origin. Her family had been much involved in the European settling of South America and the Argentine War of Independence, and she spoke often of their heroic actions.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "His 1929 book Cuaderno San Martín includes the poem \"Isidoro Acevedo\", commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, Acevedo Laprida fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, and Los Corrales in 1880. Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "According to a study by Antonio Andrade, Jorge Luis Borges had Portuguese ancestry: Borges's great-grandfather, Francisco, was born in Portugal in 1770, and lived in Torre de Moncorvo, in the North of the country before he emigrated to Argentina, where he married Cármen Lafinur.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Borges's own father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer, and wrote the novel El caudillo in 1921. Borges Haslam was born in Entre Ríos of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent, the son of Francisco Borges Lafinur, a colonel, and Frances Ann Haslam, an Englishwoman. Borges Haslam grew up speaking English at home. The family frequently traveled to Europe. Borges Haslam wed Leonor Acevedo Suárez in 1898 and their offspring also included the painter Norah Borges, sister of Jorge Luis Borges.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Aged ten, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish. It was published in a local journal, but Borges's friends thought the real author was his father. Borges Haslam was a lawyer and psychology teacher who harboured literary aspirations. Borges said his father \"tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt\", despite the 1921 opus El caudillo. Jorge Luis Borges wrote, \"as most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action.\"",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Jorge Luis Borges was taught at home until the age of 11, was bilingual in Spanish and English, reading Shakespeare in the latter at the age of twelve. The family lived in a large house with an English library of over one thousand volumes; Borges would later remark that \"if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.\"",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "His father gave up practicing law due to the failing eyesight that would eventually affect his son. In 1914, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and spent the next decade in Europe. In Geneva, Borges Haslam was treated by an eye specialist, while his son and daughter attended school. Jorge Luis learned French, read Thomas Carlyle in English, and began to read philosophy in German. In 1917, when he was eighteen, he met writer Maurice Abramowicz and began a literary friendship that would last for the remainder of his life. He received his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The Borges family decided that, due to political unrest in Argentina, they would remain in Switzerland during the war. After World War I, the family spent three years living in various cities: Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. They remained in Europe until 1921.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "At that time, Borges discovered the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem (1915) which became influential to his work. In Spain, Borges fell in with and became a member of the avant-garde, anti-Modernismo Ultraist literary movement, inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, close to the Imagists. His first poem, \"Hymn to the Sea,\" written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia. While in Spain, he met such noted Spanish writers as Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires. He had little formal education, no qualifications and few friends. He wrote to a friend that Buenos Aires was now \"overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and decorative young ladies\". He brought with him the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career, publishing surreal poems and essays in literary journals. In 1923, Borges first published his poetry, a collection called Fervor de Buenos Aires and contributed to the avant-garde review Martín Fierro.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Borges co-founded the journals Prisma, a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires, and Proa. Later in life, Borges regretted some of these early publications, attempting to purchase all known copies to ensure their destruction.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "By the mid-1930s, he began to explore existential questions and fiction. He worked in a style that Argentine critic Ana María Barrenechea has called \"irreality.\" Many other Latin American writers, such as Juan Rulfo, Juan José Arreola, and Alejo Carpentier, were investigating these themes, influenced by the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. In this vein, Borges biographer Edwin Williamson underlines the danger of inferring an autobiographically inspired basis for the content or tone of certain of his works: books, philosophy, and imagination were as much a source of real inspiration to him as his own lived experience, if not more so.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "From the first issue, Borges was a regular contributor to Sur, founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo. It was then Argentina's most important literary journal and helped Borges find his fame. Ocampo introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy Casares, another well-known figure of Argentine literature who was to become a frequent collaborator and close friend. They wrote a number of works together, some under the nom de plume H. Bustos Domecq, including a parody detective series and fantasy stories. During these years, a family friend, Macedonio Fernández, became a major influence on Borges. The two would preside over discussions in cafés, at country retreats, or in Fernandez's tiny apartment in the Balvanera district. He appears by name in Borges's Dialogue about a Dialogue, in which the two discuss the immortality of the soul.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1933, Borges gained an editorial appointment at Revista Multicolor de los Sábados (the literary supplement of the Buenos Aires newspaper Crítica), where he first published the pieces collected as Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) in 1935. The book includes two types of writing: the first lies somewhere between non-fiction essays and short stories, using fictional techniques to tell essentially true stories. The second consists of literary forgeries, which Borges initially passed off as translations of passages from famous but seldom-read works.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the following years, he served as a literary adviser for the publishing house Emecé Editores, and from 1936 to 1939 wrote weekly columns for El Hogar. In 1938, Borges found work as the first assistant at the Miguel Cané Municipal Library. It was in a working-class area and there were so few books that cataloging more than one hundred books per day, he was told, would leave little to do for the other staff and would make them look bad. The task took him about an hour each day and the rest of his time he spent in the basement of the library, writing and translating.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Borges's father died in 1938, shortly before his 64th birthday. On Christmas Eve that year, Borges had a severe head injury; during treatment, he nearly died of sepsis. While recovering from the accident, Borges began exploring a new style of writing for which he would become famous. His first story written after his accident, \"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,\" came out in May 1939. One of his most famous works, \"Menard\" examines the nature of authorship, as well as the relationship between an author and his historical context. His first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), appeared in 1941, composed mostly of works previously published in Sur.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The title story concerns a Chinese professor in England, Dr. Yu Tsun, who spies for Germany during World War I, in an attempt to prove to the authorities that an Asian person is able to obtain the information that they seek. A combination of book and maze, it can be read in many ways. Through it, Borges arguably invented the hypertext novel and went on to describe a theory of the universe based upon the structure of such a novel.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Composed of stories taking up over sixty pages, the book was generally well received, but El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan failed to garner for him the literary prizes many in his circle expected. Victoria Ocampo dedicated a large portion of the July 1942 issue of Sur to a \"Reparation for Borges.\" Numerous leading writers and critics from Argentina and throughout the Spanish-speaking world contributed writings to the \"reparation\" project.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "With his vision beginning to fade in his early thirties and unable to support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer. He became an increasingly public figure, obtaining appointments as president of the Argentine Society of Writers and as professor of English and American Literature at the Argentine Association of English Culture. His short story \"Emma Zunz\" was made into a film (under the name of Días de odio, Days of Hate, directed in 1954 by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson). Around this time, Borges also began writing screenplays.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 1955, he became director of the Argentine National Library. By the late 1950s he had become completely blind. Neither the coincidence nor the irony of his blindness as a writer escaped Borges:",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "His later collection of poetry, Elogio de la Sombra (In Praise of Darkness), develops this theme. In 1956 the University of Cuyo awarded Borges the first of many honorary doctorates and the following year he received the National Prize for Literature. From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and other temporary appointments at other universities. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1964. In the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "As his eyesight deteriorated, Borges relied increasingly on his mother's help. When he was not able to read and write anymore (he never learned to read Braille), his mother, to whom he had always been close, became his personal secretary. When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Eight of Borges's poems appear in the 1943 anthology of Spanish American Poets by H. R. Hays. \"The Garden of Forking Paths\", one of the first Borges stories to be translated into English, appeared in the August 1948 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, translated by Anthony Boucher. Though several other Borges translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies during the 1950s (and one story appeared in the science fiction magazine Fantastic Universe in 1960), his international fame dates from the early 1960s.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 1961, Borges received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. While Beckett had garnered a distinguished reputation in Europe and America, Borges had been largely unknown and untranslated in the English-speaking world and the prize stirred great interest in his work. The Italian government named Borges Commendatore and the University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker Chair. This led to his first lecture tour in the United States. In 1962, two major anthologies of Borges's writings were published in English by New York presses: Ficciones and Labyrinths. In that year, Borges began lecture tours of Europe. Numerous honors were to accumulate over the years such as a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America \"for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre\" (1976), the Balzan Prize (for Philology, Linguistics and literary Criticism) and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (all 1980), as well as the French Legion of Honour (1983) and the Diamond Konex Award for Literature Arts as the most important writer in the last decade in his country.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, through whom he became better known in the English-speaking world. Di Giovanni contended that Borges's popularity was due to his writing with multiple languages in mind and deliberately using Latin words as a bridge from Spanish to English.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Borges continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios (Book of Imaginary Beings, 1967, co-written with Margarita Guerrero), El informe de Brodie (Dr. Brodie's Report, 1970), and El libro de arena (The Book of Sand, 1975). He lectured prolifically. Many of these lectures were anthologized in volumes such as Siete noches (Seven Nights) and Nueve ensayos dantescos (Nine Dantesque Essays).",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "His presence in 1967 on campus at the University of Virginia (UVA) in the U.S. influenced a group of students among whom was Jared Loewenstein, who would later become founder and curator of the Jorge Luis Borges Collection at UVA, one of the largest repositories of documents and manuscripts pertaining to Borges's early works. In 1984, he travelled to Athens, Greece, and later to Rethymnon, Crete, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the School of Philosophy at the University of Crete.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In the mid-1960s, Borges became acquainted with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, who was at the time a young Jesuit priest. In 1979, Borges spoke appreciatively and at some length about Bergoglio to the Argentine poet and essayist Roberto Alifano.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In 1967, Borges married the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. Friends believed that his mother, who was 90 and anticipating her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. The marriage lasted less than three years. After a legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at age 99. Thereafter, he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her, cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper of many decades.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "From 1975 until the time of his death, Borges traveled internationally. He was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry. In April 1986, a few months before his death, he married her via an attorney in Paraguay, in what was then a common practice among Argentines wishing to circumvent the Argentine laws of the time regarding divorce. On his religious views, Borges declared himself an agnostic, clarifying: \"Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen.\" Borges was taught to read the Bible by his English Protestant grandmother and he prayed the Our Father each night because of a promise he made to his mother. He also died in the presence of a priest.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "During his final days in Geneva, Borges began brooding about the possibility of an afterlife. Although calm and collected about his own death, Borges began probing Kodama as to whether she inclined more towards the Shinto beliefs of her father or the Catholicism of her mother. Kodama \"had always regarded Borges as an Agnostic, as she was herself\", but given the insistence of his questioning, she offered to call someone more \"qualified\". Borges responded, \"You are asking me if I want a priest.\" He then instructed her to call two clergymen, a Catholic priest, in memory of his mother, and a Protestant minister, in memory of his English grandmother. He was visited first by Father Pierre Jacquet and by Pastor Edouard de Montmollin.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Borges died of liver cancer on 14 June 1986, aged 86, in Geneva. His burial was preceded by an ecumenical service at the Protestant Cathédrale de Saint Pierre on 18 June. With many Swiss and Argentine dignitaries present, Pastor de Montmollin read the First Chapter of St John's Gospel. He then preached that \"Borges was a man who had unceasingly searched for the right word, the term that could sum up the whole, the final meaning of things.\" He said, however, that no man can reach that word through his own efforts and in trying becomes lost in a labyrinth. Pastor de Montmollin concluded, \"It is not man who discovers the word, it is the Word that comes to him.\"",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Father Jacquet also preached, saying that, when visiting Borges before his death, he had found \"a man full of love, who received from the Church the forgiveness of his sins\". After the funeral, Borges was laid to rest in Geneva's Cimetière de Plainpalais. His grave, marked by a rough-hewn headstone, is adorned with carvings derived from Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse art and literature.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Maria Kodama, his widow and heir on the basis of the marriage and two wills, gained control over his works. Her assertive administration of his estate resulted in a bitter dispute with the French publisher Gallimard regarding the republication of the complete works of Borges in French, with Pierre Assouline in Le Nouvel Observateur (August 2006) calling her \"an obstacle to the dissemination of the works of Borges\". Kodama took legal action against Assouline, considering the remark unjustified and defamatory, asking for a symbolic compensation of one euro.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Kodama also rescinded all publishing rights for existing collections of his work in English, including the translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in which Borges himself collaborated, and from which di Giovanni would have received an unusually high fifty percent of the royalties. Kodama commissioned new translations by Andrew Hurley, which have become the official translations in English.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "David Foster Wallace wrote: \"The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations of religious or ideological certainty -- a mind turned wholly inward on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.\"",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "During the 1920s and 1930s, Borges was a vocal supporter of Hipólito Yrigoyen and the social democratic Radical Civic Union. In 1945, Borges signed a manifesto calling for an end to military rule and the establishment of political liberty and democratic elections. By the 1960s, he had grown more skeptical of democracy. During a 1971 conference at Columbia University, a creative writing student asked Borges what he regarded as \"a writer's duty to his time\". Borges replied, \"I think a writer's duty is to be a writer, and if he can be a good writer, he is doing his duty. Besides, I think of my own opinions as being superficial. For example, I am a Conservative, I hate the Communists, I hate the Nazis, I hate the anti-Semites, and so on; but I don't allow these opinions to find their way into my writings—except, of course, when I was greatly elated about the Six-Day War. Generally speaking, I think of keeping them in watertight compartments. Everybody knows my opinions, but as for my dreams and my stories, they should be allowed their full freedom, I think. I don't want to intrude into them, I'm writing fiction, not fables.\" In the 1980s, towards the end of his life, Borges regained his earlier faith in democracy and held it out as the only hope for Argentina. In 1983, Borges applauded the election of the Radical Civic Union's Raúl Alfonsín and welcomed the end of military rule with the following words: \"I once wrote that democracy is the abuse of statistics ... On October 30, 1983, Argentine democracy refuted me splendidly. Splendidly and resoundingly.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Borges recurrently declared himself a \"Spencerian anarchist who believes in the individual and not in the State\" due to his father's influence. In an interview with Richard Burgin during the late 1960s, Borges described himself as a \"mild\" adherent of classical liberalism. He further recalled that his opposition to communism and to Marxism was absorbed in his childhood, stating: \"Well, I have been brought up to think that the individual should be strong and the State should be weak. I couldn't be enthusiastic about theories where the State is more important than the individual.\" After the overthrow via coup d'état of President Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, Borges supported efforts to purge Argentina's Government of Peronists and dismantle the former President's welfare state. He was enraged that the Communist Party of Argentina opposed these measures and sharply criticized them in lectures and in print. Borges's opposition to the Party in this matter ultimately led to a permanent rift with his longtime lover, Argentine Communist Estela Canto.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In a 1956 interview given to El Hogar, he stated that \"[Communists] are in favor of totalitarian regimes and systematically combat freedom of thought, oblivious of the fact that the principal victims of dictatorships are, precisely, intelligence and culture.\" Borges elaborated: \"Many people are in favor of dictatorships because they allow them to avoid thinking for themselves. Everything is presented to them ready-made. There are even agencies of the State that supply them with opinions, passwords, slogans, and even idols to exalt or cast down according to the prevailing wind or in keeping with the directives of the thinking heads of the single party.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In later years, Borges frequently expressed contempt for Marxist and Communist authors, poets, and intellectuals. In an interview with Burgin, Borges referred to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as \"a very fine poet\" but a \"very mean man\" for unconditionally supporting the Soviet Union and demonizing the United States. Borges commented about Neruda, \"Now he knows that's rubbish.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In the same interview, Borges also criticized famed poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was abducted by Nationalist soldiers and executed without trial during the Spanish Civil War. In Borges's opinion, Lorca's poetry and plays, when examined against his tragic death, appeared better than they actually were.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In 1934, Argentine ultra-nationalists, sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, asserted Borges was secretly Jewish, and by implication, not truly Argentinian. Borges responded with the essay \"Yo, Judío\" (\"I, a Jew\"), a reference to the old phrase \"Yo, Argentino\" (\"I, an Argentine\") uttered by potential victims during pogroms against Argentine Jews, to signify one was not Jewish. In the essay, Borges declares he would be proud to be a Jew, and remarks that any pure Castilian is likely to come from ancient Jewish descent, from a millennium ago.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Both before and during the Second World War, Borges regularly published essays attacking the Nazi police state and its racist ideology. His outrage was fueled by his deep love for German literature. In an essay published in 1937, Borges attacked the Nazi Party's use of children's books to inflame antisemitism. He wrote, \"I don't know if the world can do without German civilization, but I do know that its corruption by the teachings of hatred is a crime.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In a 1938 essay, Borges reviewed an anthology which rewrote German authors of the past to fit the Nazi party line. He was disgusted by what he described as Germany's \"chaotic descent into darkness\" and the attendant rewriting of history. He argued that such books sacrificed the German people's culture, history and integrity in the name of restoring their national honour. Such use of children's books for propaganda he writes, \"perfect the criminal arts of barbarians.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In a 1944 essay, Borges postulated,",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena's hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have known that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In 1946, Borges published the short story \"Deutsches Requiem\", which masquerades as the last testament of a condemned Nazi war criminal named Otto Dietrich zur Linde.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In a 1971 conference at Columbia University, Borges was asked about the story by a student from the creative writing program. He recalled, \"When the Germans were defeated I felt great joy and relief, but at the same time I thought of the German defeat as being somehow tragic, because here we have perhaps the most educated people in Europe, who have a fine literature, a fine tradition of philosophy and poetry. Yet these people were bamboozled by a madman named Adolf Hitler, and I think there is tragedy there.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In a 1967 interview with Burgin, Borges recalled how his interactions with Argentina's Nazi sympathisers led him to create the story. He recalled, \"And then I realized that those people that were on the side of Germany, that they never thought of German victories or the German glory. What they really liked was the idea of the Blitzkrieg, of London being on fire, of the country being destroyed. As to the German fighters, they took no stock in them. Then I thought, well now Germany has lost, now America has saved us from this nightmare, but since nobody can doubt on which side I stood, I'll see what can be done from a literary point of view in favor of the Nazis. And then I created the ideal Nazi.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "At Columbia University in 1971, Borges further elaborated on the story's creation, \"I tried to imagine what a real Nazi might be like. I mean someone who thought of violence as being praiseworthy for its own sake. Then I thought that this archetype of the Nazis wouldn't mind being defeated; after all, defeats and victories are mere matters of chance. He would still be glad of the fact, even if the Americans and British won the war. Naturally, when I am with Nazis, I find they are not my idea of what a Nazi is, but this wasn't meant to be a political tract. It was meant to stand for the fact that there was something tragic in the fate of a real Nazi. Except that I wonder if a real Nazi ever existed. At least, when I went to Germany, I never met one. They were all feeling sorry for themselves and wanted me to feel sorry for them as well.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In 1946, Argentine President Juan Perón began transforming Argentina into a one-party state with the assistance of his wife, Evita. Almost immediately, the spoils system was the rule of the day, as ideological critics of the ruling Partido Justicialista were fired from government jobs. During this period, Borges was informed that he was being \"promoted\" from his position at the Miguel Cané Library to a post as inspector of poultry and rabbits at the Buenos Aires municipal market. Upon demanding to know the reason, Borges was told, \"Well, you were on the side of the Allies, what do you expect?\" Borges resigned the following day.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Perón's treatment of Borges became a cause célèbre for the Argentine intelligentsia. The Argentine Society of Writers (SADE) held a formal dinner in his honour. At the dinner, a speech was read which Borges had written for the occasion. It said:",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy. Bellboys babbling orders, portraits of caudillos, prearranged cheers or insults, walls covered with names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking ... Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the duties of a writer. Need I remind readers of Martín Fierro or Don Segundo that individualism is an old Argentine virtue.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In the aftermath, Borges found himself much in demand as a lecturer and one of the intellectual leaders of the Argentine opposition. In 1951 he was asked by anti-Peronist friends to run for president of SADE. Borges, then having depression caused by a failed romance, reluctantly accepted. He later recalled that he would awake every morning and remember that Perón was president and feel deeply depressed and ashamed. Perón's government had seized control of the Argentine mass media and regarded SADE with indifference. Borges later recalled, however, \"Many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside its doors.\" Meanwhile, SADE became an increasing refuge for critics of the Perón government. SADE official Luisa Mercedes Levinson noted, \"We would gather every week to tell the latest jokes about the ruling couple and even dared to sing the songs of the French Resistance, as well as 'La Marseillaise'\".",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "After Evita Perón's death on 26 July 1952, Borges received a visit from two policemen, who ordered him to put up two portraits of the ruling couple on the premises of SADE. Borges indignantly refused, calling it a ridiculous demand. The policemen replied that he would soon face the consequences. The Justicialist Party placed Borges under 24-hour surveillance and sent policemen to sit in on his lectures; in September they ordered SADE to be permanently closed down. Like much of the Argentine opposition to Perón, SADE had become marginalized due to persecution by the State, and very few active members remained.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "According to Edwin Williamson,",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Borges had agreed to stand for the presidency of the SADE in order [to] fight for intellectual freedom, but he also wanted to avenge the humiliation he believed he had suffered in 1946, when the Peronists had proposed to make him an inspector of chickens. In his letter of 1950 to Attilio Rossi, he claimed that his infamous promotion had been a clever way the Peronists had found of damaging him and diminishing his reputation. The closure of the SADE meant that the Peronists had damaged him a second time, as was borne out by the visit of the Spanish writer Julián Marías, who arrived in Buenos Aires shortly after the closure of the SADE. It was impossible for Borges, as president, to hold the usual reception for the distinguished visitor; instead, one of Borges's friends brought a lamb from his ranch, and they had it roasted at a tavern across the road from the SADE building on Calle Mexico. After dinner, a friendly janitor let them into the premises, and they showed Marías around by candlelight. That tiny group of writers leading a foreign guest through a dark building by the light of guttering candles was vivid proof of the extent to which the SADE had been diminished under the rule of Juan Perón.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "On 16 September 1955, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu's Revolución Libertadora toppled the ruling party and forced Perón into exile. Borges was overjoyed and joined demonstrators marching through the streets of Buenos Aires. According to Williamson, Borges shouted, \"Viva la Patria\", until his voice grew hoarse. Due to the influence of Borges's mother and his own role on the opposition to Peron, the provisional government appointed Borges as the Director of the National Library.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In his essay L'Illusion Comique, Borges wrote there were two histories of Peronism in Argentina. The first he described as \"the criminal one\", composed of the police state tactics used against both real and imagined anti-Peronists. The second history was, according to Borges, \"the theatrical one\" composed of \"tales and fables made for consumption by dolts.\" He argued that, despite their claims to detest capitalism, Juan and Eva Perón \"copied its methods, dictating names and slogans to the people\" in the same way that multi-national corporations \"impose their razor blades, cigarettes, and washing machines.\" Borges then listed the numerous conspiracy theories the ruling couple dictated to their followers and how those theories were accepted without question.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Borges concluded:",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "It is useless to list the examples; one can only denounce the duplicity of the fictions of the former regime, which can't be believed and were believed. It will be said that the public's lack of sophistication is enough to explain the contradiction; I believe that the cause is more profound. Coleridge spoke of the \"willing suspension of disbelief,\" that is, poetic faith; Samuel Johnson said, in defense of Shakespeare, that the spectators at a tragedy do not believe they are in Alexandria in the first act and Rome in the second but submit to the pleasure of a fiction. Similarly, the lies of a dictatorship are neither believed nor disbelieved; they pertain to an intermediate plane, and their purpose is to conceal or justify sordid or atrocious realities. They pertain to the pathetic or the clumsily sentimental. Happily, for the enlightenment and security of the Argentines, the current regime has understood that the function of government is not to inspire pathos.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In a 1967 interview, Borges said, \"Perón was a humbug, and he knew it, and everybody knew it. But Perón could be very cruel. I mean, he had people tortured, killed. And his wife was a common prostitute.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "When Perón returned from exile in 1973 and regained the Presidency, Borges was enraged. In a 1975 interview for National Geographic, he said \"Damn, the snobs are back in the saddle. If their posters and slogans again defile the city, I'll be glad I've lost my sight. Well, they can't humiliate me as they did before my books sold well.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "After being accused of being unforgiving, Borges quipped, \"I resented Perón's making Argentina look ridiculous to the world ... as in 1951, when he announced control over thermonuclear fusion, which still hasn't happened anywhere but in the sun and the stars. For a time, Argentines hesitated to wear band aids for fear friends would ask, 'Did the atomic bomb go off in your hand?' A shame, because Argentina really has world-class scientists.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "After Borges's death in 1986, the Peronist Partido Justicialista declined to send a delegate to the writer's memorial service in Buenos Aires. A spokesman for the Party said that this was in reaction to \"certain declarations he had made about the country.\" Later, at the City Council of Buenos Aires, Peronist politicians refused to honor Borges as an Argentine, commenting that he \"chose to die abroad.\" When infuriated politicians from the other parties demanded to know the real reason, the Peronists finally explained that Borges had made statements about Evita Perón which they called \"unacceptable\".",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "During the 1970s, Borges at first expressed support for Argentina's military junta, but was scandalized by the junta's actions during the Dirty War. In protest against their support of the regime, Borges ceased publishing in the newspaper La Nación.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In 1985, he wrote a short poem about the Falklands War called Juan López y John Ward, about two fictional soldiers (one from each side), who died in the Falklands, in which he refers to \"islands that were too famous\". He also said about the war: \"The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Borges was an observer at the trials of the military junta in 1985 and wrote that \"not to judge and condemn the crimes would be to encourage impunity and to become, somehow, its accomplice.\" Borges added that \"the news of the missing people, the crimes and atrocities [the military] committed\" had inspired him to return to his earlier Emersonian faith in democracy.",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Borges believed that indigenous peoples in what is now called Argentina had no traditions: \"There's no native tradition of any kind since the Indians here were mere barbarians. We have to fall back on the European tradition, why not? It's a very fine tradition.\"",
"title": "Political opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort argue that Borges \"may have been the most important figure in Spanish-language literature since Cervantes. He was clearly of tremendous influence, writing intricate poems, short stories, and essays that instantiated concepts of dizzying power.\" Borges's work has been compared to that of Homer and Milton. Indeed, the critic Harold Bloom numbers Borges among the key figures of the Western literary canon.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In addition to short stories for which he is most noted, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, literary criticism, and edited numerous anthologies. His longest work of fiction is a fourteen-page story, \"The Congress\", first published in 1971. His late-onset blindness strongly influenced his later writing. Borges wrote: \"When I think of what I've lost, I ask, 'Who know themselves better than the blind?' – for every thought becomes a tool.\"",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, integrating these through literature, sometimes playfully, sometimes with great seriousness.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned (it came and went, with a struggle between advancing age and advances in eye surgery), he increasingly focused on writing poetry, since he could memorize an entire work in progress.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "His poems embrace the same wide range of interests as his fiction, along with issues that emerge in his critical works and translations, and from more personal musings. For example, his interest in idealism runs through his work, reflected in the fictional world of Tlön in \"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius\" and in his essay \"A New Refutation of Time\".",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Borges was a notable translator. He translated works of literature in English, French, German, Old English, and Old Norse into Spanish. His first publication, for a Buenos Aires newspaper, was a translation of Oscar Wilde's story \"The Happy Prince\" into Spanish when he was nine. At the end of his life he produced a Spanish-language version of a part of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. He also translated (while simultaneously subtly transforming) the works of, among others, Ambrose Bierce, William Faulkner, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf. Borges wrote and lectured extensively on the art of translation, holding that a translation may improve upon the original, may even be unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid. Borges employed the devices of literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work, both forms of modern pseudo-epigrapha.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Borges's best-known set of literary forgeries date from his early work as a translator and literary critic with a regular column in the Argentine magazine El Hogar. Along with publishing numerous legitimate translations, he also published original works, for example, in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg or One Thousand and One Nights, originally claiming them to be translations of works he had chanced upon. In another case, he added three short, falsely attributed pieces into his otherwise legitimate and carefully researched anthology El matrero. Several of these are gathered in the A Universal History of Infamy.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "While Borges was the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, he had developed the idea from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a book-length review of a non-existent German transcendentalist work, and the biography of its equally non-existent author. In This Craft of Verse, Borges says that in 1916 in Geneva \"[I] discovered, and was overwhelmed by, Thomas Carlyle. I read Sartor Resartus, and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart.\"",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In the introduction to his first published volume of fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges remarks, \"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.\" He then cites both Sartor Resartus and Samuel Butler's The Fair Haven, remarking, however, that \"those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books.\"",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "On the other hand, some works were wrongly attributed to Borges, like the poem \"Instantes\".",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Borges's change in style from regionalist criollismo to a more cosmopolitan style brought him much criticism from journals such as Contorno, a leftist, Sartre-influenced Argentine publication founded by David Viñas and his brother, along with other intellectuals such as Noé Jitrik and Adolfo Prieto. In the post-Peronist Argentina of the early 1960s, Contorno met with wide approval from the youth who challenged the authenticity of older writers such as Borges and questioned their legacy of experimentation. Magic realism and exploration of universal truths, they argued, had come at the cost of responsibility and seriousness in the face of society's problems.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The Contorno writers acknowledged Borges and Eduardo Mallea for being \"doctors of technique\" but argued that their work lacked substance due to their lack of interaction with the reality that they inhabited, an existentialist critique of their refusal to embrace existence and reality in their artwork.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The story \"The Sect of the Phoenix\" is famously interpreted to allude to the ubiquity of sexual intercourse among humans – a concept whose essential qualities the narrator of the story is not able to relate to.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "With a few notable exceptions, women are almost entirely absent from Borges's fiction. However, there are some instances in Borges's later writings of romantic love, for example the story \"Ulrikke\" from The Book of Sand. The protagonist of the story \"El muerto\" also lusts after the \"splendid, contemptuous, red-haired woman\" of Azevedo Bandeira and later \"sleeps with the woman with shining hair\". Although they do not appear in the stories, women are significantly discussed as objects of unrequited love in his short stories \"The Zahir\" and \"The Aleph\". The plot of La Intrusa was based on a true story of two friends. Borges turned their fictional counterparts into brothers, excluding the possibility of a homosexual relationship.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "\"Emma Zunz\" is Borges's only story with a female protagonist. Originally published in 1948, this work tells the tale of a young Jewish woman who kills a man in order to avenge the disgrace and suicide of her father. She carefully plans the crime, submitting to an unpleasant sexual encounter with a stranger in order to create the appearance of sexual impropriety in her intended victim. Despite the fact that she premeditates and executes a murder, the eponymous heroine of this story is surprisingly likable, both because of intrinsic qualities in the character (interestingly enough, she believes in nonviolence) and because the story is narrated from a \"remote but sympathetic\" point of view that highlights the poignancy of her situation.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, something which continually distressed the writer. He was one of several distinguished authors who never received the honour. Borges commented, \"Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me\".",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Some observers speculated that Borges did not receive the award in his later life because of his conservative political views, or, more specifically, because he had accepted an honour from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Borges was however among the short-listed candidates several times. In 1965 he was considered along with Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda and Mikhail Sholokhov, and in 1966 a shared prize to Borges and Miguel Ángel Asturias was proposed. Borges was nominated again in 1967, and was among the final three choices considered by the committee, according to Nobel records unsealed on the 50th anniversary, in 2017. The committee considered Borges, Graham Greene and Miguel Ángel Asturias, choosing Asturias as the winner.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Many of Borges's best-known stories deal with themes of time (\"The Secret Miracle\"), infinity (\"The Aleph\"), mirrors (\"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius\") and labyrinths (\"The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths\", \"The House of Asterion\", \"The Immortal\", \"The Garden of Forking Paths\"). Williamson writes, \"His basic contention was that fiction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an author's ability to generate 'poetic faith' in his reader.\"",
"title": "Fact, fantasy and non-linearity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "His stories often have fantastical themes, such as a library containing every possible 410-page text (\"The Library of Babel\"), a man who forgets nothing he experiences (\"Funes, the Memorious\"), an artifact through which the user can see everything in the universe (\"The Aleph\"), and a year of still time given to a man standing before a firing squad (\"The Secret Miracle\"). Borges told realistic stories of South American life, of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, and historical figures. He mixed the real and the fantastic, fact with fiction. His interest in compounding fantasy, philosophy, and the art of translation are evident in articles such as \"The Translators of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights\". In the Book of Imaginary Beings, a thoroughly researched bestiary of mythical creatures, Borges wrote, \"There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.\" Borges's interest in fantasy was shared by Bioy Casares, with whom he coauthored several collections of tales between 1942 and 1967.",
"title": "Fact, fantasy and non-linearity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Often, especially early in his career, the mixture of fact and fantasy crossed the line into the realm of hoax or literary forgery.",
"title": "Fact, fantasy and non-linearity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "\"The Garden of Forking Paths\" (1941) presents the idea of forking paths through networks of time, none of which is the same, all of which are equal. Borges uses the recurring image of \"a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression\" so we \"become aware of all the possible choices we might make.\" The forking paths have branches to represent these choices that ultimately lead to different endings. Borges saw man's search for meaning in a seemingly infinite universe as fruitless and instead uses the maze as a riddle for time, not space. He examined the themes of universal randomness (\"The Lottery in Babylon\") and madness (\"The Zahir\"). Due to the success of the \"Forking Paths\" story, the term \"Borgesian\" came to reflect a quality of narrative non-linearity.",
"title": "Fact, fantasy and non-linearity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "John Clute writes: \"as was earlier the case with Franz Kafka, a collection of whose work he translated as La Metamorfosis (coll. 1938), Borges's influence on twentieth century literature worldwide has been so deep and pervasive that any sf written in English since about 1960 may consciously or subliminally reflect his work. Any sf story whose structure or arguments question or play with the nature of reality - or which makes fantastic use of images of the Labyrinth, the Mirror, the Library, the Map, and/or the Book and/or the Dream to inform the world - will necessarily navigate seas of imagination he has already plumbed, apodictically, in ten or twenty short stories.\" Clute notes that Borges \"revealed a first-hand (if at points inaccurate) knowledge of sf and its authors, including H. P. Lovecraft, Robert A Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt and Ray Bradbury\" and cites Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut and Gene Wolfe as being directly influenced by Borges.",
"title": "Fact, fantasy and non-linearity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "William Gibson recalls \"the sensation, both complex and eerily simple\", of reading \"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius\" in Labyrinths as a young man, seated at a writing desk said to have belonged to Francis Marion: \"Had the concept of software been available to me, I imagine I would have felt as though I were installing something that exponentially increased what one day would be called bandwidth, though bandwidth of what, exactly, I remain unable to say. This sublime and cosmically comic fable of utterly pure information (i.e. the utterly fictive) gradually and relentlessly infiltrating and eventually consuming the quotidian, opened something within me which has never yet closed... Works we all our lives recall reading for the first time are among the truest milestones, but Labyrinths was a profoundly singular one, for me, and I believe I knew that, then, in my early adolescence. It was demonstrated to me, that afternoon. Proven. For, by the time I had finished with 'Tlön' (though one never finishes with Tlön, nor indeed any story by Borges) and had traversed 'The Garden of Forking Paths' and had wondered, literally bug-eyed, at ''Pierre Menaud, Author of the Quixote', I discovered that I had ceased to be afraid of any influence that might dwell within Francis Marion's towering desk.\"",
"title": "Fact, fantasy and non-linearity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "The philosophical term \"Borgesian conundrum\" is named after him and has been defined as the ontological question of \"whether the writer writes the story, or it writes him.\" The original concept was put forward by Borges in his essay \"Kafka and His Precursors\". After reviewing works that were written before those of Kafka, Borges wrote:",
"title": "Fact, fantasy and non-linearity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem \"Fears and Scruples\" by Browning foretells Kafka's work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics' vocabulary, the word 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.\"",
"title": "Fact, fantasy and non-linearity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Along with other young Argentine writers of his generation, Borges initially rallied around the fictional character of Martín Fierro. Martín Fierro, a poem by José Hernández, was a dominant work of 19th century Argentine literature. Its eponymous hero became a symbol of Argentine sensibility, untied from European values – a gaucho, free, poor, pampas-dwelling.",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "The character Fierro is illegally drafted to serve at a border fort to defend it against the indigenous population but ultimately deserts to become a gaucho matrero, the Argentine equivalent of a North American western outlaw. Borges contributed keenly to the avant garde Martín Fierro magazine in the early 1920s.",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "As Borges matured, he came to a more nuanced attitude toward the Hernández poem. In his book of essays on the poem, Borges separates his admiration for the aesthetic virtues of the work from his mixed opinion of the moral virtues of its protagonist. In his essay \"The Argentine Writer and Tradition\" (1951), Borges celebrates how Hernández expresses the Argentine character. In a key scene in the poem, Martín Fierro and El Moreno compete by improvising songs on universal themes such as time, night, and the sea, reflecting the real-world gaucho tradition of payadas, improvised musical dialogues on philosophical themes. Borges points out that Hernández evidently knew the difference between actual gaucho tradition of composing poetry versus the \"gauchesque\" fashion among Buenos Aires literati.",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "In his works he refutes the arch-nationalist interpreters of the poem and disdains others, such as critic Eleuterio Tiscornia, for their Europeanising approach. Borges denies that Argentine literature should distinguish itself by limiting itself to \"local colour\", which he equates with cultural nationalism. Racine and Shakespeare's work, he says, looked beyond their countries' borders. Neither, he argues, need the literature be bound to the heritage of old world Spanish or European tradition. Nor should it define itself by the conscious rejection of its colonial past. He asserts that Argentine writers need to be free to define Argentine literature anew, writing about Argentina and the world from the point of view of those who have inherited the whole of world literature. Williamson says \"Borges's main argument is that the very fact of writing from the margins provides Argentine writers with a special opportunity to innovate without being bound to the canons of the centre, ... at once a part of and apart from the centre, which gives them much potential freedom\".",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Borges focused on universal themes, but also composed a substantial body of literature on themes from Argentine folklore and history. His first book, the poetry collection Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion for Buenos Aires), appeared in 1923. Borges's writings on things Argentine include Argentine culture (\"History of the Tango\"; \"Inscriptions on Horse Wagons\"), folklore (\"Juan Muraña\", \"Night of the Gifts\"), literature (\"The Argentine Writer and Tradition\", \"Almafuerte\"; \"Evaristo Carriego\"), and national concerns (\"Celebration of the Monster\", \"Hurry, Hurry\", \"The Mountebank\", \"Pedro Salvadores\"). Ultranationalists, however, continued to question his Argentine identity.",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Borges's interest in Argentine themes reflects, in part, the inspiration of his family tree. Borges had an English paternal grandmother who, around 1870, married the criollo Francisco Borges, a man with a military command and a historic role in the Argentine Civil Wars in what are now Argentina and Uruguay.",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Spurred by pride in his family's heritage, Borges often used those civil wars as settings in fiction and quasi-fiction (for example, \"The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz,\" \"The Dead Man,\" \"Avelino Arredondo\") as well as poetry (\"General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage\"). Borges's maternal great-grandfather, Manuel Isidoro Suárez, was another military hero, whom Borges immortalized in the poem \"A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín\". His nonfiction explores many of the themes found in his fiction. Essays such as \"The History of the Tango\" or his writings on the epic poem \"Martín Fierro\" explore Argentine themes, such as the identity of the Argentine people and of various Argentine subcultures. The varying genealogies of characters, settings, and themes in his stories, such as \"La muerte y la brújula\", used Argentine models without pandering to his readers or framing Argentine culture as \"exotic\".",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "In fact, contrary to what is usually supposed, the geographies found in his fictions often do not correspond to those of real-world Argentina. In his essay \"El escritor argentino y la tradición\", Borges notes that the very absence of camels in the Qur'an was proof enough that it was an Arabian work (despite the fact that camels are, in fact, mentioned in the Qur'an). He suggested that only someone trying to write an \"Arab\" work would purposefully include a camel. He uses this example to illustrate how his dialogue with universal existential concerns was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos and tangos.",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "At the time of the Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816, the population was predominantly criollo (of Spanish ancestry). From the mid-1850s on waves of immigration from Europe, especially Italy and Spain, arrived in the country, and in the following decades the Argentine national identity diversified. Borges was writing in a strongly European literary context, immersed in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature. He also read translations of Near Eastern and Far Eastern works. Borges's writing is also informed by scholarship of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, including prominent religious figures, heretics, and mystics.",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Religion and heresy are explored in such stories as \"Averroes's Search\", \"The Writing of the God\", \"The Theologians\", and \"Three Versions of Judas\". The curious inversion of mainstream Christian concepts of redemption in the last story is characteristic of Borges's approach to theology in his literature.",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "In describing himself, he said, \"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.\" As a young man, he visited the frontier pampas which extend beyond Argentina into Uruguay and Brazil. Borges said that his father wished him \"to become a citizen of the world, a great cosmopolitan,\" in the way of Henry and William James.",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Borges lived and studied in Switzerland and Spain as a young student. As Borges matured, he traveled through Argentina as a lecturer and, internationally, as a visiting professor; he continued to tour the world as he grew older, finally settling in Geneva where he had spent some of his youth. Drawing on the influence of many times and places, Borges's work belittled nationalism and racism. However, Borges also scorned his own Basque ancestry and criticised the abolition of slavery in America because he believed black people were happier remaining uneducated and without freedom. Portraits of diverse coexisting cultures characteristic of Argentina are especially pronounced in the book Six Problems for don Isidoro Parodi (co-authored with Bioy Casares) and Death and the Compass. Borges wrote that he considered Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes to be \"the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time.\"",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Borges was also an admirer of Asian culture, e.g. the ancient Chinese board game of Go, about which he penned some verses, while \"The Garden of Forking Paths\" had a strong Chinese theme.",
"title": "Culture and Argentine literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Borges was rooted in the Modernism predominant in its early years and was influenced by Symbolism. Like Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, he combined an interest in his native culture with broader perspectives, also sharing their multilingualism and inventiveness with language. However, while Nabokov and Joyce tended toward progressively larger works, Borges remained a miniaturist. His work progressed away from what he referred to as \"the baroque\": his later style is far more transparent and naturalistic than his earlier works. Borges represented the humanist view of media that stressed the social aspect of art driven by emotion. If art represented the tool, then Borges was more interested in how the tool could be used to relate to people.",
"title": "Influences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Existentialism saw its apogee during the years of Borges's greatest artistic production. It has been argued that his choice of topics largely ignored existentialism's central tenets. Critic Paul de Man notes, \"Whatever Borges's existential anxieties may be, they have little in common with Sartre's robustly prosaic view of literature, with the earnestness of Camus' moralism, or with the weighty profundity of German existential thought. Rather, they are the consistent expansion of a purely poetic consciousness to its furthest limits.\"",
"title": "Influences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "The essay collection Borges y la Matemática (Borges and Mathematics, 2003) by Argentine mathematician and writer Guillermo Martínez outlines how Borges used concepts from mathematics in his work. Martínez states that Borges had, for example, at least a superficial knowledge of set theory, which he handles with elegance in stories such as \"The Book of Sand\". Other books such as The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch (2008) and Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics by Floyd Merrell (1991) also explore this relationship.",
"title": "Influences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Fritz Mauthner, philosopher of language and author of the Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Dictionary of Philosophy), had an important influence on Borges. Borges always recognized the influence of this German philosopher. According to the literary review Sur, the book was one of the five books most noted and read by Borges. The first time that Borges mentioned Mauthner was in 1928 in his book The language of the Argentines (El idioma de los argentinos). In a 1962 interview Borges described Mauthner as possessing a fine sense of humor as well as great knowledge and erudition.",
"title": "Influences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "In an interview, Denis Dutton asked Borges who were the \"philosophers who have influenced your works, in whom you've been the most interested\". In reply, Borges named Berkeley and Schopenhauer. He was also influenced by Spinoza, about whom Borges wrote a famous poem.",
"title": "Influences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "It is not without humour that Borges once wrote \"Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca.\" (I always imagined Paradise to be some kind of a library.)",
"title": "Influences"
}
]
| Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones and El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature. Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the growing number of English translations, the Latin American Boom, and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists." | 2001-10-23T22:58:12Z | 2023-12-19T09:29:22Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges |
15,782 | Jane Austen | Jane Austen (/ˈɒstɪn, ˈɔːstɪn/ OST-in, AW-stin; 16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works are an implicit critique of the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her deft use of social commentary, realism and biting irony have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.
The anonymously published Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816), were a modest success but brought her little fame in her lifetime. She wrote two other novels—Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818—and began another, eventually titled Sanditon, but died before its completion. She also left behind three volumes of juvenile writings in manuscript, the short epistolary novel Lady Susan, and the unfinished novel The Watsons.
Since her death Austen's novels have rarely been out of print. A significant transition in her reputation occurred in 1833, when they were republished in Richard Bentley's Standard Novels series (illustrated by Ferdinand Pickering and sold as a set). They gradually gained wide acclaim and popular readership. In 1869, fifty-two years after her death, her nephew's publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced a compelling version of her writing career and supposedly uneventful life to an eager audience. Her work has inspired a large number of critical essays and has been included in many literary anthologies. Her novels have also inspired many films, including 1940's Pride and Prejudice, 1995's Sense and Sensibility and 2016's Love & Friendship.
The scant biographical information about Austen comes from her few surviving letters and sketches her family members wrote about her. Only about 160 of the approximately 3,000 letters Austen wrote have survived and been published. Cassandra Austen destroyed the bulk of the letters she received from her sister, burning or otherwise destroying them. She wanted to ensure that the "younger nieces did not read any of Jane's sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbours or family members". In the interest of protecting reputations from Jane's penchant for honesty and forthrightness, Cassandra omitted details of illnesses, unhappiness and anything she considered unsavoury. Important details about the Austen family were elided by intention, such as any mention of Austen's brother George, whose undiagnosed developmental challenges led the family to send him away from home; the two brothers sent away to the navy at an early age; or wealthy Aunt Leigh-Perrot, arrested and tried on charges of larceny.
The first Austen biography was Henry Thomas Austen's 1818 "Biographical Notice". It appeared in a posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and included extracts from two letters, against the judgement of other family members. Details of Austen's life continued to be omitted or embellished in her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen, published in 1869, and in William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh's biography Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, published in 1913, all of which included additional letters. Austen's family and relatives built a legend of "good quiet Aunt Jane", portraying her as a woman in a happy domestic situation, whose family was the mainstay of her life. Modern biographers include details excised from the letters and family biographies, but the biographer Jan Fergus writes that the challenge is to keep the view balanced, not to present her languishing in periods of deep unhappiness as "an embittered, disappointed woman trapped in a thoroughly unpleasant family".
Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, on 16 December 1775 in a harsh winter. Her father wrote of her arrival in a letter that her mother "certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago". He added that the newborn infant was "a present plaything for Cassy and a future companion". The winter of 1776 was particularly harsh and it was not until 5 April that she was baptised at the local church with the single name Jane.
George Austen (1731–1805), served as the rector of the Anglican parishes of Steventon and Deane. The Reverend Austen came from an old and wealthy family of wool merchants. As each generation of eldest sons received inheritances, the wealth was divided, and George's branch of the family fell into poverty. He and his two sisters were orphaned as children, and had to be taken in by relatives. In 1745, at the age of fifteen, George Austen's sister Philadelphia was apprenticed to a milliner in Covent Garden. At the age of sixteen, George entered St John's College, Oxford, where he most likely met Cassandra Leigh (1739–1827). She came from the prominent Leigh family (originally of Shropshire and based at Stonleigh, Warwickshire since the later 16th century). Her father was rector at All Souls College, Oxford, where she grew up among the gentry. Her eldest brother James inherited a fortune and large estate from his great-aunt Perrot, with the only condition that he change his name to Leigh-Perrot.
George Austen and Cassandra Leigh were engaged, probably around 1763, when they exchanged miniatures. He received the living of the Steventon parish from Thomas Knight, the wealthy husband of his second cousin. They married on 26 April 1764 at St Swithin's Church in Bath, by license, in a simple ceremony, two months after Cassandra's father died. Their income was modest, with George's small per annum living; Cassandra brought to the marriage the expectation of a small inheritance at the time of her mother's death.
The Austens took up temporary residence at the nearby Deane rectory until Steventon, a 16th-century house in disrepair, underwent necessary renovations. Cassandra gave birth to three children while living at Deane: James in 1765, George in 1766, and Edward in 1767. Her custom was to keep an infant at home for several months and then place it with Elizabeth Littlewood, a woman living nearby to nurse and raise for twelve to eighteen months.
In 1768, the family finally took up residence in Steventon. Henry was the first child to be born there, in 1771. At about this time, Cassandra could no longer ignore the signs that little George was developmentally disabled. He was subject to seizures, may have been deaf and mute, and she chose to send him out to be fostered. In 1773, Cassandra was born, followed by Francis in 1774, and Jane in 1775.
According to Professor of Literature Park Honan, the atmosphere of the Austen home was an "open, amused, easy intellectual" one, where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed.
The family relied on the patronage of their kin and hosted visits from numerous family members. Mrs Austen spent the summer of 1770 in London with George's sister, Philadelphia, and her daughter Eliza, accompanied by his other sister, Mrs Walter and her daughter Philly. Philadelphia and Eliza Hancock were, according to Le Faye, "the bright comets flashing into an otherwise placid solar system of clerical life in rural Hampshire, and the news of their foreign travels and fashionable London life, together with their sudden descents upon the Steventon household in between times, all helped to widen Jane's youthful horizon and influence her later life and works."
Cassandra Austen's cousin Thomas Leigh visited a number of times in the 1770s and 1780s, inviting young Cassie to visit them in Bath in 1781. The first mention of Jane occurs in family documents upon her return, "... and almost home they were when they met Jane & Charles, the two little ones of the family, who had to go as far as New Down to meet the chaise, & have the pleasure of riding home in it." Le Faye writes that "Mr Austen's predictions for his younger daughter were fully justified. Never were sisters more to each other than Cassandra and Jane; while in a particularly affectionate family, there seems to have been a special link between Cassandra and Edward on the one hand, and between Henry and Jane on the other."
From 1773 until 1796, George Austen supplemented his income by farming and by teaching three or four boys at a time, who boarded at his home. The Reverend Austen had an annual income of £200 (equivalent to £27,000 in 2021) from his two livings. This was a very modest income at the time; by comparison, a skilled worker like a blacksmith or a carpenter could make about £100 annually while the typical annual income of a gentry family was between £1,000 and £5,000. Mr. Austen also rented the 200-acre Cheesedown farm from his benefactor Thomas Knight which could make a profit of £300 (equivalent to £41,000 in 2021) a year.
During this period of her life, Jane Austen attended church regularly, socialised with friends and neighbours, and read novels—often of her own composition—aloud to her family in the evenings. Socialising with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall. Her brother Henry later said that "Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it".
In 1783, Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs Ann Cawley who took them to Southampton later that year. That autumn both girls were sent home after catching typhus, from which Jane Austen nearly died. She was from then home educated, until she attended boarding school with her sister from early in 1785 at the Reading Abbey Girls' School, ruled by Mrs La Tournelle. The curriculum probably included French, spelling, needlework, dancing, music and drama. The sisters returned home before December 1786 because the school fees for the two girls were too high for the Austen family. After 1786, Austen "never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment".
Her education came from reading, guided by her father and brothers James and Henry. Irene Collins said that Austen "used some of the same school books as the boys". Austen apparently had unfettered access both to her father's library and that of a family friend, Warren Hastings. Together these collections amounted to a large and varied library. Her father was also tolerant of Austen's sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing.
Private theatricals were an essential part of Austen's education. From her early childhood, the family and friends staged a series of plays in the rectory barn, including Richard Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) and David Garrick's Bon Ton. Austen's eldest brother James wrote the prologues and epilogues and she probably joined in these activities, first as a spectator and later as a participant. Most of the plays were comedies, which suggests how Austen's satirical gifts were cultivated. At the age of 12, she tried her own hand at dramatic writing; she wrote three short plays during her teenage years.
From at least the time she was aged eleven, Austen wrote poems and stories to amuse herself and her family. She exaggerated mundane details of daily life and parodied common plot devices in "stories [] full of anarchic fantasies of female power, licence, illicit behaviour, and general high spirits", according to Janet Todd. Containing work written between 1787 and 1793, Austen compiled fair copies of twenty-nine early works into three bound notebooks, now referred to as the Juvenilia. She called the three notebooks "Volume the First", "Volume the Second" and "Volume the Third", and they preserve 90,000 words she wrote during those years. The Juvenilia are often, according to scholar Richard Jenkyns, "boisterous" and "anarchic"; he compares them to the work of 18th-century novelist Laurence Sterne.
Among these works is a satirical novel in letters titled Love and Freindship [sic], written when aged fourteen in 1790, in which she mocked popular novels of sensibility. The next year, she wrote The History of England, a manuscript of thirty-four pages accompanied by thirteen watercolour miniatures by her sister, Cassandra. Austen's History parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's History of England (1764). Honan speculates that not long after writing Love and Freindship, Austen decided to "write for profit, to make stories her central effort", that is, to become a professional writer. When she was around eighteen years old, Austen began to write longer, more sophisticated works.
In August 1792, aged seventeen, Austen started Catharine or the Bower, which presaged her mature work, especially Northanger Abbey, but was left unfinished until picked up in Lady Susan, which Todd describes as less prefiguring than Catharine. A year later she began, but abandoned, a short play, later titled Sir Charles Grandison or the happy Man, a comedy in 6 acts, which she returned to and completed around 1800. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgements of Austen's favourite contemporary novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), by Samuel Richardson.
When Austen became an aunt for the first time aged eighteen, she sent new-born niece Fanny-Catherine Austen-Knight "five short pieces of ... the Juvenilia now known collectively as 'Scraps' .., purporting to be her 'Opinions and Admonitions on the conduct of Young Women'". For Jane-Anna-Elizabeth Austen (also born in 1793), her aunt wrote "two more 'Miscellanious [sic] Morsels', dedicating them to [Anna] on 2 June 1793, 'convinced that if you seriously attend to them, You will derive from them very important Instructions, with regard to your Conduct in Life.'" There is manuscript evidence that Austen continued to work on these pieces as late as 1811 (when she was 36), and that her niece and nephew, Anna and James Edward Austen, made further additions as late as 1814.
Between 1793 and 1795 (aged eighteen to twenty), Austen wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel, usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work. It is unlike any of Austen's other works. Austen biographer Claire Tomalin describes the novella's heroine as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray and abuse her lovers, friends and family. Tomalin writes:
Told in letters, it is as neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration dramatists who may have provided some of her inspiration ... It stands alone in Austen's work as a study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater than those of anyone she encounters.
According to Janet Todd, the model for the title character may have been Eliza de Feuillide, who inspired Austen with stories of her glamorous life and various adventures. Eliza's French husband was guillotined in 1794; she married Jane's brother Henry Austen in 1797.
When Austen was twenty, Tom Lefroy, a neighbour, visited Steventon from December 1795 to January 1796. He had just finished a university degree and was moving to London for training as a barrister. Lefroy and Austen would have been introduced at a ball or other neighbourhood social gathering, and it is clear from Austen's letters to Cassandra that they spent considerable time together: "I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together."
Austen wrote in her first surviving letter to her sister Cassandra that Lefroy was a "very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man". Five days later in another letter, Austen wrote that she expected an "offer" from her "friend" and that "I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat", going on to write "I will confide myself in the future to Mr Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't give a sixpence" and refuse all others. The next day, Austen wrote: "The day will come on which I flirt my last with Tom Lefroy and when you receive this it will be all over. My tears flow as I write at this melancholy idea".
Halperin cautioned that Austen often satirised popular sentimental romantic fiction in her letters, and some of the statements about Lefroy may have been ironic. However, it is clear that Austen was genuinely attracted to Lefroy and subsequently none of her other suitors ever quite measured up to him. The Lefroy family intervened and sent him away at the end of January. Marriage was impractical as both Lefroy and Austen must have known. Neither had any money, and he was dependent on a great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career. If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again. In November 1798, Lefroy was still on Austen's mind as she wrote to her sister she had tea with one of his relatives, wanted desperately to ask about him, but could not bring herself to raise the subject.
After finishing Lady Susan, Austen began her first full-length novel Elinor and Marianne. Her sister remembered that it was read to the family "before 1796" and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility.
Austen began a second novel, First Impressions (later published as Pride and Prejudice), in 1796. She completed the initial draft in August 1797, aged 21; as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an "established favourite". At this time, her father made the first attempt to publish one of her novels. In November 1797, George Austen wrote to Thomas Cadell, an established publisher in London, to ask if he would consider publishing First Impressions. Cadell returned Mr. Austen's letter, marking it "Declined by Return of Post". Austen may not have known of her father's efforts. Following the completion of First Impressions, Austen returned to Elinor and Marianne and from November 1797 until mid-1798, revised it heavily; she eliminated the epistolary format in favour of third-person narration and produced something close to Sense and Sensibility. In 1797, Austen met her cousin (and future sister-in-law), Eliza de Feuillide, a French aristocrat whose first husband the Comte de Feuillide had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austen. The description of the execution of the Comte de Feuillide related by his widow left Austen with an intense horror of the French Revolution that lasted for the rest of her life.
During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of Elinor and Marianne, Austen began writing a third novel with the working title Susan—later Northanger Abbey—a satire on the popular Gothic novel. Austen completed her work about a year later. In early 1803, Henry Austen offered Susan to Benjamin Crosby, a London publisher, who paid £10 for the copyright. Crosby promised early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being "in the press", but did nothing more. The manuscript remained in Crosby's hands, unpublished, until Austen repurchased the copyright from him in 1816.
In December 1800, George Austen unexpectedly announced his decision to retire from the ministry, leave Steventon, and move the family to 4, Sydney Place in Bath, Somerset. While retirement and travel were good for the elder Austens, Jane Austen was shocked to be told she was moving 50 miles (80 km) away from the only home she had ever known. An indication of her state of mind is her lack of productivity as a writer during the time she lived in Bath. She was able to make some revisions to Susan, and she began and then abandoned a new novel, The Watsons, but there was nothing like the productivity of the years 1795–1799. Tomalin suggests this reflects a deep depression disabling her as a writer, but Honan disagrees, arguing Austen wrote or revised her manuscripts throughout her creative life, except for a few months after her father died. It is often claimed that Austen was unhappy in Bath, which caused her to lose interest in writing, but it is just as possible that Austen's social life in Bath prevented her from spending much time writing novels. The critic Robert Irvine argued that if Austen spent more time writing novels when she was in the countryside, it might just have been because she had more spare time as opposed to being more happy in the countryside as is often argued. Furthermore, Austen frequently both moved and travelled over southern England during this period, which was hardly a conducive environment for writing a long novel. Austen sold the rights to publish Susan to a publisher Crosby & Company, who paid her £10 (equivalent to £860 in 2021). The Crosby & Company advertised Susan, but never published it.
The years from 1801 to 1804 are something of a blank space for Austen scholars as Cassandra destroyed all of her letters from her sister in this period for unknown reasons. In December 1802, Austen received her only known proposal of marriage. She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted. As described by Caroline Austen, Jane's niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive—he was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance. No contemporary letters or diaries describe how Austen felt about this proposal. Irvine described Bigg-Wither as somebody who "...seems to have been a man very hard to like, let alone love".
In 1814, Austen wrote a letter to her niece Fanny Knight, who had asked for advice about a serious relationship, telling her that "having written so much on one side of the question, I shall now turn around & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection". The English scholar Douglas Bush wrote that Austen had "had a very high ideal of the love that should unite a husband and wife ... All of her heroines ... know in proportion to their maturity, the meaning of ardent love". A possible autobiographical element in Sense and Sensibility occurs when Elinor Dashwood contemplates "the worse and most irremediable of all evils, a connection for life" with an unsuitable man.
In 1804, while living in Bath, Austen started, but did not complete, her novel The Watsons. The story centres on an invalid and impoverished clergyman and his four unmarried daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as "a study in the harsh economic realities of dependent women's lives". Honan suggests, and Tomalin agrees, that Austen chose to stop work on the novel after her father died on 21 January 1805 and her personal circumstances resembled those of her characters too closely for her comfort.
Her father's relatively sudden death left Jane, Cassandra, and their mother in a precarious financial situation. Edward, James, Henry, and Francis Austen (known as Frank) pledged to make annual contributions to support their mother and sisters. For the next four years, the family's living arrangements reflected their financial insecurity. They spent part of the time in rented quarters in Bath before leaving the city in June 1805 for a family visit to Steventon and Godmersham. They moved for the autumn months to the newly fashionable seaside resort of Worthing, on the Sussex coast, where they resided at Stanford Cottage. It was here that Austen is thought to have written her fair copy of Lady Susan and added its "Conclusion". In 1806, the family moved to Southampton, where they shared a house with Frank Austen and his new wife. A large part of this time they spent visiting various branches of the family.
On 5 April 1809, about three months before the family's move to Chawton, Austen wrote an angry letter to Richard Crosby, offering him a new manuscript of Susan if needed to secure the immediate publication of the novel, and requesting the return of the original so she could find another publisher. Crosby replied that he had not agreed to publish the book by any particular time, or at all, and that Austen could repurchase the manuscript for the £10 he had paid her and find another publisher. She did not have the resources to buy the copyright back at that time, but was able to purchase it in 1816.
Around early 1809, Austen's brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a more settled life—the use of a large cottage in Chawton village which was part of the estate around Edward's nearby property Chawton House. Jane, Cassandra and their mother moved into Chawton cottage on 7 July 1809. Life was quieter in Chawton than it had been since the family's move to Bath in 1800. The Austens did not socialise with gentry and entertained only when family visited. Her niece Anna described the family's life in Chawton as "a very quiet life, according to our ideas, but they were great readers, and besides the housekeeping our aunts occupied themselves in working with the poor and in teaching some girl or boy to read or write."
Like many women authors at the time, Austen published her books anonymously. At the time, the ideal roles for a woman were as wife and mother, and writing for women was regarded at best as a secondary form of activity; a woman who wished to be a full-time writer was felt to be degrading her femininity, so books by women were usually published anonymously in order to maintain the conceit that the female writer was only publishing as a sort of part-time job, and was not seeking to become a "literary lioness" (i.e. a celebrity).
During her time at Chawton, Austen published four generally well-received novels. Through her brother Henry, the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and Sensibility, which, like all of Austen's novels except Pride and Prejudice, was published "on commission", that is, at the author's financial risk. When publishing on commission, publishers would advance the costs of publication, repay themselves as books were sold and then charge a 10% commission for each book sold, paying the rest to the author. If a novel did not recover its costs through sales, the author was responsible for them. The alternative to selling via commission was by selling the copyright, where an author received a one-time payment from the publisher for the manuscript, which occurred with Pride and Prejudice. Austen's experience with Susan (the manuscript that became Northanger Abbey) where she sold the copyright to the publisher Crosby & Sons for £10, who did not publish the book, forcing her to buy back the copyright in order to get her work published, left Austen leery of this method of publishing. The final alternative, of selling by subscription, where a group of people would agree to buy a book in advance, was not an option for Austen as only authors who were well known or had an influential aristocratic patron who would recommend an up-coming book to their friends, could sell by subscription. Sense and Sensibility appeared in October 1811, and was described as being written "By a Lady". As it was sold on commission, Egerton used expensive paper and set the price at 15 shillings (equivalent to £58 in 2021).
Reviews were favourable and the novel became fashionable among young aristocratic opinion-makers; the edition sold out by mid-1813. Austen's novels were published in larger editions than was normal for this period. The small size of the novel-reading public and the large costs associated with hand production (particularly the cost of handmade paper) meant that most novels were published in editions of 500 copies or fewer to reduce the risks to the publisher and the novelist. Even some of the most successful titles during this period were issued in editions of not more than 750 or 800 copies and later reprinted if demand continued. Austen's novels were published in larger editions, ranging from about 750 copies of Sense and Sensibility to about 2,000 copies of Emma. It is not clear whether the decision to print more copies than usual of Austen's novels was driven by the publishers or the author. Since all but one of Austen's books were originally published "on commission", the risks of overproduction were largely hers (or Cassandra's after her death) and publishers may have been more willing to produce larger editions than was normal practice when their own funds were at risk. Editions of popular works of non-fiction were often much larger.
Austen made £140 (equivalent to £10,800 in 2021) from Sense and Sensibility, which provided her with some financial and psychological independence. After the success of Sense and Sensibility, all of Austen's subsequent books were billed as written "By the author of Sense and Sensibility" and Austen's name never appeared on her books during her lifetime. Egerton then published Pride and Prejudice, a revision of First Impressions, in January 1813. Austen sold the copyright to Pride and Prejudice to Egerton for £110 (equivalent to £7,600 in 2021). To maximise profits, he used cheap paper and set the price at 18 shillings (equivalent to £62 in 2021). He advertised the book widely and it was an immediate success, garnering three favourable reviews and selling well. Had Austen sold Pride and Prejudice on commission, she would have made a profit of £475, or twice her father's annual income. By October 1813, Egerton was able to begin selling a second edition. Mansfield Park was published by Egerton in May 1814. While Mansfield Park was ignored by reviewers, it was very popular with readers. All copies were sold within six months, and Austen's earnings on this novel were larger than for any of her other novels.
Without Austen's knowledge or approval, her novels were translated into French and published in cheaply produced, pirated editions in France. The literary critic Noel King commented in 1953 that, given the prevailing rage in France at the time for lush romantic fantasies, it was remarkable that her novels with the emphasis on everyday English life had any sort of a market in France. King cautioned that Austen's chief translator in France, Madame Isabelle de Montolieu, had only the most rudimentary knowledge of English, and her translations were more of "imitations" than translations proper, as Montolieu depended upon assistants to provide a summary, which she then translated into an embellished French that often radically altered Austen's plots and characters. The first of the Austen novels to be published that credited her as the author was in France, when Persuasion was published in 1821 as La Famille Elliot ou L'Ancienne Inclination.
Austen learned that the Prince Regent admired her novels and kept a set at each of his residences. In November 1815, the Prince Regent's librarian James Stanier Clarke invited Austen to visit the Prince's London residence and hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming Emma to the Prince. Though Austen disapproved of the Prince Regent, she could scarcely refuse the request. Austen disapproved of the Prince Regent on the account of his womanising, gambling, drinking, spendthrift ways and generally disreputable behaviour. She later wrote Plan of a Novel, according to Hints from Various Quarters, a satiric outline of the "perfect novel" based on the librarian's many suggestions for a future Austen novel. Austen was greatly annoyed by Clarke's often pompous literary advice, and the Plan of a Novel parodying Clarke was intended as her revenge for all of the unwanted letters she had received from the royal librarian.
In mid-1815 Austen moved her work from Egerton to John Murray, a better known London publisher, who published Emma in December 1815 and a second edition of Mansfield Park in February 1816. Emma sold well, but the new edition of Mansfield Park did poorly, and this failure offset most of the income from Emma. These were the last of Austen's novels to be published during her lifetime.
While Murray prepared Emma for publication, Austen began The Elliots, later published as Persuasion. She completed her first draft in July 1816. In addition, shortly after the publication of Emma, Henry Austen repurchased the copyright for Susan from Crosby. Austen was forced to postpone publishing either of these completed novels by family financial troubles. Henry Austen's bank failed in March 1816, depriving him of all of his assets, leaving him deeply in debt and costing Edward, James, and Frank Austen large sums. Henry and Frank could no longer afford the contributions they had made to support their mother and sisters.
Austen was feeling unwell by early 1816, but ignored the warning signs. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable, and she began a slow, irregular deterioration. The majority of biographers rely on Zachary Cope's 1964 retrospective diagnosis and list her cause of death as Addison's disease, although her final illness has also been described as resulting from Hodgkin's lymphoma. When her uncle died and left his entire fortune to his wife, effectively disinheriting his relatives, she suffered a relapse, writing: "I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle's Will brought on a relapse ... but a weak Body must excuse weak Nerves."
Austen continued to work in spite of her illness. Dissatisfied with the ending of The Elliots, she rewrote the final two chapters, which she finished on 6 August 1816. In January 1817, Austen began The Brothers (titled Sanditon when published in 1925), completing twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably due to illness. Todd describes Sanditon's heroine, Diana Parker, as an "energetic invalid". In the novel Austen mocked hypochondriacs, and although she describes the heroine as "bilious", five days after abandoning the novel she wrote of herself that she was turning "every wrong colour" and living "chiefly on the sofa". She put down her pen on 18 March 1817, making a note of it.
Austen made light of her condition, describing it as "bile" and rheumatism. As her illness progressed, she experienced difficulty walking and lacked energy; by mid-April she was confined to bed. In May, Cassandra and Henry brought her to Winchester for treatment, by which time she suffered agonising pain and welcomed death. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817 at the age of 41. Henry, through his clerical connections, arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen's personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation and mentions the "extraordinary endowments of her mind", but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer.
In the months after Austen's death in July 1817, Cassandra, Henry Austen and Murray arranged for the publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey as a set. Henry Austen contributed a Biographical Note dated December 1817, which for the first time identified his sister as the author of the novels. Tomalin describes it as "a loving and polished eulogy". Sales were good for a year—only 321 copies remained unsold at the end of 1818.
Although Austen's six novels were out of print in England in the 1820s, they were still being read through copies housed in private libraries and circulating libraries. Austen had early admirers. The first piece of fiction using her as a character (what might now be called real person fiction) appeared in 1823 in a letter to the editor in The Lady's Magazine. It refers to Austen's genius and suggests that aspiring authors were envious of her powers.
In 1832, Richard Bentley purchased the remaining copyrights to all of her novels, and over the following winter published five illustrated volumes as part of his Standard Novels series. In October 1833, Bentley released the first collected edition of her works. Since then, Austen's novels have been continuously in print.
Austen's works implicitly critique the sentimental novels of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. The earliest English novelists, Richardson, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, were followed by the school of sentimentalists and romantics such as Walter Scott, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and Oliver Goldsmith, whose style and genre Austen repudiated, returning the novel on a "slender thread" to the tradition of Richardson and Fielding for a "realistic study of manners". In the mid-20th century, literary critics F. R. Leavis and Ian Watt placed her in the tradition of Richardson and Fielding; both believe that she used their tradition of "irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both".
Walter Scott noted Austen's "resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much of modern fiction—'the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries'". Yet her relationship with these genres is complex, as evidenced by Northanger Abbey and Emma. Similar to William Wordsworth, who excoriated the modern frantic novel in the "Preface" to his Lyrical Ballads (1800), Austen distances herself from escapist novels; the discipline and innovation she demonstrates is similar to his, and she shows "that rhetorically less is artistically more." She eschewed popular Gothic fiction, stories of terror in which a heroine typically was stranded in a remote location, a castle or abbey (32 novels between 1784 and 1818 contain the word "abbey" in their title). Yet in Northanger Abbey she alludes to the trope, with the heroine, Catherine, anticipating a move to a remote locale. Rather than full-scale rejection or parody, Austen transforms the genre, juxtaposing reality, with descriptions of elegant rooms and modern comforts, against the heroine's "novel-fueled" desires. Nor does she completely denigrate Gothic fiction: instead she transforms settings and situations, such that the heroine is still imprisoned, yet her imprisonment is mundane and real—regulated manners and the strict rules of the ballroom. In Sense and Sensibility Austen presents characters who are more complex than in staple sentimental fiction, according to critic Keymer, who notes that although it is a parody of popular sentimental fiction, "Marianne in her sentimental histrionics responds to the calculating world ... with a quite justifiable scream of female distress."
The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable. It was a wretched business, indeed! Such an overthrow of everything she had been wishing for! Such a development of every thing most unwelcome!
— example of free indirect speech, Jane Austen, Emma
Richardson's Pamela, the prototype for the sentimental novel, is a didactic love story with a happy ending, written at a time women were beginning to have the right to choose husbands and yet were restricted by social conventions. Austen attempted Richardson's epistolary style, but found the flexibility of narrative more conducive to her realism, a realism in which each conversation and gesture carries a weight of significance. The narrative style utilises free indirect speech—she was the first English novelist to do so extensively—through which she had the ability to present a character's thoughts directly to the reader and yet still retain narrative control. The style allows an author to vary discourse between the narrator's voice and values and those of the characters.
Austen had a natural ear for speech and dialogue, according to scholar Mary Lascelles: "Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing and thoughts of their characters." Techniques such as fragmentary speech suggest a character's traits and their tone; "syntax and phrasing rather than vocabulary" is utilised to indicate social variants. Dialogue reveals a character's mood—frustration, anger, happiness—each treated differently and often through varying patterns of sentence structures. When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Darcy, her stilted speech and the convoluted sentence structure reveals that he has wounded her:
From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that the groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike. And I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.
Austen's plots highlight women's traditional dependence on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. As an art form, the 18th-century novel lacked the seriousness of its equivalents from the 19th century, when novels were treated as "the natural vehicle for discussion and ventilation of what mattered in life". Rather than delving too deeply into the psyche of her characters, Austen enjoys them and imbues them with humour, according to critic John Bayley. He believes that the well-spring of her wit and irony is her own attitude that comedy "is the saving grace of life". Part of Austen's fame rests on the historical and literary significance that she was the first woman to write great comic novels. Samuel Johnson's influence is evident, in that she follows his advice to write "a representation of life as may excite mirth".
Her humour comes from her modesty and lack of superiority, allowing her most successful characters, such as Elizabeth Bennet, to transcend the trivialities of life, which the more foolish characters are overly absorbed in. Austen used comedy to explore the individualism of women's lives and gender relations, and she appears to have used it to find the goodness in life, often fusing it with "ethical sensibility", creating artistic tension. Critic Robert Polhemus writes, "To appreciate the drama and achievement of Austen, we need to realize how deep was her passion for both reverence and ridicule ... and her comic imagination reveals both the harmonies and the telling contradictions of her mind and vision as she tries to reconcile her satirical bias with her sense of the good."
As Austen's works were published anonymously, they brought her little personal renown. They were fashionable among opinion-makers, but were rarely reviewed. Most of the reviews were short and on balance favourable, although superficial and cautious, most often focused on the moral lessons of the novels.
Sir Walter Scott, a leading novelist of the day, anonymously wrote a review of Emma in 1815, using it to defend the then-disreputable genre of the novel and praising Austen's realism, "the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes from an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him". The other important early review was attributed to Richard Whately in 1821. However, Whately denied having authored the review, which drew favourable comparisons between Austen and such acknowledged greats as Homer and Shakespeare, and praised the dramatic qualities of her narrative. Scott and Whately set the tone for almost all subsequent 19th-century Austen criticism.
Because Austen's novels did not conform to Romantic and Victorian expectations that "powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and colour in the writing", 19th-century critics and audiences preferred the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Notwithstanding Walter Scott's positivity, Austen's work did not match the prevailing aesthetic values of the Romantic zeitgeist. Her novels were republished in Britain from the 1830s and sold steadily, but they were not best-sellers.
The first French critic who paid notice to Austen was Philarète Chasles in an 1842 essay, dismissing her in two sentences as a boring, imitative writer with no substance. Austen was almost completely ignored in France until 1878, when the French critic Léon Boucher published the essay Le Roman Classique en Angleterre, in which he called Austen a "genius", the first French author to do so. The first accurate translation of Austen into French occurred in 1899 when Félix Fénéon translated Northanger Abbey as Catherine Moreland.
In Britain, Austen gradually grew in the estimation of the literati. Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes published a series of enthusiastic articles in the 1840s and 1850s. Later in the century, novelist Henry James referred to Austen several times with approval, and on one occasion ranked her with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding as among "the fine painters of life".
The publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced Austen to a wider public as "dear aunt Jane", the respectable maiden aunt. Publication of the Memoir spurred the reissue of Austen's novels—the first popular editions were released in 1883 and fancy illustrated editions and collectors' sets quickly followed. Author and critic Leslie Stephen described the popular mania that started to develop for Austen in the 1880s as "Austenolatry". Around the start of the 20th century, an intellectual clique of Janeites reacted against the popularisation of Austen, distinguishing their deeper appreciation from the vulgar enthusiasm of the masses.
In response, Henry James decried "a beguiled infatuation" with Austen, a rising tide of public interest that exceeded Austen's "intrinsic merit and interest". The American literary critic A. Walton Litz noted that the "anti-Janites" in the 19th and 20th centuries comprised a formidable literary squad of Mark Twain, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, D. H. Lawrence and Kingsley Amis, but in "every case the adverse judgement merely reveals the special limitations or eccentricities of the critic, leaving Jane Austen relatively untouched".
Austen's works have attracted legions of scholars. The first dissertation on Austen was published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard University. Another early academic analysis came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley, who grouped Austen's novels into "early" and "late" works, a distinction still used by scholars today. The first academic book devoted to Austen in France was Jane Austen by Paul and Kate Rague (1914), who set out to explain why French critics and readers should take Austen seriously. The same year, Léonie Villard published Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres, originally her PhD thesis, the first serious academic study of Austen in France. In 1923, R.W. Chapman published the first scholarly edition of Austen's collected works, which was also the first scholarly edition of any English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published editions of Austen's works.
With the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles' Jane Austen and Her Art, the academic study of Austen took hold. Lascelles analyzed the books Austen read and their influence on her work, and closely examined Austen's style and "narrative art". Concern arose that academics were obscuring the appreciation of Austen with increasingly esoteric theories, a debate that has continued since.
The period since World War II has seen a diversity of critical approaches to Austen, including feminist theory, and perhaps most controversially, postcolonial theory. The divide has widened between the popular appreciation of Austen, particularly by modern Janeites, and academic judgements. In 1994, literary critic Harold Bloom placed Austen among the greatest Western writers of all time.
In the People's Republic of China after 1949, writings of Austen were regarded as too frivolous, and thus during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–69, Austen was banned as a "British bourgeois imperialist". In the late 1970s, when Austen's works was re-published in China, her popularity with readers confounded the authorities who had trouble understanding that people generally read books for enjoyment, not political edification.
In a typical modern debate, the conservative American professor Gene Koppel, to the indignation of his liberal literature students, mentioned that Austen and her family were "Tories of the deepest dye", i.e. Conservatives in opposition to the liberal Whigs. Although several feminist authors such as Claudia Johnson and Mollie Sandock claimed Austen for their own cause, Koppel argued that different people react to a work of literature in different subjective ways, as explained by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thus competing interpretations of Austen's work can be equally valid, provided they are grounded in textual and historical analysis: it is equally possible to see Austen as a feminist critiquing Regency-era society and as a conservative upholding its values.
Austen's novels have resulted in sequels, prequels and adaptations of almost every type, from soft-core pornography to fantasy. From the 19th century, her family members published conclusions to her incomplete novels, and by 2000 there were over 100 printed adaptations. The first dramatic adaptation of Austen was published in 1895, Rosina Filippi's Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane Austen: Arranged and Adapted for Drawing-Room Performance, and Filippi was also responsible for the first professional stage adaptation, The Bennets (1901). The first film adaptation was the 1940 MGM production of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. BBC television dramatisations since the 1970s have attempted to adhere meticulously to Austen's plots, characterisations and settings. The British critic Robert Irvine noted that in American film adaptations of Austen's novels, starting with the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, class is subtly downplayed, and the society of Regency England depicted by Austen that is grounded in a hierarchy based upon the ownership of land and the antiquity of the family name is one that Americans cannot embrace in its entirety.
From 1995, many Austen adaptations appeared, with Ang Lee's film of Sense and Sensibility, for which screenwriter and star Emma Thompson won an Academy Award, and the BBC's immensely popular TV mini-series Pride and Prejudice, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. A 2005 British production of Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, was followed in 2007 by ITV's Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and in 2016 by Love & Friendship starring Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan, a film version of Lady Susan, that borrowed the title of Austen's Love and Freindship [sic].
In 2013, Austen's works featured on a series of UK postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail to mark the bicentenary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. Austen is on the £10 note issued by the Bank of England which was introduced in 2017, replacing Charles Darwin. In July 2017, a statue of Jane Austen was erected in Basingstoke, Hampshire on the 200th anniversary of her death.
Unfinished fiction
Other works | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jane Austen (/ˈɒstɪn, ˈɔːstɪn/ OST-in, AW-stin; 16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works are an implicit critique of the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her deft use of social commentary, realism and biting irony have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The anonymously published Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816), were a modest success but brought her little fame in her lifetime. She wrote two other novels—Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818—and began another, eventually titled Sanditon, but died before its completion. She also left behind three volumes of juvenile writings in manuscript, the short epistolary novel Lady Susan, and the unfinished novel The Watsons.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Since her death Austen's novels have rarely been out of print. A significant transition in her reputation occurred in 1833, when they were republished in Richard Bentley's Standard Novels series (illustrated by Ferdinand Pickering and sold as a set). They gradually gained wide acclaim and popular readership. In 1869, fifty-two years after her death, her nephew's publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced a compelling version of her writing career and supposedly uneventful life to an eager audience. Her work has inspired a large number of critical essays and has been included in many literary anthologies. Her novels have also inspired many films, including 1940's Pride and Prejudice, 1995's Sense and Sensibility and 2016's Love & Friendship.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The scant biographical information about Austen comes from her few surviving letters and sketches her family members wrote about her. Only about 160 of the approximately 3,000 letters Austen wrote have survived and been published. Cassandra Austen destroyed the bulk of the letters she received from her sister, burning or otherwise destroying them. She wanted to ensure that the \"younger nieces did not read any of Jane's sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbours or family members\". In the interest of protecting reputations from Jane's penchant for honesty and forthrightness, Cassandra omitted details of illnesses, unhappiness and anything she considered unsavoury. Important details about the Austen family were elided by intention, such as any mention of Austen's brother George, whose undiagnosed developmental challenges led the family to send him away from home; the two brothers sent away to the navy at an early age; or wealthy Aunt Leigh-Perrot, arrested and tried on charges of larceny.",
"title": "Biographical sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The first Austen biography was Henry Thomas Austen's 1818 \"Biographical Notice\". It appeared in a posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and included extracts from two letters, against the judgement of other family members. Details of Austen's life continued to be omitted or embellished in her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen, published in 1869, and in William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh's biography Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, published in 1913, all of which included additional letters. Austen's family and relatives built a legend of \"good quiet Aunt Jane\", portraying her as a woman in a happy domestic situation, whose family was the mainstay of her life. Modern biographers include details excised from the letters and family biographies, but the biographer Jan Fergus writes that the challenge is to keep the view balanced, not to present her languishing in periods of deep unhappiness as \"an embittered, disappointed woman trapped in a thoroughly unpleasant family\".",
"title": "Biographical sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, on 16 December 1775 in a harsh winter. Her father wrote of her arrival in a letter that her mother \"certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago\". He added that the newborn infant was \"a present plaything for Cassy and a future companion\". The winter of 1776 was particularly harsh and it was not until 5 April that she was baptised at the local church with the single name Jane.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "George Austen (1731–1805), served as the rector of the Anglican parishes of Steventon and Deane. The Reverend Austen came from an old and wealthy family of wool merchants. As each generation of eldest sons received inheritances, the wealth was divided, and George's branch of the family fell into poverty. He and his two sisters were orphaned as children, and had to be taken in by relatives. In 1745, at the age of fifteen, George Austen's sister Philadelphia was apprenticed to a milliner in Covent Garden. At the age of sixteen, George entered St John's College, Oxford, where he most likely met Cassandra Leigh (1739–1827). She came from the prominent Leigh family (originally of Shropshire and based at Stonleigh, Warwickshire since the later 16th century). Her father was rector at All Souls College, Oxford, where she grew up among the gentry. Her eldest brother James inherited a fortune and large estate from his great-aunt Perrot, with the only condition that he change his name to Leigh-Perrot.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "George Austen and Cassandra Leigh were engaged, probably around 1763, when they exchanged miniatures. He received the living of the Steventon parish from Thomas Knight, the wealthy husband of his second cousin. They married on 26 April 1764 at St Swithin's Church in Bath, by license, in a simple ceremony, two months after Cassandra's father died. Their income was modest, with George's small per annum living; Cassandra brought to the marriage the expectation of a small inheritance at the time of her mother's death.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Austens took up temporary residence at the nearby Deane rectory until Steventon, a 16th-century house in disrepair, underwent necessary renovations. Cassandra gave birth to three children while living at Deane: James in 1765, George in 1766, and Edward in 1767. Her custom was to keep an infant at home for several months and then place it with Elizabeth Littlewood, a woman living nearby to nurse and raise for twelve to eighteen months.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1768, the family finally took up residence in Steventon. Henry was the first child to be born there, in 1771. At about this time, Cassandra could no longer ignore the signs that little George was developmentally disabled. He was subject to seizures, may have been deaf and mute, and she chose to send him out to be fostered. In 1773, Cassandra was born, followed by Francis in 1774, and Jane in 1775.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "According to Professor of Literature Park Honan, the atmosphere of the Austen home was an \"open, amused, easy intellectual\" one, where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The family relied on the patronage of their kin and hosted visits from numerous family members. Mrs Austen spent the summer of 1770 in London with George's sister, Philadelphia, and her daughter Eliza, accompanied by his other sister, Mrs Walter and her daughter Philly. Philadelphia and Eliza Hancock were, according to Le Faye, \"the bright comets flashing into an otherwise placid solar system of clerical life in rural Hampshire, and the news of their foreign travels and fashionable London life, together with their sudden descents upon the Steventon household in between times, all helped to widen Jane's youthful horizon and influence her later life and works.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Cassandra Austen's cousin Thomas Leigh visited a number of times in the 1770s and 1780s, inviting young Cassie to visit them in Bath in 1781. The first mention of Jane occurs in family documents upon her return, \"... and almost home they were when they met Jane & Charles, the two little ones of the family, who had to go as far as New Down to meet the chaise, & have the pleasure of riding home in it.\" Le Faye writes that \"Mr Austen's predictions for his younger daughter were fully justified. Never were sisters more to each other than Cassandra and Jane; while in a particularly affectionate family, there seems to have been a special link between Cassandra and Edward on the one hand, and between Henry and Jane on the other.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "From 1773 until 1796, George Austen supplemented his income by farming and by teaching three or four boys at a time, who boarded at his home. The Reverend Austen had an annual income of £200 (equivalent to £27,000 in 2021) from his two livings. This was a very modest income at the time; by comparison, a skilled worker like a blacksmith or a carpenter could make about £100 annually while the typical annual income of a gentry family was between £1,000 and £5,000. Mr. Austen also rented the 200-acre Cheesedown farm from his benefactor Thomas Knight which could make a profit of £300 (equivalent to £41,000 in 2021) a year.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "During this period of her life, Jane Austen attended church regularly, socialised with friends and neighbours, and read novels—often of her own composition—aloud to her family in the evenings. Socialising with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall. Her brother Henry later said that \"Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it\".",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1783, Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs Ann Cawley who took them to Southampton later that year. That autumn both girls were sent home after catching typhus, from which Jane Austen nearly died. She was from then home educated, until she attended boarding school with her sister from early in 1785 at the Reading Abbey Girls' School, ruled by Mrs La Tournelle. The curriculum probably included French, spelling, needlework, dancing, music and drama. The sisters returned home before December 1786 because the school fees for the two girls were too high for the Austen family. After 1786, Austen \"never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment\".",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Her education came from reading, guided by her father and brothers James and Henry. Irene Collins said that Austen \"used some of the same school books as the boys\". Austen apparently had unfettered access both to her father's library and that of a family friend, Warren Hastings. Together these collections amounted to a large and varied library. Her father was also tolerant of Austen's sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Private theatricals were an essential part of Austen's education. From her early childhood, the family and friends staged a series of plays in the rectory barn, including Richard Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) and David Garrick's Bon Ton. Austen's eldest brother James wrote the prologues and epilogues and she probably joined in these activities, first as a spectator and later as a participant. Most of the plays were comedies, which suggests how Austen's satirical gifts were cultivated. At the age of 12, she tried her own hand at dramatic writing; she wrote three short plays during her teenage years.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "From at least the time she was aged eleven, Austen wrote poems and stories to amuse herself and her family. She exaggerated mundane details of daily life and parodied common plot devices in \"stories [] full of anarchic fantasies of female power, licence, illicit behaviour, and general high spirits\", according to Janet Todd. Containing work written between 1787 and 1793, Austen compiled fair copies of twenty-nine early works into three bound notebooks, now referred to as the Juvenilia. She called the three notebooks \"Volume the First\", \"Volume the Second\" and \"Volume the Third\", and they preserve 90,000 words she wrote during those years. The Juvenilia are often, according to scholar Richard Jenkyns, \"boisterous\" and \"anarchic\"; he compares them to the work of 18th-century novelist Laurence Sterne.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Among these works is a satirical novel in letters titled Love and Freindship [sic], written when aged fourteen in 1790, in which she mocked popular novels of sensibility. The next year, she wrote The History of England, a manuscript of thirty-four pages accompanied by thirteen watercolour miniatures by her sister, Cassandra. Austen's History parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's History of England (1764). Honan speculates that not long after writing Love and Freindship, Austen decided to \"write for profit, to make stories her central effort\", that is, to become a professional writer. When she was around eighteen years old, Austen began to write longer, more sophisticated works.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In August 1792, aged seventeen, Austen started Catharine or the Bower, which presaged her mature work, especially Northanger Abbey, but was left unfinished until picked up in Lady Susan, which Todd describes as less prefiguring than Catharine. A year later she began, but abandoned, a short play, later titled Sir Charles Grandison or the happy Man, a comedy in 6 acts, which she returned to and completed around 1800. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgements of Austen's favourite contemporary novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), by Samuel Richardson.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "When Austen became an aunt for the first time aged eighteen, she sent new-born niece Fanny-Catherine Austen-Knight \"five short pieces of ... the Juvenilia now known collectively as 'Scraps' .., purporting to be her 'Opinions and Admonitions on the conduct of Young Women'\". For Jane-Anna-Elizabeth Austen (also born in 1793), her aunt wrote \"two more 'Miscellanious [sic] Morsels', dedicating them to [Anna] on 2 June 1793, 'convinced that if you seriously attend to them, You will derive from them very important Instructions, with regard to your Conduct in Life.'\" There is manuscript evidence that Austen continued to work on these pieces as late as 1811 (when she was 36), and that her niece and nephew, Anna and James Edward Austen, made further additions as late as 1814.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Between 1793 and 1795 (aged eighteen to twenty), Austen wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel, usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work. It is unlike any of Austen's other works. Austen biographer Claire Tomalin describes the novella's heroine as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray and abuse her lovers, friends and family. Tomalin writes:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Told in letters, it is as neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration dramatists who may have provided some of her inspiration ... It stands alone in Austen's work as a study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater than those of anyone she encounters.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "According to Janet Todd, the model for the title character may have been Eliza de Feuillide, who inspired Austen with stories of her glamorous life and various adventures. Eliza's French husband was guillotined in 1794; she married Jane's brother Henry Austen in 1797.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "When Austen was twenty, Tom Lefroy, a neighbour, visited Steventon from December 1795 to January 1796. He had just finished a university degree and was moving to London for training as a barrister. Lefroy and Austen would have been introduced at a ball or other neighbourhood social gathering, and it is clear from Austen's letters to Cassandra that they spent considerable time together: \"I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Austen wrote in her first surviving letter to her sister Cassandra that Lefroy was a \"very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man\". Five days later in another letter, Austen wrote that she expected an \"offer\" from her \"friend\" and that \"I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat\", going on to write \"I will confide myself in the future to Mr Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't give a sixpence\" and refuse all others. The next day, Austen wrote: \"The day will come on which I flirt my last with Tom Lefroy and when you receive this it will be all over. My tears flow as I write at this melancholy idea\".",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Halperin cautioned that Austen often satirised popular sentimental romantic fiction in her letters, and some of the statements about Lefroy may have been ironic. However, it is clear that Austen was genuinely attracted to Lefroy and subsequently none of her other suitors ever quite measured up to him. The Lefroy family intervened and sent him away at the end of January. Marriage was impractical as both Lefroy and Austen must have known. Neither had any money, and he was dependent on a great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career. If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again. In November 1798, Lefroy was still on Austen's mind as she wrote to her sister she had tea with one of his relatives, wanted desperately to ask about him, but could not bring herself to raise the subject.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "After finishing Lady Susan, Austen began her first full-length novel Elinor and Marianne. Her sister remembered that it was read to the family \"before 1796\" and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Austen began a second novel, First Impressions (later published as Pride and Prejudice), in 1796. She completed the initial draft in August 1797, aged 21; as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an \"established favourite\". At this time, her father made the first attempt to publish one of her novels. In November 1797, George Austen wrote to Thomas Cadell, an established publisher in London, to ask if he would consider publishing First Impressions. Cadell returned Mr. Austen's letter, marking it \"Declined by Return of Post\". Austen may not have known of her father's efforts. Following the completion of First Impressions, Austen returned to Elinor and Marianne and from November 1797 until mid-1798, revised it heavily; she eliminated the epistolary format in favour of third-person narration and produced something close to Sense and Sensibility. In 1797, Austen met her cousin (and future sister-in-law), Eliza de Feuillide, a French aristocrat whose first husband the Comte de Feuillide had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austen. The description of the execution of the Comte de Feuillide related by his widow left Austen with an intense horror of the French Revolution that lasted for the rest of her life.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of Elinor and Marianne, Austen began writing a third novel with the working title Susan—later Northanger Abbey—a satire on the popular Gothic novel. Austen completed her work about a year later. In early 1803, Henry Austen offered Susan to Benjamin Crosby, a London publisher, who paid £10 for the copyright. Crosby promised early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being \"in the press\", but did nothing more. The manuscript remained in Crosby's hands, unpublished, until Austen repurchased the copyright from him in 1816.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In December 1800, George Austen unexpectedly announced his decision to retire from the ministry, leave Steventon, and move the family to 4, Sydney Place in Bath, Somerset. While retirement and travel were good for the elder Austens, Jane Austen was shocked to be told she was moving 50 miles (80 km) away from the only home she had ever known. An indication of her state of mind is her lack of productivity as a writer during the time she lived in Bath. She was able to make some revisions to Susan, and she began and then abandoned a new novel, The Watsons, but there was nothing like the productivity of the years 1795–1799. Tomalin suggests this reflects a deep depression disabling her as a writer, but Honan disagrees, arguing Austen wrote or revised her manuscripts throughout her creative life, except for a few months after her father died. It is often claimed that Austen was unhappy in Bath, which caused her to lose interest in writing, but it is just as possible that Austen's social life in Bath prevented her from spending much time writing novels. The critic Robert Irvine argued that if Austen spent more time writing novels when she was in the countryside, it might just have been because she had more spare time as opposed to being more happy in the countryside as is often argued. Furthermore, Austen frequently both moved and travelled over southern England during this period, which was hardly a conducive environment for writing a long novel. Austen sold the rights to publish Susan to a publisher Crosby & Company, who paid her £10 (equivalent to £860 in 2021). The Crosby & Company advertised Susan, but never published it.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The years from 1801 to 1804 are something of a blank space for Austen scholars as Cassandra destroyed all of her letters from her sister in this period for unknown reasons. In December 1802, Austen received her only known proposal of marriage. She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted. As described by Caroline Austen, Jane's niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive—he was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance. No contemporary letters or diaries describe how Austen felt about this proposal. Irvine described Bigg-Wither as somebody who \"...seems to have been a man very hard to like, let alone love\".",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1814, Austen wrote a letter to her niece Fanny Knight, who had asked for advice about a serious relationship, telling her that \"having written so much on one side of the question, I shall now turn around & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection\". The English scholar Douglas Bush wrote that Austen had \"had a very high ideal of the love that should unite a husband and wife ... All of her heroines ... know in proportion to their maturity, the meaning of ardent love\". A possible autobiographical element in Sense and Sensibility occurs when Elinor Dashwood contemplates \"the worse and most irremediable of all evils, a connection for life\" with an unsuitable man.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1804, while living in Bath, Austen started, but did not complete, her novel The Watsons. The story centres on an invalid and impoverished clergyman and his four unmarried daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as \"a study in the harsh economic realities of dependent women's lives\". Honan suggests, and Tomalin agrees, that Austen chose to stop work on the novel after her father died on 21 January 1805 and her personal circumstances resembled those of her characters too closely for her comfort.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Her father's relatively sudden death left Jane, Cassandra, and their mother in a precarious financial situation. Edward, James, Henry, and Francis Austen (known as Frank) pledged to make annual contributions to support their mother and sisters. For the next four years, the family's living arrangements reflected their financial insecurity. They spent part of the time in rented quarters in Bath before leaving the city in June 1805 for a family visit to Steventon and Godmersham. They moved for the autumn months to the newly fashionable seaside resort of Worthing, on the Sussex coast, where they resided at Stanford Cottage. It was here that Austen is thought to have written her fair copy of Lady Susan and added its \"Conclusion\". In 1806, the family moved to Southampton, where they shared a house with Frank Austen and his new wife. A large part of this time they spent visiting various branches of the family.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "On 5 April 1809, about three months before the family's move to Chawton, Austen wrote an angry letter to Richard Crosby, offering him a new manuscript of Susan if needed to secure the immediate publication of the novel, and requesting the return of the original so she could find another publisher. Crosby replied that he had not agreed to publish the book by any particular time, or at all, and that Austen could repurchase the manuscript for the £10 he had paid her and find another publisher. She did not have the resources to buy the copyright back at that time, but was able to purchase it in 1816.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Around early 1809, Austen's brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a more settled life—the use of a large cottage in Chawton village which was part of the estate around Edward's nearby property Chawton House. Jane, Cassandra and their mother moved into Chawton cottage on 7 July 1809. Life was quieter in Chawton than it had been since the family's move to Bath in 1800. The Austens did not socialise with gentry and entertained only when family visited. Her niece Anna described the family's life in Chawton as \"a very quiet life, according to our ideas, but they were great readers, and besides the housekeeping our aunts occupied themselves in working with the poor and in teaching some girl or boy to read or write.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Like many women authors at the time, Austen published her books anonymously. At the time, the ideal roles for a woman were as wife and mother, and writing for women was regarded at best as a secondary form of activity; a woman who wished to be a full-time writer was felt to be degrading her femininity, so books by women were usually published anonymously in order to maintain the conceit that the female writer was only publishing as a sort of part-time job, and was not seeking to become a \"literary lioness\" (i.e. a celebrity).",
"title": "Published author"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "During her time at Chawton, Austen published four generally well-received novels. Through her brother Henry, the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and Sensibility, which, like all of Austen's novels except Pride and Prejudice, was published \"on commission\", that is, at the author's financial risk. When publishing on commission, publishers would advance the costs of publication, repay themselves as books were sold and then charge a 10% commission for each book sold, paying the rest to the author. If a novel did not recover its costs through sales, the author was responsible for them. The alternative to selling via commission was by selling the copyright, where an author received a one-time payment from the publisher for the manuscript, which occurred with Pride and Prejudice. Austen's experience with Susan (the manuscript that became Northanger Abbey) where she sold the copyright to the publisher Crosby & Sons for £10, who did not publish the book, forcing her to buy back the copyright in order to get her work published, left Austen leery of this method of publishing. The final alternative, of selling by subscription, where a group of people would agree to buy a book in advance, was not an option for Austen as only authors who were well known or had an influential aristocratic patron who would recommend an up-coming book to their friends, could sell by subscription. Sense and Sensibility appeared in October 1811, and was described as being written \"By a Lady\". As it was sold on commission, Egerton used expensive paper and set the price at 15 shillings (equivalent to £58 in 2021).",
"title": "Published author"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Reviews were favourable and the novel became fashionable among young aristocratic opinion-makers; the edition sold out by mid-1813. Austen's novels were published in larger editions than was normal for this period. The small size of the novel-reading public and the large costs associated with hand production (particularly the cost of handmade paper) meant that most novels were published in editions of 500 copies or fewer to reduce the risks to the publisher and the novelist. Even some of the most successful titles during this period were issued in editions of not more than 750 or 800 copies and later reprinted if demand continued. Austen's novels were published in larger editions, ranging from about 750 copies of Sense and Sensibility to about 2,000 copies of Emma. It is not clear whether the decision to print more copies than usual of Austen's novels was driven by the publishers or the author. Since all but one of Austen's books were originally published \"on commission\", the risks of overproduction were largely hers (or Cassandra's after her death) and publishers may have been more willing to produce larger editions than was normal practice when their own funds were at risk. Editions of popular works of non-fiction were often much larger.",
"title": "Published author"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Austen made £140 (equivalent to £10,800 in 2021) from Sense and Sensibility, which provided her with some financial and psychological independence. After the success of Sense and Sensibility, all of Austen's subsequent books were billed as written \"By the author of Sense and Sensibility\" and Austen's name never appeared on her books during her lifetime. Egerton then published Pride and Prejudice, a revision of First Impressions, in January 1813. Austen sold the copyright to Pride and Prejudice to Egerton for £110 (equivalent to £7,600 in 2021). To maximise profits, he used cheap paper and set the price at 18 shillings (equivalent to £62 in 2021). He advertised the book widely and it was an immediate success, garnering three favourable reviews and selling well. Had Austen sold Pride and Prejudice on commission, she would have made a profit of £475, or twice her father's annual income. By October 1813, Egerton was able to begin selling a second edition. Mansfield Park was published by Egerton in May 1814. While Mansfield Park was ignored by reviewers, it was very popular with readers. All copies were sold within six months, and Austen's earnings on this novel were larger than for any of her other novels.",
"title": "Published author"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Without Austen's knowledge or approval, her novels were translated into French and published in cheaply produced, pirated editions in France. The literary critic Noel King commented in 1953 that, given the prevailing rage in France at the time for lush romantic fantasies, it was remarkable that her novels with the emphasis on everyday English life had any sort of a market in France. King cautioned that Austen's chief translator in France, Madame Isabelle de Montolieu, had only the most rudimentary knowledge of English, and her translations were more of \"imitations\" than translations proper, as Montolieu depended upon assistants to provide a summary, which she then translated into an embellished French that often radically altered Austen's plots and characters. The first of the Austen novels to be published that credited her as the author was in France, when Persuasion was published in 1821 as La Famille Elliot ou L'Ancienne Inclination.",
"title": "Published author"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Austen learned that the Prince Regent admired her novels and kept a set at each of his residences. In November 1815, the Prince Regent's librarian James Stanier Clarke invited Austen to visit the Prince's London residence and hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming Emma to the Prince. Though Austen disapproved of the Prince Regent, she could scarcely refuse the request. Austen disapproved of the Prince Regent on the account of his womanising, gambling, drinking, spendthrift ways and generally disreputable behaviour. She later wrote Plan of a Novel, according to Hints from Various Quarters, a satiric outline of the \"perfect novel\" based on the librarian's many suggestions for a future Austen novel. Austen was greatly annoyed by Clarke's often pompous literary advice, and the Plan of a Novel parodying Clarke was intended as her revenge for all of the unwanted letters she had received from the royal librarian.",
"title": "Published author"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In mid-1815 Austen moved her work from Egerton to John Murray, a better known London publisher, who published Emma in December 1815 and a second edition of Mansfield Park in February 1816. Emma sold well, but the new edition of Mansfield Park did poorly, and this failure offset most of the income from Emma. These were the last of Austen's novels to be published during her lifetime.",
"title": "Published author"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "While Murray prepared Emma for publication, Austen began The Elliots, later published as Persuasion. She completed her first draft in July 1816. In addition, shortly after the publication of Emma, Henry Austen repurchased the copyright for Susan from Crosby. Austen was forced to postpone publishing either of these completed novels by family financial troubles. Henry Austen's bank failed in March 1816, depriving him of all of his assets, leaving him deeply in debt and costing Edward, James, and Frank Austen large sums. Henry and Frank could no longer afford the contributions they had made to support their mother and sisters.",
"title": "Published author"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Austen was feeling unwell by early 1816, but ignored the warning signs. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable, and she began a slow, irregular deterioration. The majority of biographers rely on Zachary Cope's 1964 retrospective diagnosis and list her cause of death as Addison's disease, although her final illness has also been described as resulting from Hodgkin's lymphoma. When her uncle died and left his entire fortune to his wife, effectively disinheriting his relatives, she suffered a relapse, writing: \"I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle's Will brought on a relapse ... but a weak Body must excuse weak Nerves.\"",
"title": "Published author"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Austen continued to work in spite of her illness. Dissatisfied with the ending of The Elliots, she rewrote the final two chapters, which she finished on 6 August 1816. In January 1817, Austen began The Brothers (titled Sanditon when published in 1925), completing twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably due to illness. Todd describes Sanditon's heroine, Diana Parker, as an \"energetic invalid\". In the novel Austen mocked hypochondriacs, and although she describes the heroine as \"bilious\", five days after abandoning the novel she wrote of herself that she was turning \"every wrong colour\" and living \"chiefly on the sofa\". She put down her pen on 18 March 1817, making a note of it.",
"title": "Published author"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Austen made light of her condition, describing it as \"bile\" and rheumatism. As her illness progressed, she experienced difficulty walking and lacked energy; by mid-April she was confined to bed. In May, Cassandra and Henry brought her to Winchester for treatment, by which time she suffered agonising pain and welcomed death. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817 at the age of 41. Henry, through his clerical connections, arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen's personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation and mentions the \"extraordinary endowments of her mind\", but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer.",
"title": "Published author"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In the months after Austen's death in July 1817, Cassandra, Henry Austen and Murray arranged for the publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey as a set. Henry Austen contributed a Biographical Note dated December 1817, which for the first time identified his sister as the author of the novels. Tomalin describes it as \"a loving and polished eulogy\". Sales were good for a year—only 321 copies remained unsold at the end of 1818.",
"title": "Posthumous publication"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Although Austen's six novels were out of print in England in the 1820s, they were still being read through copies housed in private libraries and circulating libraries. Austen had early admirers. The first piece of fiction using her as a character (what might now be called real person fiction) appeared in 1823 in a letter to the editor in The Lady's Magazine. It refers to Austen's genius and suggests that aspiring authors were envious of her powers.",
"title": "Posthumous publication"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In 1832, Richard Bentley purchased the remaining copyrights to all of her novels, and over the following winter published five illustrated volumes as part of his Standard Novels series. In October 1833, Bentley released the first collected edition of her works. Since then, Austen's novels have been continuously in print.",
"title": "Posthumous publication"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Austen's works implicitly critique the sentimental novels of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. The earliest English novelists, Richardson, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, were followed by the school of sentimentalists and romantics such as Walter Scott, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and Oliver Goldsmith, whose style and genre Austen repudiated, returning the novel on a \"slender thread\" to the tradition of Richardson and Fielding for a \"realistic study of manners\". In the mid-20th century, literary critics F. R. Leavis and Ian Watt placed her in the tradition of Richardson and Fielding; both believe that she used their tradition of \"irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both\".",
"title": "Genre and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Walter Scott noted Austen's \"resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much of modern fiction—'the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries'\". Yet her relationship with these genres is complex, as evidenced by Northanger Abbey and Emma. Similar to William Wordsworth, who excoriated the modern frantic novel in the \"Preface\" to his Lyrical Ballads (1800), Austen distances herself from escapist novels; the discipline and innovation she demonstrates is similar to his, and she shows \"that rhetorically less is artistically more.\" She eschewed popular Gothic fiction, stories of terror in which a heroine typically was stranded in a remote location, a castle or abbey (32 novels between 1784 and 1818 contain the word \"abbey\" in their title). Yet in Northanger Abbey she alludes to the trope, with the heroine, Catherine, anticipating a move to a remote locale. Rather than full-scale rejection or parody, Austen transforms the genre, juxtaposing reality, with descriptions of elegant rooms and modern comforts, against the heroine's \"novel-fueled\" desires. Nor does she completely denigrate Gothic fiction: instead she transforms settings and situations, such that the heroine is still imprisoned, yet her imprisonment is mundane and real—regulated manners and the strict rules of the ballroom. In Sense and Sensibility Austen presents characters who are more complex than in staple sentimental fiction, according to critic Keymer, who notes that although it is a parody of popular sentimental fiction, \"Marianne in her sentimental histrionics responds to the calculating world ... with a quite justifiable scream of female distress.\"",
"title": "Genre and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable. It was a wretched business, indeed! Such an overthrow of everything she had been wishing for! Such a development of every thing most unwelcome!",
"title": "Genre and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "— example of free indirect speech, Jane Austen, Emma",
"title": "Genre and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Richardson's Pamela, the prototype for the sentimental novel, is a didactic love story with a happy ending, written at a time women were beginning to have the right to choose husbands and yet were restricted by social conventions. Austen attempted Richardson's epistolary style, but found the flexibility of narrative more conducive to her realism, a realism in which each conversation and gesture carries a weight of significance. The narrative style utilises free indirect speech—she was the first English novelist to do so extensively—through which she had the ability to present a character's thoughts directly to the reader and yet still retain narrative control. The style allows an author to vary discourse between the narrator's voice and values and those of the characters.",
"title": "Genre and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Austen had a natural ear for speech and dialogue, according to scholar Mary Lascelles: \"Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing and thoughts of their characters.\" Techniques such as fragmentary speech suggest a character's traits and their tone; \"syntax and phrasing rather than vocabulary\" is utilised to indicate social variants. Dialogue reveals a character's mood—frustration, anger, happiness—each treated differently and often through varying patterns of sentence structures. When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Darcy, her stilted speech and the convoluted sentence structure reveals that he has wounded her:",
"title": "Genre and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that the groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike. And I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.",
"title": "Genre and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Austen's plots highlight women's traditional dependence on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. As an art form, the 18th-century novel lacked the seriousness of its equivalents from the 19th century, when novels were treated as \"the natural vehicle for discussion and ventilation of what mattered in life\". Rather than delving too deeply into the psyche of her characters, Austen enjoys them and imbues them with humour, according to critic John Bayley. He believes that the well-spring of her wit and irony is her own attitude that comedy \"is the saving grace of life\". Part of Austen's fame rests on the historical and literary significance that she was the first woman to write great comic novels. Samuel Johnson's influence is evident, in that she follows his advice to write \"a representation of life as may excite mirth\".",
"title": "Genre and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Her humour comes from her modesty and lack of superiority, allowing her most successful characters, such as Elizabeth Bennet, to transcend the trivialities of life, which the more foolish characters are overly absorbed in. Austen used comedy to explore the individualism of women's lives and gender relations, and she appears to have used it to find the goodness in life, often fusing it with \"ethical sensibility\", creating artistic tension. Critic Robert Polhemus writes, \"To appreciate the drama and achievement of Austen, we need to realize how deep was her passion for both reverence and ridicule ... and her comic imagination reveals both the harmonies and the telling contradictions of her mind and vision as she tries to reconcile her satirical bias with her sense of the good.\"",
"title": "Genre and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "As Austen's works were published anonymously, they brought her little personal renown. They were fashionable among opinion-makers, but were rarely reviewed. Most of the reviews were short and on balance favourable, although superficial and cautious, most often focused on the moral lessons of the novels.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Sir Walter Scott, a leading novelist of the day, anonymously wrote a review of Emma in 1815, using it to defend the then-disreputable genre of the novel and praising Austen's realism, \"the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes from an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him\". The other important early review was attributed to Richard Whately in 1821. However, Whately denied having authored the review, which drew favourable comparisons between Austen and such acknowledged greats as Homer and Shakespeare, and praised the dramatic qualities of her narrative. Scott and Whately set the tone for almost all subsequent 19th-century Austen criticism.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Because Austen's novels did not conform to Romantic and Victorian expectations that \"powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and colour in the writing\", 19th-century critics and audiences preferred the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Notwithstanding Walter Scott's positivity, Austen's work did not match the prevailing aesthetic values of the Romantic zeitgeist. Her novels were republished in Britain from the 1830s and sold steadily, but they were not best-sellers.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The first French critic who paid notice to Austen was Philarète Chasles in an 1842 essay, dismissing her in two sentences as a boring, imitative writer with no substance. Austen was almost completely ignored in France until 1878, when the French critic Léon Boucher published the essay Le Roman Classique en Angleterre, in which he called Austen a \"genius\", the first French author to do so. The first accurate translation of Austen into French occurred in 1899 when Félix Fénéon translated Northanger Abbey as Catherine Moreland.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In Britain, Austen gradually grew in the estimation of the literati. Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes published a series of enthusiastic articles in the 1840s and 1850s. Later in the century, novelist Henry James referred to Austen several times with approval, and on one occasion ranked her with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding as among \"the fine painters of life\".",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced Austen to a wider public as \"dear aunt Jane\", the respectable maiden aunt. Publication of the Memoir spurred the reissue of Austen's novels—the first popular editions were released in 1883 and fancy illustrated editions and collectors' sets quickly followed. Author and critic Leslie Stephen described the popular mania that started to develop for Austen in the 1880s as \"Austenolatry\". Around the start of the 20th century, an intellectual clique of Janeites reacted against the popularisation of Austen, distinguishing their deeper appreciation from the vulgar enthusiasm of the masses.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In response, Henry James decried \"a beguiled infatuation\" with Austen, a rising tide of public interest that exceeded Austen's \"intrinsic merit and interest\". The American literary critic A. Walton Litz noted that the \"anti-Janites\" in the 19th and 20th centuries comprised a formidable literary squad of Mark Twain, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, D. H. Lawrence and Kingsley Amis, but in \"every case the adverse judgement merely reveals the special limitations or eccentricities of the critic, leaving Jane Austen relatively untouched\".",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Austen's works have attracted legions of scholars. The first dissertation on Austen was published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard University. Another early academic analysis came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley, who grouped Austen's novels into \"early\" and \"late\" works, a distinction still used by scholars today. The first academic book devoted to Austen in France was Jane Austen by Paul and Kate Rague (1914), who set out to explain why French critics and readers should take Austen seriously. The same year, Léonie Villard published Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres, originally her PhD thesis, the first serious academic study of Austen in France. In 1923, R.W. Chapman published the first scholarly edition of Austen's collected works, which was also the first scholarly edition of any English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published editions of Austen's works.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "With the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles' Jane Austen and Her Art, the academic study of Austen took hold. Lascelles analyzed the books Austen read and their influence on her work, and closely examined Austen's style and \"narrative art\". Concern arose that academics were obscuring the appreciation of Austen with increasingly esoteric theories, a debate that has continued since.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The period since World War II has seen a diversity of critical approaches to Austen, including feminist theory, and perhaps most controversially, postcolonial theory. The divide has widened between the popular appreciation of Austen, particularly by modern Janeites, and academic judgements. In 1994, literary critic Harold Bloom placed Austen among the greatest Western writers of all time.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In the People's Republic of China after 1949, writings of Austen were regarded as too frivolous, and thus during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–69, Austen was banned as a \"British bourgeois imperialist\". In the late 1970s, when Austen's works was re-published in China, her popularity with readers confounded the authorities who had trouble understanding that people generally read books for enjoyment, not political edification.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In a typical modern debate, the conservative American professor Gene Koppel, to the indignation of his liberal literature students, mentioned that Austen and her family were \"Tories of the deepest dye\", i.e. Conservatives in opposition to the liberal Whigs. Although several feminist authors such as Claudia Johnson and Mollie Sandock claimed Austen for their own cause, Koppel argued that different people react to a work of literature in different subjective ways, as explained by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thus competing interpretations of Austen's work can be equally valid, provided they are grounded in textual and historical analysis: it is equally possible to see Austen as a feminist critiquing Regency-era society and as a conservative upholding its values.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Austen's novels have resulted in sequels, prequels and adaptations of almost every type, from soft-core pornography to fantasy. From the 19th century, her family members published conclusions to her incomplete novels, and by 2000 there were over 100 printed adaptations. The first dramatic adaptation of Austen was published in 1895, Rosina Filippi's Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane Austen: Arranged and Adapted for Drawing-Room Performance, and Filippi was also responsible for the first professional stage adaptation, The Bennets (1901). The first film adaptation was the 1940 MGM production of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. BBC television dramatisations since the 1970s have attempted to adhere meticulously to Austen's plots, characterisations and settings. The British critic Robert Irvine noted that in American film adaptations of Austen's novels, starting with the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, class is subtly downplayed, and the society of Regency England depicted by Austen that is grounded in a hierarchy based upon the ownership of land and the antiquity of the family name is one that Americans cannot embrace in its entirety.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "From 1995, many Austen adaptations appeared, with Ang Lee's film of Sense and Sensibility, for which screenwriter and star Emma Thompson won an Academy Award, and the BBC's immensely popular TV mini-series Pride and Prejudice, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. A 2005 British production of Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, was followed in 2007 by ITV's Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and in 2016 by Love & Friendship starring Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan, a film version of Lady Susan, that borrowed the title of Austen's Love and Freindship [sic].",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In 2013, Austen's works featured on a series of UK postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail to mark the bicentenary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. Austen is on the £10 note issued by the Bank of England which was introduced in 2017, replacing Charles Darwin. In July 2017, a statue of Jane Austen was erected in Basingstoke, Hampshire on the 200th anniversary of her death.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Unfinished fiction",
"title": "List of works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Other works",
"title": "List of works"
}
]
| Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works are an implicit critique of the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her deft use of social commentary, realism and biting irony have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars. The anonymously published Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816), were a modest success but brought her little fame in her lifetime. She wrote two other novels—Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818—and began another, eventually titled Sanditon, but died before its completion. She also left behind three volumes of juvenile writings in manuscript, the short epistolary novel Lady Susan, and the unfinished novel The Watsons. Since her death Austen's novels have rarely been out of print. A significant transition in her reputation occurred in 1833, when they were republished in Richard Bentley's Standard Novels series. They gradually gained wide acclaim and popular readership. In 1869, fifty-two years after her death, her nephew's publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced a compelling version of her writing career and supposedly uneventful life to an eager audience. Her work has inspired a large number of critical essays and has been included in many literary anthologies. Her novels have also inspired many films, including 1940's Pride and Prejudice, 1995's Sense and Sensibility and 2016's Love & Friendship. | 2001-08-17T17:54:09Z | 2023-12-09T00:46:07Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen |
15,785 | June | June is the sixth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Its length is 30 days. June contains the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the day with the most daylight hours, and the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, the day with the fewest daylight hours (excluding polar regions in both cases). June in the Northern Hemisphere is the seasonal equivalent to December in the Southern Hemisphere and vice versa. In the Northern Hemisphere, the beginning of the traditional astronomical summer is 21 June (meteorological summer begins on 1 June). In the Southern Hemisphere, meteorological winter begins on 1 June.
At the start of June, the sun rises in the constellation of Taurus; at the end of June, the sun rises in the constellation of Gemini. However, due to the precession of the equinoxes, June begins with the sun in the astrological sign of Gemini, and ends with the sun in the astrological sign of Cancer.
The Latin name for June is Junius. Ovid offers multiple etymologies for the name in the Fasti, a poem about the Roman calendar. The first is that the month is named after the Roman goddess Juno, the goddess of marriage and the wife of the supreme deity Jupiter; the second is that the name comes from the Latin word iuniores, meaning "younger ones", as opposed to maiores ("elders") for which the preceding month May (Maius) may be named. Another source claims June is named after Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic and ancestor of the Roman gens Junia.
In ancient Rome, the period from mid-May through mid-June was considered inauspicious for marriage. Ovid says that he consulted the Flaminica Dialis, the high priestess of Jupiter, about setting a date for his daughter's wedding, and was advised to wait till after June 15. Plutarch, however, implies that the entire month of June was more favorable for weddings than May.
Certain meteor showers take place in June. The Arietids takes place May 22 to July 2 each year, and peaks on June 7. The Beta Taurids June 5 to July 18. The June Bootids take place roughly between 26 June and 2 July each year.
Under the calendar of ancient Rome, the festival of Ludi Fabarici took place on May 29 – June 1, Kalendae Fabariae took place on June 1, the Festival to Bellona took place on June 3, Ludi Piscatorii took place on June 7, and Vestalia took place from June 7 – June 15. A Rosalia was held on June 20. The Secular Games were held roughly every 100 years in either May or June. These dates do not correspond to the modern Gregorian calendar.
(All Baha'i, Islamic, and Jewish observances begin at the sundown prior to the date listed, and end at sundown of the date in question unless otherwise noted.)
June's birthstones are pearl, alexandrite and moonstone.
The birth flowers are rose and honeysuckle. The zodiac signs are Gemini (until June 20) and Cancer (from June 21 onward). Both of these dates are for United States Eastern Daylight Time. For the world UT/GMT the dates are 19–20. | [
{
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"text": "June is the sixth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Its length is 30 days. June contains the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the day with the most daylight hours, and the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, the day with the fewest daylight hours (excluding polar regions in both cases). June in the Northern Hemisphere is the seasonal equivalent to December in the Southern Hemisphere and vice versa. In the Northern Hemisphere, the beginning of the traditional astronomical summer is 21 June (meteorological summer begins on 1 June). In the Southern Hemisphere, meteorological winter begins on 1 June.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "At the start of June, the sun rises in the constellation of Taurus; at the end of June, the sun rises in the constellation of Gemini. However, due to the precession of the equinoxes, June begins with the sun in the astrological sign of Gemini, and ends with the sun in the astrological sign of Cancer.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Latin name for June is Junius. Ovid offers multiple etymologies for the name in the Fasti, a poem about the Roman calendar. The first is that the month is named after the Roman goddess Juno, the goddess of marriage and the wife of the supreme deity Jupiter; the second is that the name comes from the Latin word iuniores, meaning \"younger ones\", as opposed to maiores (\"elders\") for which the preceding month May (Maius) may be named. Another source claims June is named after Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic and ancestor of the Roman gens Junia.",
"title": "Etymology and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In ancient Rome, the period from mid-May through mid-June was considered inauspicious for marriage. Ovid says that he consulted the Flaminica Dialis, the high priestess of Jupiter, about setting a date for his daughter's wedding, and was advised to wait till after June 15. Plutarch, however, implies that the entire month of June was more favorable for weddings than May.",
"title": "Etymology and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Certain meteor showers take place in June. The Arietids takes place May 22 to July 2 each year, and peaks on June 7. The Beta Taurids June 5 to July 18. The June Bootids take place roughly between 26 June and 2 July each year.",
"title": "Etymology and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Under the calendar of ancient Rome, the festival of Ludi Fabarici took place on May 29 – June 1, Kalendae Fabariae took place on June 1, the Festival to Bellona took place on June 3, Ludi Piscatorii took place on June 7, and Vestalia took place from June 7 – June 15. A Rosalia was held on June 20. The Secular Games were held roughly every 100 years in either May or June. These dates do not correspond to the modern Gregorian calendar.",
"title": "Etymology and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "(All Baha'i, Islamic, and Jewish observances begin at the sundown prior to the date listed, and end at sundown of the date in question unless otherwise noted.)",
"title": "Observances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "June's birthstones are pearl, alexandrite and moonstone.",
"title": "Symbols"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The birth flowers are rose and honeysuckle. The zodiac signs are Gemini (until June 20) and Cancer (from June 21 onward). Both of these dates are for United States Eastern Daylight Time. For the world UT/GMT the dates are 19–20.",
"title": "Symbols"
}
]
| June is the sixth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Its length is 30 days. June contains the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the day with the most daylight hours, and the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, the day with the fewest daylight hours. June in the Northern Hemisphere is the seasonal equivalent to December in the Southern Hemisphere and vice versa. In the Northern Hemisphere, the beginning of the traditional astronomical summer is 21 June. In the Southern Hemisphere, meteorological winter begins on 1 June. At the start of June, the sun rises in the constellation of Taurus; at the end of June, the sun rises in the constellation of Gemini. However, due to the precession of the equinoxes, June begins with the sun in the astrological sign of Gemini, and ends with the sun in the astrological sign of Cancer. | 2001-10-15T17:27:28Z | 2023-12-22T21:51:43Z | [
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15,786 | July | July is the seventh month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and is the fourth of seven months to have a length of 31 days. It was named by the Roman Senate in honour of Roman general Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., being the month of his birth. Before then it was called Quintilis, being the fifth month of the calendar that started with March.
It is on average the warmest month in most of the Northern Hemisphere, where it is the second month of summer, and the coldest month in much of the Southern Hemisphere, where it is the second month of winter. The second half of the year commences in July. In the Southern Hemisphere, July is the seasonal equivalent of January in the Northern hemisphere.
"Dog days" are considered to begin in early July in the Northern Hemisphere, when the hot sultry weather of summer usually starts. Spring lambs born in late winter or early spring are usually sold before 1 July.
July's birthstone is the ruby, which symbolizes contentment.
Its birth flowers are the larkspur and the water lily. The zodiac signs are Cancer (until July 22) and Leo (July 23 onward).
This list does not necessarily imply either official status nor general observance.
(All Baha'i, Islamic, and Jewish observances begin at the sundown before the date listed, and end at sundown of the date in question unless otherwise noted.) | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "July is the seventh month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and is the fourth of seven months to have a length of 31 days. It was named by the Roman Senate in honour of Roman general Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., being the month of his birth. Before then it was called Quintilis, being the fifth month of the calendar that started with March.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "It is on average the warmest month in most of the Northern Hemisphere, where it is the second month of summer, and the coldest month in much of the Southern Hemisphere, where it is the second month of winter. The second half of the year commences in July. In the Southern Hemisphere, July is the seasonal equivalent of January in the Northern hemisphere.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "\"Dog days\" are considered to begin in early July in the Northern Hemisphere, when the hot sultry weather of summer usually starts. Spring lambs born in late winter or early spring are usually sold before 1 July.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "July's birthstone is the ruby, which symbolizes contentment.",
"title": "Symbols"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Its birth flowers are the larkspur and the water lily. The zodiac signs are Cancer (until July 22) and Leo (July 23 onward).",
"title": "Symbols"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "This list does not necessarily imply either official status nor general observance.",
"title": "Observances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "(All Baha'i, Islamic, and Jewish observances begin at the sundown before the date listed, and end at sundown of the date in question unless otherwise noted.)",
"title": "Observances"
}
]
| July is the seventh month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and is the fourth of seven months to have a length of 31 days. It was named by the Roman Senate in honour of Roman general Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., being the month of his birth. Before then it was called Quintilis, being the fifth month of the calendar that started with March. It is on average the warmest month in most of the Northern Hemisphere, where it is the second month of summer, and the coldest month in much of the Southern Hemisphere, where it is the second month of winter. The second half of the year commences in July. In the Southern Hemisphere, July is the seasonal equivalent of January in the Northern hemisphere. "Dog days" are considered to begin in early July in the Northern Hemisphere, when the hot sultry weather of summer usually starts. Spring lambs born in late winter or early spring are usually sold before 1 July. | 2001-06-11T19:09:52Z | 2023-12-03T04:31:59Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July |
15,787 | January 1 | January 1 or 1 January is the first day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. There are 364 days remaining until the end of the year (365 in leap years). This day is also known as New Year's Day since the day marks the beginning of the year. | [
{
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"text": "January 1 or 1 January is the first day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. There are 364 days remaining until the end of the year (365 in leap years). This day is also known as New Year's Day since the day marks the beginning of the year.",
"title": ""
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| January 1 or 1 January is the first day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. There are 364 days remaining until the end of the year. This day is also known as New Year's Day since the day marks the beginning of the year. | 2001-10-31T11:36:03Z | 2023-12-31T04:22:14Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1 |
15,788 | January 2 | January 2 is the second day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 363 days remain until the end of the year (364 in leap years). | [
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"text": "January 2 is the second day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 363 days remain until the end of the year (364 in leap years).",
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| January 2 is the second day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 363 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-15T14:45:54Z | 2023-12-31T06:58:36Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2 |
15,789 | January 3 | January 3 is the third day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 362 days remain until the end of the year (363 in leap years).
Perihelion, the point during the year when the Earth is closest to the Sun, occurs on or around this date. In the Northern Hemisphere, ignoring the effects of daylight saving time, the latest sunrise of the year occurs on or around this date. | [
{
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"text": "January 3 is the third day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 362 days remain until the end of the year (363 in leap years).",
"title": ""
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{
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"text": "Perihelion, the point during the year when the Earth is closest to the Sun, occurs on or around this date. In the Northern Hemisphere, ignoring the effects of daylight saving time, the latest sunrise of the year occurs on or around this date.",
"title": "Notes"
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| January 3 is the third day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 362 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-15T14:43:49Z | 2023-12-24T10:21:54Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_3 |
15,790 | January 15 | January 15 is the 15th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 350 days remain until the end of the year (351 in leap years). | [
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| January 15 is the 15th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 350 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-15T15:02:09Z | 2023-12-26T15:27:36Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_15 |
15,791 | January 26 | January 26 is the 26th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 339 days remain until the end of the year (340 in leap years). | [
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"text": "January 26 is the 26th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 339 days remain until the end of the year (340 in leap years).",
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| January 26 is the 26th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 339 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-06-30T13:53:03Z | 2023-12-28T23:50:16Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_26 |
15,792 | January 28 | January 28 is the 28th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 337 days remain until the end of the year (338 in leap years). | [
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| January 28 is the 28th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 337 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-09T07:38:31Z | 2023-11-24T23:02:24Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_28 |
15,793 | January 31 | January 31 is the 31st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 334 days remain until the end of the year (335 in leap years). | [
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| January 31 is the 31st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 334 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-14T21:23:19Z | 2023-12-11T10:22:16Z | [
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15,794 | June 6 | June 6 is the 157th day of the year (158th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 208 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| June 6 is the 157th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 208 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-14T01:09:27Z | 2023-12-25T05:58:16Z | [
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15,795 | June 7 | June 7 is the 158th day of the year (159th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 207 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,796 | June 11 | June 11 is the 162nd day of the year (163rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 203 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,797 | June 14 | June 14 is the 165th day of the year (166th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 200 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,798 | June 17 | June 17 is the 168th day of the year (169th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 197 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,799 | June 25 | June 25 is the 176th day of the year (177th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 189 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,800 | June 26 | June 26 is the 177th day of the year (178th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 188 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,801 | June 27 | June 27 is the 178th day of the year (179th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 187 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,802 | June 28 | June 28 is the 179th day of the year (180th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 186 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,803 | July 20 | July 20 is the 201st day of the year (202nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 164 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,804 | July 25 | July 25 is the 206th day of the year (207th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 159 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,805 | June 10 | June 10 is the 161st day of the year (162nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 204 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,806 | June 12 | June 12 is the 163rd day of the year (164th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 202 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,807 | John Horton Conway | John Horton Conway FRS (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches of recreational mathematics, most notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life.
Born and raised in Liverpool, Conway spent the first half of his career at the University of Cambridge before moving to the United States, where he held the John von Neumann Professorship at Princeton University for the rest of his career. On 11 April 2020, at age 82, he died of complications from COVID-19.
Conway was born on 26 December 1937 in Liverpool, the son of Cyril Horton Conway and Agnes Boyce. He became interested in mathematics at a very early age. By the time he was 11, his ambition was to become a mathematician. After leaving sixth form, he studied mathematics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. A "terribly introverted adolescent" in school, he took his admission to Cambridge as an opportunity to transform himself into an extrovert, a change which would later earn him the nickname of "the world's most charismatic mathematician".
Conway was awarded a BA in 1959 and, supervised by Harold Davenport, began to undertake research in number theory. Having solved the open problem posed by Davenport on writing numbers as the sums of fifth powers, Conway began to become interested in infinite ordinals. It appears that his interest in games began during his years studying the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, where he became an avid backgammon player, spending hours playing the game in the common room.
In 1964, Conway was awarded his doctorate and was appointed as College Fellow and Lecturer in Mathematics at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
After leaving Cambridge in 1986, he took up the appointment to the John von Neumann Chair of Mathematics at Princeton University. There, he won the school's Pi Day pie-eating contest.
Conway's career was intertwined with that of Martin Gardner. When Gardner featured Conway's Game of Life in his Mathematical Games column in October 1970, it became the most widely read of all his columns and made Conway an instant celebrity. Gardner and Conway had first corresponded in the late 1950s, and over the years Gardner had frequently written about recreational aspects of Conway's work. For instance, he discussed Conway's game of Sprouts (July 1967), Hackenbush (January 1972), and his angel and devil problem (February 1974). In the September 1976 column, he reviewed Conway's book On Numbers and Games and even managed to explain Conway's surreal numbers.
Conway was a prominent member of Martin Gardner's Mathematical Grapevine. He regularly visited Gardner and often wrote him long letters summarizing his recreational research. In a 1976 visit, Gardner kept him for a week, pumping him for information on the Penrose tilings which had just been announced. Conway had discovered many (if not most) of the major properties of the tilings. Gardner used these results when he introduced the world to Penrose tiles in his January 1977 column. The cover of that issue of Scientific American features the Penrose tiles and is based on a sketch by Conway.
Conway was married three times. With his first two wives he had two sons and four daughters. He married Diana in 2001 and had another son with her. He had three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
On 8 April 2020, Conway developed symptoms of COVID-19. On 11 April, he died in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at the age of 82.
Conway invented the Game of Life, one of the early examples of a cellular automaton. His initial experiments in that field were done with pen and paper, long before personal computers existed. Since Conway's game was popularized by Martin Gardner in Scientific American in 1970, it has spawned hundreds of computer programs, web sites, and articles. It is a staple of recreational mathematics. There is an extensive wiki devoted to curating and cataloging the various aspects of the game. From the earliest days, it has been a favorite in computer labs, both for its theoretical interest and as a practical exercise in programming and data display. Conway came to dislike how discussions of him heavily focused on his Game of Life, feeling that it overshadowed deeper and more important things he had done, although he remained proud of his work on it. The game helped to launch a new branch of mathematics, the field of cellular automata. The Game of Life is known to be Turing complete.
Conway contributed to combinatorial game theory (CGT), a theory of partisan games. He developed the theory with Elwyn Berlekamp and Richard Guy, and also co-authored the book Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays with them. He also wrote On Numbers and Games (ONAG) which lays out the mathematical foundations of CGT.
He was also one of the inventors of the game sprouts, as well as philosopher's football. He developed detailed analyses of many other games and puzzles, such as the Soma cube, peg solitaire, and Conway's soldiers. He came up with the angel problem, which was solved in 2006.
He invented a new system of numbers, the surreal numbers, which are closely related to certain games and have been the subject of a mathematical novelette by Donald Knuth. He also invented a nomenclature for exceedingly large numbers, the Conway chained arrow notation. Much of this is discussed in the 0th part of ONAG.
In the mid-1960s with Michael Guy, Conway established that there are sixty-four convex uniform polychora excluding two infinite sets of prismatic forms. They discovered the grand antiprism in the process, the only non-Wythoffian uniform polychoron. Conway has also suggested a system of notation dedicated to describing polyhedra called Conway polyhedron notation.
In the theory of tessellations, he devised the Conway criterion which is a fast way to identify many prototiles that tile the plane.
He investigated lattices in higher dimensions and was the first to determine the symmetry group of the Leech lattice.
In knot theory, Conway formulated a new variation of the Alexander polynomial and produced a new invariant now called the Conway polynomial. After lying dormant for more than a decade, this concept became central to work in the 1980s on the novel knot polynomials. Conway further developed tangle theory and invented a system of notation for tabulating knots, now known as Conway notation, while correcting a number of errors in the 19th-century knot tables and extending them to include all but four of the non-alternating primes with 11 crossings. The Conway knot is named after him.
Conway's conjecture that, in any thrackle, the number of edges is at most equal to the number of vertices, is still open.
He was the primary author of the ATLAS of Finite Groups giving properties of many finite simple groups. Working with his colleagues Robert Curtis and Simon P. Norton he constructed the first concrete representations of some of the sporadic groups. More specifically, he discovered three sporadic groups based on the symmetry of the Leech lattice, which have been designated the Conway groups. This work made him a key player in the successful classification of the finite simple groups.
Based on a 1978 observation by mathematician John McKay, Conway and Norton formulated the complex of conjectures known as monstrous moonshine. This subject, named by Conway, relates the monster group with elliptic modular functions, thus bridging two previously distinct areas of mathematics—finite groups and complex function theory. Monstrous moonshine theory has now been revealed to also have deep connections to string theory.
Conway introduced the Mathieu groupoid, an extension of the Mathieu group M12 to 13 points.
As a graduate student, he proved one case of a conjecture by Edward Waring, that every integer could be written as the sum of 37 numbers each raised to the fifth power, though Chen Jingrun solved the problem independently before Conway's work could be published. In 1972, Conway proved that a natural generalization of the Collatz problem is algorithmically undecidable. Related to that, he developed the esoteric programming language FRACTRAN. While lecturing on Collatz conjecture, Terence Tao (who was taught by him in graduate school) mentioned Conway's result and said that he was "always very good at making extremely weird connections in mathematics".
Conway wrote a textbook on Stephen Kleene's theory of state machines and published original work on algebraic structures, focusing particularly on quaternions and octonions. Together with Neil Sloane, he invented the icosians.
He invented a base 13 function as a counterexample to the converse of the intermediate value theorem: the function takes on every real value in each interval on the real line, so it has a Darboux property but is not continuous.
For calculating the day of the week, he invented the Doomsday algorithm. The algorithm is simple enough for anyone with basic arithmetic ability to do the calculations mentally. Conway could usually give the correct answer in under two seconds. To improve his speed, he practised his calendrical calculations on his computer, which was programmed to quiz him with random dates every time he logged on. One of his early books was on finite-state machines.
In 2004, Conway and Simon B. Kochen, another Princeton mathematician, proved the free will theorem, a version of the "no hidden variables" principle of quantum mechanics. It states that given certain conditions, if an experimenter can freely decide what quantities to measure in a particular experiment, then elementary particles must be free to choose their spins to make the measurements consistent with physical law. Conway said that "if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles."
Conway received the Berwick Prize (1971), was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1981), became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, was the first recipient of the Pólya Prize (LMS) (1987), won the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (1998) and received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (2000) of the American Mathematical Society. In 2001 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Liverpool, and in 2014 one from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University.
His FRS nomination, in 1981, reads:
A versatile mathematician who combines a deep combinatorial insight with algebraic virtuosity, particularly in the construction and manipulation of "off-beat" algebraic structures which illuminate a wide variety of problems in completely unexpected ways. He has made distinguished contributions to the theory of finite groups, to the theory of knots, to mathematical logic (both set theory and automata theory) and to the theory of games (as also to its practice).
In 2017 Conway was given honorary membership of the British Mathematical Association.
Conferences called Gathering 4 Gardner are held every two years to celebrate the legacy of Martin Gardner, and Conway himself was often a featured speaker at these events, discussing various aspects of recreational mathematics. | [
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"text": "He invented a new system of numbers, the surreal numbers, which are closely related to certain games and have been the subject of a mathematical novelette by Donald Knuth. He also invented a nomenclature for exceedingly large numbers, the Conway chained arrow notation. Much of this is discussed in the 0th part of ONAG.",
"title": "Major areas of research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In the mid-1960s with Michael Guy, Conway established that there are sixty-four convex uniform polychora excluding two infinite sets of prismatic forms. They discovered the grand antiprism in the process, the only non-Wythoffian uniform polychoron. Conway has also suggested a system of notation dedicated to describing polyhedra called Conway polyhedron notation.",
"title": "Major areas of research"
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"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the theory of tessellations, he devised the Conway criterion which is a fast way to identify many prototiles that tile the plane.",
"title": "Major areas of research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "He investigated lattices in higher dimensions and was the first to determine the symmetry group of the Leech lattice.",
"title": "Major areas of research"
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{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In knot theory, Conway formulated a new variation of the Alexander polynomial and produced a new invariant now called the Conway polynomial. After lying dormant for more than a decade, this concept became central to work in the 1980s on the novel knot polynomials. Conway further developed tangle theory and invented a system of notation for tabulating knots, now known as Conway notation, while correcting a number of errors in the 19th-century knot tables and extending them to include all but four of the non-alternating primes with 11 crossings. The Conway knot is named after him.",
"title": "Major areas of research"
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{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Conway's conjecture that, in any thrackle, the number of edges is at most equal to the number of vertices, is still open.",
"title": "Major areas of research"
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{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "He was the primary author of the ATLAS of Finite Groups giving properties of many finite simple groups. Working with his colleagues Robert Curtis and Simon P. Norton he constructed the first concrete representations of some of the sporadic groups. More specifically, he discovered three sporadic groups based on the symmetry of the Leech lattice, which have been designated the Conway groups. This work made him a key player in the successful classification of the finite simple groups.",
"title": "Major areas of research"
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{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Based on a 1978 observation by mathematician John McKay, Conway and Norton formulated the complex of conjectures known as monstrous moonshine. This subject, named by Conway, relates the monster group with elliptic modular functions, thus bridging two previously distinct areas of mathematics—finite groups and complex function theory. Monstrous moonshine theory has now been revealed to also have deep connections to string theory.",
"title": "Major areas of research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Conway introduced the Mathieu groupoid, an extension of the Mathieu group M12 to 13 points.",
"title": "Major areas of research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "As a graduate student, he proved one case of a conjecture by Edward Waring, that every integer could be written as the sum of 37 numbers each raised to the fifth power, though Chen Jingrun solved the problem independently before Conway's work could be published. In 1972, Conway proved that a natural generalization of the Collatz problem is algorithmically undecidable. Related to that, he developed the esoteric programming language FRACTRAN. While lecturing on Collatz conjecture, Terence Tao (who was taught by him in graduate school) mentioned Conway's result and said that he was \"always very good at making extremely weird connections in mathematics\".",
"title": "Major areas of research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Conway wrote a textbook on Stephen Kleene's theory of state machines and published original work on algebraic structures, focusing particularly on quaternions and octonions. Together with Neil Sloane, he invented the icosians.",
"title": "Major areas of research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "He invented a base 13 function as a counterexample to the converse of the intermediate value theorem: the function takes on every real value in each interval on the real line, so it has a Darboux property but is not continuous.",
"title": "Major areas of research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "For calculating the day of the week, he invented the Doomsday algorithm. The algorithm is simple enough for anyone with basic arithmetic ability to do the calculations mentally. Conway could usually give the correct answer in under two seconds. To improve his speed, he practised his calendrical calculations on his computer, which was programmed to quiz him with random dates every time he logged on. One of his early books was on finite-state machines.",
"title": "Major areas of research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 2004, Conway and Simon B. Kochen, another Princeton mathematician, proved the free will theorem, a version of the \"no hidden variables\" principle of quantum mechanics. It states that given certain conditions, if an experimenter can freely decide what quantities to measure in a particular experiment, then elementary particles must be free to choose their spins to make the measurements consistent with physical law. Conway said that \"if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles.\"",
"title": "Major areas of research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Conway received the Berwick Prize (1971), was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1981), became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, was the first recipient of the Pólya Prize (LMS) (1987), won the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (1998) and received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (2000) of the American Mathematical Society. In 2001 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Liverpool, and in 2014 one from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "His FRS nomination, in 1981, reads:",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "A versatile mathematician who combines a deep combinatorial insight with algebraic virtuosity, particularly in the construction and manipulation of \"off-beat\" algebraic structures which illuminate a wide variety of problems in completely unexpected ways. He has made distinguished contributions to the theory of finite groups, to the theory of knots, to mathematical logic (both set theory and automata theory) and to the theory of games (as also to its practice).",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In 2017 Conway was given honorary membership of the British Mathematical Association.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Conferences called Gathering 4 Gardner are held every two years to celebrate the legacy of Martin Gardner, and Conway himself was often a featured speaker at these events, discussing various aspects of recreational mathematics.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
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]
| John Horton Conway was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches of recreational mathematics, most notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life. Born and raised in Liverpool, Conway spent the first half of his career at the University of Cambridge before moving to the United States, where he held the John von Neumann Professorship at Princeton University for the rest of his career. On 11 April 2020, at age 82, he died of complications from COVID-19. | 2001-10-12T23:48:56Z | 2023-12-11T18:07:49Z | [
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15,809 | July 10 | July 10 is the 191st day of the year (192nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 174 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| July 10 is the 191st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 174 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-07-04T00:02:24Z | 2023-12-30T21:21:00Z | [
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15,812 | June 24 | June 24 is the 175th day of the year (176th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 190 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| June 24 is the 175th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 190 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-09-27T23:27:34Z | 2023-12-04T22:08:26Z | [
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15,813 | January 30 | January 30 is the 30th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 335 days remain until the end of the year (336 in leap years). | [
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| January 30 is the 30th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 335 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-15T15:06:44Z | 2023-12-22T02:54:16Z | [
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15,814 | January 29 | January 29 is the 29th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 336 days remain until the end of the year (337 in leap years). | [
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| January 29 is the 29th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 336 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-15T15:06:59Z | 2023-12-16T16:36:41Z | [
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15,815 | June 18 | June 18 is the 169th day of the year (170th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 196 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| June 18 is the 169th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 196 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-02T15:19:42Z | 2023-10-17T07:09:27Z | [
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15,816 | June 13 | June 13 is the 164th day of the year (165th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 201 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| June 13 is the 164th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 201 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-07-03T21:43:53Z | 2023-10-14T08:43:44Z | [
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15,817 | June 19 | June 19 is the 170th day of the year (171st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 195 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| June 19 is the 170th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 195 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-06-20T00:47:50Z | 2023-12-31T19:57:35Z | [
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15,818 | June 20 | June 20 is the 171st day of the year (172nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 194 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| June 20 is the 171st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 194 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-14T11:41:03Z | 2023-12-27T02:43:30Z | [
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15,819 | June 21 | June 21 is the 172nd day of the year (173rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 193 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| June 21 is the 172nd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 193 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-06-22T03:42:51Z | 2023-12-26T16:39:45Z | [
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15,820 | June 5 | June 5 is the 156th day of the year (157th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 209 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| June 5 is the 156th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 209 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-07-05T00:07:32Z | 2023-12-15T20:31:36Z | [
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15,821 | Jack Lemmon | John Uhler Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001) was an American actor, musician, producer, director and comedian. Considered equally proficient in both dramatic and comic roles, Lemmon was known for his anxious, middle-class everyman screen persona in dramedy pictures, leading The Guardian to label him as "the most successful tragi-comedian of his age."
He starred in over sixty films and was nominated for an Academy Award eight times, winning twice, and received many other accolades, including six Golden Globe Awards (counting the honorary Cecil B. DeMille Award), two Cannes Film Festival Awards, two Volpi Cups, one Silver Bear, three BAFTA Awards, and two Emmy Awards. In 1988, he was awarded the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the American cinema.
His best known films include Mister Roberts (1955, for which he won the year's Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Irma la Douce (1963), The Great Race (1965), Save the Tiger (1973, winning the Academy Award for Best Actor), The China Syndrome (1979), Missing (1982), and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). He also acted in several Broadway plays, earning Tony Award nominations for Tribute, which earned him another Oscar nomination for its film adaptation, as well as the 1986 revival of Long Day's Journey into Night.
Lemmon had a long-running collaboration with actor and real-life friend Walter Matthau, which The New York Times called "one of Hollywood's most successful pairings," that spanned ten films between 1966 and 1998; The Fortune Cookie (1966), The Odd Couple (1968) and its sequel The Odd Couple II (1998), The Front Page (1974), Buddy Buddy (1981), JFK (1991), Grumpy Old Men (1993) and its sequel Grumpier Old Men (1995), The Grass Harp (1995), and Out to Sea (1997).
Lemmon was born on February 8, 1925, in an elevator at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts. He was the only child of Mildred Burgess (née LaRue; 1896–1967) and John Uhler Lemmon II (1893–1962), who rose to Vice-President of Sales of the Doughnut Corporation of America. John Uhler Lemmon II was of Irish heritage, and Jack Lemmon was raised Catholic. His parents had a difficult marriage, and separated permanently when Lemmon was 18, but never divorced. He attended John Ward Elementary School in Newton and the Rivers School in Weston, Massachusetts. Often unwell as a child, Lemmon had three significant operations on his ears before he turned 10. He had spent two years in hospital by the time he turned 12.
During his acceptance of his lifetime achievement award, he stated that he knew he wanted to be an actor from the age of eight. He began to act in school productions. Lemmon attended Rivers Country Day School and Phillips Andover Academy (Class of 1943), where he pursued track sports with success, and Harvard College (Class of 1947), where he lived in Eliot House. At Harvard, he was president of the Hasty Pudding Club and vice president of Dramatic and Delphic Clubs. Except for drama and music, however, he was an unexceptional student.
Forbidden to act onstage due to academic probation, Lemmon broke Harvard rules to appear in roles using pseudonyms such as Timothy Orange.
A member of the V-12 Navy College Training Program, Lemmon was commissioned by the United States Navy, serving briefly as an ensign on the aircraft carrier USS Lake Champlain during World War II before returning to Harvard after completing his military service. After graduation with a degree in War Service Sciences in 1947, he studied acting under coach Uta Hagen at HB Studio in New York City. He was also a pianist, who became devoted to the instrument at age 14 and learned to play by ear. For about a year in New York City, he worked unpaid as a waiter and master of ceremonies at the Old Knick bar on Second Avenue. He also played the piano at the venue.
Lemmon became a professional actor, working on radio and Broadway. His film debut was a bit part as a plasterer in the film The Lady Takes a Sailor (1949), but he had already appeared in television shows, which numbered about 400 from 1948 to 1953.
Lemmon believed his stage career was about to take off when he was appearing on Broadway for the first time in a 1953 revival of the comedy Room Service, but the production closed after two weeks. Despite this setback, he was spotted by talent scout Max Arnow, who was then working for Columbia, and Lemmon's focus shifted to films and Hollywood. Columbia's head, Harry Cohn, wanted to change Lemmon's name, in case it was used to describe the quality of the actor's films, but he successfully resisted.
His first role as a leading man was in the comedy It Should Happen to You (1954), which also featured the established Judy Holliday in the female lead. Bosley Crowther in his review for The New York Times described Lemmon as possessing "a warm and appealing personality. The screen should see more of him." The two leads soon reunited in Phffft (also 1954). Kim Novak had a secondary role as a brief love interest for Lemmon's character. "If it wasn't for Judy, I'm not sure I would have concentrated on films", he told The Washington Post in 1986 saying early in his career he had a snobbish attitude towards films over the stage. He managed to negotiate a contract with Columbia allowing him leeway to pursue other projects, some of the terms of which he said "nobody had gotten before". He signed a seven-year contract, but ended up staying with Columbia for 10 years. Lemmon's appearance as Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts (1955), with James Cagney, Henry Fonda, and William Powell for Warner Bros., gained Lemmon the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Director John Ford decided to cast Lemmon after seeing his Columbia screen test, which had been directed by Richard Quine. At an impromptu meeting on the studio lot, Ford persuaded the actor to appear in the film, although Lemmon did not realize he was in conversation with Ford at the time.
In the military farce Operation Mad Ball (1957) set in a U.S. Army base in France after World War II, Lemmon played a calculating private. He met comedian Ernie Kovacs, who co-starred, and they became close friends, appearing together in two subsequent films, as a warlock in Bell, Book and Candle (1958, a film he apparently disliked) and It Happened to Jane (1959), all three under the direction of Richard Quine. Lemmon starred in six films directed by Quine. The others were My Sister Eileen (1955), The Notorious Landlady (1962) and How to Murder Your Wife (1965).
Lemmon worked with director Billy Wilder on seven films. Their association began with the gender-bending comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), with Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. His role required him to perform 80% of the role in drag. People who knew his mother, Millie Lemmon, said he had mimicked her personality and even her hairstyle. Critic Pauline Kael said he was "demoniacally funny" in the part. The sequence of films with Wilder continued with The Apartment (1960) alongside Shirley MacLaine. The film received mixed reviews from critics at the time, although it has been re-evaluated as a classic today. It received 11 nominations, winning five Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Lemmon received Oscar nominations for his performances in Some Like it Hot and The Apartment. He reunited with MacLaine in Irma la Douce (1963). MacLaine, observing the director's relationship with his male lead, believed it amounted to "professional infatuation".
Lemmon's first role in a film directed by Blake Edwards was in Days of Wine and Roses (1962) portraying Joe Clay, a young alcoholic businessman. The role, for which he was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, was one of Lemmon's favorites. By this time, he had appeared in 15 comedies, a Western and an adventure film. "The movie people put a label attached to your big toe — 'light comedy' — and that's the only way they think of you", he commented in an interview during 1984. "I knew damn well I could play drama. Things changed following Days of Wine and Roses. That was as important a film as I've ever done." Days of Wine and Roses was the first film where Lemmon was involved with production of the film via his Jalem production company. Lemmon's association with Edwards continued with The Great Race (1965), which reunited him with Tony Curtis. His salary this time was $1 million, but the film did not return its large budget at the box office. Variety, in its December 31, 1964, review, commented: "never has there been a villain so dastardly as Jack Lemmon".
In 1966, Lemmon began the first of his many collaborations with actor Walter Matthau in The Fortune Cookie. The film has been described by the British film critic Philip French as their "one truly great film". Matthau went on to win an Academy Award for his performance in the film. Another nine films with them co-starring eventually followed, including The Odd Couple (1968), The Front Page (1974), and Buddy Buddy (1981).
In 1967, Lemmon's production company Jalem produced the film Cool Hand Luke, which starred Paul Newman in the lead role. The film was a box-office and critical success. Newman, in gratitude, offered him the role of the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but Lemmon turned it down.
The best-known Lemmon-Matthau film is The Odd Couple (1968), based on the Neil Simon play, with the lead characters being the mismatched Felix Unger (Lemmon) and Oscar Madison (Matthau), respectively neurotical and cynical. The much-admired comedy Kotch (1971), the only film Lemmon directed, starred Matthau, who was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. The Out-of-Towners (1970) was another Neil Simon-scripted film in which Lemmon appeared.
In 1972, at the 44th Academy Awards, Jack Lemmon presented the Honorary Academy Award to silent screen legend Charlie Chaplin.
Lemmon starred with Juliet Mills in Avanti! (1972) and appeared with Matthau in The Front Page (1974). Both films were directed by Wilder. He felt Lemmon had a natural tendency toward overacting that had to be tempered; Wilder's biography Nobody's Perfect quotes the director as saying, "Lemmon, I would describe him as a ham, a fine ham, and with ham you have to trim a little fat." Wilder, though, also once said: "Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon".
Lemmon in Save the Tiger (1973) plays Harry Stoner, a businessman in the garment trade who finds someone to commit arson by burning down his warehouse to avoid bankruptcy. The project was rejected by multiple studios, but Paramount was prepared to make the film if it were budgeted for only $1 million. Lemmon was so keen to play the part that he worked for union scale, then $165 a week. The role was demanding; like the character, Lemmon came close to breaking point: "I started to crack as the character did," he recalled. "I just kept getting deeper and deeper into the character's despair." For this film, Lemmon won the Best Actor Oscar. Having won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for Mister Roberts, he became the first actor to achieve that particular double, although Helen Hayes had achieved this feat three years earlier in the equivalent female categories.
Lemmon was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role in The China Syndrome (1979), for which he was also awarded Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. In Tribute, a stage drama first performed in 1979, he played a press agent who has cancer while trying to mend his relationship with his son. The Broadway production ran for 212 performances, but it gained mixed reviews. Nevertheless, Lemmon was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. For his role in the 1980 film version, Lemmon gained another Oscar nomination.
His final Oscar nomination was for Missing (1982), as a conservative father whose son has vanished in Chile during the period the country was under the rule of Augusto Pinochet; he won another Cannes award for his performance. A contemporary failure was his last film with Billy Wilder, Buddy Buddy (1981). Lemmon's character attempts suicide in a hotel while a hitman (Matthau) is in the next suite. Another flop at the box office was his final film with Blake Edwards, another of his friends; in That's Life! (1986), he appeared in the director's self-autobiographical part with Edwards' wife, Julie Andrews. A seductress role was played by Lemmon's wife, Felicia Farr. His later career is said to have been affected by other bad choices, such as Mass Appeal (1984), about a conservative Catholic priest, Macaroni (1985), a tale about old Army friends with Marcello Mastroianni, and That's Life. Lemmon received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1988.
Lemmon was nominated for a Tony Award the second and last time for a revival of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night in 1986; Lemmon had taken the lead role of James Tyrone in a production directed by Jonathan Miller. It had a London run in 1987, Lemmon's first theatre work in the city, and a television version followed. A return to London in 1989 for the antiwar play Veterans' Day, with Michael Gambon, was poorly received by critics, and following modest audiences, soon closed. Lemmon also worked with Kevin Spacey in the films The Murder of Mary Phagan (1987), Dad (1989), and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), as well as the production of Long Day's Journey into Night.
Lemmon and Matthau had small parts in Oliver Stone's film JFK (1991), in which both men appeared without sharing screen time. The duo reunited in Grumpy Old Men (1993). The film was a surprise hit. Later in the decade, they starred together in The Grass Harp (1995), Grumpier Old Men (1995), Out to Sea (1997), and The Odd Couple II (1998). While Grumpier Old Men grossed slightly more than its predecessor, The Odd Couple II was a box-office disappointment.
In 1996, Lemmon was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Or Nonmusical Album for his narration on "Harry S Truman: A Journey To Independence". Around the same time, Lemmon starred along with James Garner in the comedy My Fellow Americans (1996) as two feuding ex-presidents. The supporting cast included Dan Aykroyd and Lauren Bacall.
For his role in the William Friedkin-directed version of Twelve Angry Men (1997), Lemmon was nominated for Best Actor in a Made-for-TV Movie in the 1998 Golden Globe Awards. The award ceremony was memorable because Ving Rhames, who won the Golden Globe for his portrayal of Don King: Only in America, stunned the A-list crowd and television audience by calling Lemmon up to the stage and handing him the award. Lemmon tried not to accept but Rhames insisted. The emotional crowd gave Lemmon a standing ovation to which he replied that, "This is one of the nicest, sweetest moments I have ever known in my life." The role was as the contentious juror, played in the original 1957 film version by Henry Fonda. Lemmon appeared in the remake with George C. Scott and reunited with him in another television film, this time Inherit the Wind (1999).
Lemmon was a guest voice on The Simpsons episode "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson" (1997), as the owner of the pretzel business. For his role as Morrie Schwartz in his final television role, Tuesdays with Morrie (1999), Lemmon won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie. His final film role was uncredited: the narrator in Robert Redford's film The Legend of Bagger Vance.
Lemmon was married twice. He and first wife actress Cynthia Stone, with whom he had a son, Chris Lemmon (born 1954), divorced. Lemmon married actress Felicia Farr on August 17, 1962, while shooting Irma La Douce in Paris. The couple's daughter, Courtney, was born in 1966. Lemmon was the stepfather to Denise, from Farr's previous marriage to Lee Farr. He was close friends with actors Tony Curtis and Kevin Spacey, among others.
His publicist Geraldine McInerney said, "I remember Jack once telling me he lived in terror his whole life that he'd never get another job. Here was one of America's most established actors and yet he was without any confidence. It was like every job was going to be his last". As the 1970s progressed, Lemmon increased his drinking to cope with stress. He was fined for driving under the influence in 1976, finally quitting alcohol in the early 1980s. On a 1998 episode of the television program Inside the Actors Studio, he stated that he was a recovering alcoholic.
Lemmon was known as the "star" of the celebrity-packed, third-round telecast of the annual AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, held at Pebble Beach Golf Links each February. Lemmon's packed gallery was there not only for his humor, but also to root him on in his lifelong quest to "make the cut" to round four, something he was never able to achieve. The amateur who helps his team most in the Pro-Am portion is annually awarded the Jack Lemmon Award. During the 1980s and 1990s, Lemmon served on the advisory board of the National Student Film Institute. Lemmon was a registered Democrat.
Lemmon died of bladder cancer on June 27, 2001. He had suffered from the disease privately for two years before his death. His body was interred at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California. (The graves of Marilyn Monroe, Walter Matthau, George C. Scott, Rodney Dangerfield, and film director Billy Wilder lie in the same cemetery.) Lemmon's gravestone reads like a title screen from a film: "JACK LEMMON in". Guests who attended the private ceremony included Billy Wilder, Shirley MacLaine, Kevin Spacey, Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier, Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Frank Sinatra's widow Barbara and Walter Matthau's son Charlie.
Lemmon received eight Academy Award nominations and won for Mister Roberts (1955) and Save the Tiger (1973). He was nominated for Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The China Syndrome (1979), Tribute (1981), and Missing (1982). He received two Tony Award nominations for his performances in Tribute (1979), and Long Day's Journey into Night (1986). He received four Golden Globe Awards from 21 nominations, and received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for his lifetime achievement in 1991. The year before he won the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. He was given tribute at the Kennedy Center Honors in 1996. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
In 1986, the U.S. National Board of Review of Motion Pictures gave Lemmon a "Career Achievement" Award; two years later, the American Film Institute gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in March 1988. In 1995, Lemmon was awarded the inaugural Harvard Arts Medal. In 1996, Lemmon was awarded the Honorary Golden Bear award at the 46th Berlin International Film Festival. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Uhler Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001) was an American actor, musician, producer, director and comedian. Considered equally proficient in both dramatic and comic roles, Lemmon was known for his anxious, middle-class everyman screen persona in dramedy pictures, leading The Guardian to label him as \"the most successful tragi-comedian of his age.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "He starred in over sixty films and was nominated for an Academy Award eight times, winning twice, and received many other accolades, including six Golden Globe Awards (counting the honorary Cecil B. DeMille Award), two Cannes Film Festival Awards, two Volpi Cups, one Silver Bear, three BAFTA Awards, and two Emmy Awards. In 1988, he was awarded the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the American cinema.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "His best known films include Mister Roberts (1955, for which he won the year's Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Irma la Douce (1963), The Great Race (1965), Save the Tiger (1973, winning the Academy Award for Best Actor), The China Syndrome (1979), Missing (1982), and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). He also acted in several Broadway plays, earning Tony Award nominations for Tribute, which earned him another Oscar nomination for its film adaptation, as well as the 1986 revival of Long Day's Journey into Night.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Lemmon had a long-running collaboration with actor and real-life friend Walter Matthau, which The New York Times called \"one of Hollywood's most successful pairings,\" that spanned ten films between 1966 and 1998; The Fortune Cookie (1966), The Odd Couple (1968) and its sequel The Odd Couple II (1998), The Front Page (1974), Buddy Buddy (1981), JFK (1991), Grumpy Old Men (1993) and its sequel Grumpier Old Men (1995), The Grass Harp (1995), and Out to Sea (1997).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Lemmon was born on February 8, 1925, in an elevator at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts. He was the only child of Mildred Burgess (née LaRue; 1896–1967) and John Uhler Lemmon II (1893–1962), who rose to Vice-President of Sales of the Doughnut Corporation of America. John Uhler Lemmon II was of Irish heritage, and Jack Lemmon was raised Catholic. His parents had a difficult marriage, and separated permanently when Lemmon was 18, but never divorced. He attended John Ward Elementary School in Newton and the Rivers School in Weston, Massachusetts. Often unwell as a child, Lemmon had three significant operations on his ears before he turned 10. He had spent two years in hospital by the time he turned 12.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "During his acceptance of his lifetime achievement award, he stated that he knew he wanted to be an actor from the age of eight. He began to act in school productions. Lemmon attended Rivers Country Day School and Phillips Andover Academy (Class of 1943), where he pursued track sports with success, and Harvard College (Class of 1947), where he lived in Eliot House. At Harvard, he was president of the Hasty Pudding Club and vice president of Dramatic and Delphic Clubs. Except for drama and music, however, he was an unexceptional student.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Forbidden to act onstage due to academic probation, Lemmon broke Harvard rules to appear in roles using pseudonyms such as Timothy Orange.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "A member of the V-12 Navy College Training Program, Lemmon was commissioned by the United States Navy, serving briefly as an ensign on the aircraft carrier USS Lake Champlain during World War II before returning to Harvard after completing his military service. After graduation with a degree in War Service Sciences in 1947, he studied acting under coach Uta Hagen at HB Studio in New York City. He was also a pianist, who became devoted to the instrument at age 14 and learned to play by ear. For about a year in New York City, he worked unpaid as a waiter and master of ceremonies at the Old Knick bar on Second Avenue. He also played the piano at the venue.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Lemmon became a professional actor, working on radio and Broadway. His film debut was a bit part as a plasterer in the film The Lady Takes a Sailor (1949), but he had already appeared in television shows, which numbered about 400 from 1948 to 1953.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Lemmon believed his stage career was about to take off when he was appearing on Broadway for the first time in a 1953 revival of the comedy Room Service, but the production closed after two weeks. Despite this setback, he was spotted by talent scout Max Arnow, who was then working for Columbia, and Lemmon's focus shifted to films and Hollywood. Columbia's head, Harry Cohn, wanted to change Lemmon's name, in case it was used to describe the quality of the actor's films, but he successfully resisted.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "His first role as a leading man was in the comedy It Should Happen to You (1954), which also featured the established Judy Holliday in the female lead. Bosley Crowther in his review for The New York Times described Lemmon as possessing \"a warm and appealing personality. The screen should see more of him.\" The two leads soon reunited in Phffft (also 1954). Kim Novak had a secondary role as a brief love interest for Lemmon's character. \"If it wasn't for Judy, I'm not sure I would have concentrated on films\", he told The Washington Post in 1986 saying early in his career he had a snobbish attitude towards films over the stage. He managed to negotiate a contract with Columbia allowing him leeway to pursue other projects, some of the terms of which he said \"nobody had gotten before\". He signed a seven-year contract, but ended up staying with Columbia for 10 years. Lemmon's appearance as Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts (1955), with James Cagney, Henry Fonda, and William Powell for Warner Bros., gained Lemmon the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Director John Ford decided to cast Lemmon after seeing his Columbia screen test, which had been directed by Richard Quine. At an impromptu meeting on the studio lot, Ford persuaded the actor to appear in the film, although Lemmon did not realize he was in conversation with Ford at the time.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In the military farce Operation Mad Ball (1957) set in a U.S. Army base in France after World War II, Lemmon played a calculating private. He met comedian Ernie Kovacs, who co-starred, and they became close friends, appearing together in two subsequent films, as a warlock in Bell, Book and Candle (1958, a film he apparently disliked) and It Happened to Jane (1959), all three under the direction of Richard Quine. Lemmon starred in six films directed by Quine. The others were My Sister Eileen (1955), The Notorious Landlady (1962) and How to Murder Your Wife (1965).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Lemmon worked with director Billy Wilder on seven films. Their association began with the gender-bending comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), with Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. His role required him to perform 80% of the role in drag. People who knew his mother, Millie Lemmon, said he had mimicked her personality and even her hairstyle. Critic Pauline Kael said he was \"demoniacally funny\" in the part. The sequence of films with Wilder continued with The Apartment (1960) alongside Shirley MacLaine. The film received mixed reviews from critics at the time, although it has been re-evaluated as a classic today. It received 11 nominations, winning five Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Lemmon received Oscar nominations for his performances in Some Like it Hot and The Apartment. He reunited with MacLaine in Irma la Douce (1963). MacLaine, observing the director's relationship with his male lead, believed it amounted to \"professional infatuation\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Lemmon's first role in a film directed by Blake Edwards was in Days of Wine and Roses (1962) portraying Joe Clay, a young alcoholic businessman. The role, for which he was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, was one of Lemmon's favorites. By this time, he had appeared in 15 comedies, a Western and an adventure film. \"The movie people put a label attached to your big toe — 'light comedy' — and that's the only way they think of you\", he commented in an interview during 1984. \"I knew damn well I could play drama. Things changed following Days of Wine and Roses. That was as important a film as I've ever done.\" Days of Wine and Roses was the first film where Lemmon was involved with production of the film via his Jalem production company. Lemmon's association with Edwards continued with The Great Race (1965), which reunited him with Tony Curtis. His salary this time was $1 million, but the film did not return its large budget at the box office. Variety, in its December 31, 1964, review, commented: \"never has there been a villain so dastardly as Jack Lemmon\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1966, Lemmon began the first of his many collaborations with actor Walter Matthau in The Fortune Cookie. The film has been described by the British film critic Philip French as their \"one truly great film\". Matthau went on to win an Academy Award for his performance in the film. Another nine films with them co-starring eventually followed, including The Odd Couple (1968), The Front Page (1974), and Buddy Buddy (1981).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1967, Lemmon's production company Jalem produced the film Cool Hand Luke, which starred Paul Newman in the lead role. The film was a box-office and critical success. Newman, in gratitude, offered him the role of the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but Lemmon turned it down.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The best-known Lemmon-Matthau film is The Odd Couple (1968), based on the Neil Simon play, with the lead characters being the mismatched Felix Unger (Lemmon) and Oscar Madison (Matthau), respectively neurotical and cynical. The much-admired comedy Kotch (1971), the only film Lemmon directed, starred Matthau, who was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. The Out-of-Towners (1970) was another Neil Simon-scripted film in which Lemmon appeared.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1972, at the 44th Academy Awards, Jack Lemmon presented the Honorary Academy Award to silent screen legend Charlie Chaplin.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Lemmon starred with Juliet Mills in Avanti! (1972) and appeared with Matthau in The Front Page (1974). Both films were directed by Wilder. He felt Lemmon had a natural tendency toward overacting that had to be tempered; Wilder's biography Nobody's Perfect quotes the director as saying, \"Lemmon, I would describe him as a ham, a fine ham, and with ham you have to trim a little fat.\" Wilder, though, also once said: \"Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Lemmon in Save the Tiger (1973) plays Harry Stoner, a businessman in the garment trade who finds someone to commit arson by burning down his warehouse to avoid bankruptcy. The project was rejected by multiple studios, but Paramount was prepared to make the film if it were budgeted for only $1 million. Lemmon was so keen to play the part that he worked for union scale, then $165 a week. The role was demanding; like the character, Lemmon came close to breaking point: \"I started to crack as the character did,\" he recalled. \"I just kept getting deeper and deeper into the character's despair.\" For this film, Lemmon won the Best Actor Oscar. Having won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for Mister Roberts, he became the first actor to achieve that particular double, although Helen Hayes had achieved this feat three years earlier in the equivalent female categories.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Lemmon was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role in The China Syndrome (1979), for which he was also awarded Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. In Tribute, a stage drama first performed in 1979, he played a press agent who has cancer while trying to mend his relationship with his son. The Broadway production ran for 212 performances, but it gained mixed reviews. Nevertheless, Lemmon was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. For his role in the 1980 film version, Lemmon gained another Oscar nomination.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "His final Oscar nomination was for Missing (1982), as a conservative father whose son has vanished in Chile during the period the country was under the rule of Augusto Pinochet; he won another Cannes award for his performance. A contemporary failure was his last film with Billy Wilder, Buddy Buddy (1981). Lemmon's character attempts suicide in a hotel while a hitman (Matthau) is in the next suite. Another flop at the box office was his final film with Blake Edwards, another of his friends; in That's Life! (1986), he appeared in the director's self-autobiographical part with Edwards' wife, Julie Andrews. A seductress role was played by Lemmon's wife, Felicia Farr. His later career is said to have been affected by other bad choices, such as Mass Appeal (1984), about a conservative Catholic priest, Macaroni (1985), a tale about old Army friends with Marcello Mastroianni, and That's Life. Lemmon received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1988.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Lemmon was nominated for a Tony Award the second and last time for a revival of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night in 1986; Lemmon had taken the lead role of James Tyrone in a production directed by Jonathan Miller. It had a London run in 1987, Lemmon's first theatre work in the city, and a television version followed. A return to London in 1989 for the antiwar play Veterans' Day, with Michael Gambon, was poorly received by critics, and following modest audiences, soon closed. Lemmon also worked with Kevin Spacey in the films The Murder of Mary Phagan (1987), Dad (1989), and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), as well as the production of Long Day's Journey into Night.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Lemmon and Matthau had small parts in Oliver Stone's film JFK (1991), in which both men appeared without sharing screen time. The duo reunited in Grumpy Old Men (1993). The film was a surprise hit. Later in the decade, they starred together in The Grass Harp (1995), Grumpier Old Men (1995), Out to Sea (1997), and The Odd Couple II (1998). While Grumpier Old Men grossed slightly more than its predecessor, The Odd Couple II was a box-office disappointment.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1996, Lemmon was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Or Nonmusical Album for his narration on \"Harry S Truman: A Journey To Independence\". Around the same time, Lemmon starred along with James Garner in the comedy My Fellow Americans (1996) as two feuding ex-presidents. The supporting cast included Dan Aykroyd and Lauren Bacall.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "For his role in the William Friedkin-directed version of Twelve Angry Men (1997), Lemmon was nominated for Best Actor in a Made-for-TV Movie in the 1998 Golden Globe Awards. The award ceremony was memorable because Ving Rhames, who won the Golden Globe for his portrayal of Don King: Only in America, stunned the A-list crowd and television audience by calling Lemmon up to the stage and handing him the award. Lemmon tried not to accept but Rhames insisted. The emotional crowd gave Lemmon a standing ovation to which he replied that, \"This is one of the nicest, sweetest moments I have ever known in my life.\" The role was as the contentious juror, played in the original 1957 film version by Henry Fonda. Lemmon appeared in the remake with George C. Scott and reunited with him in another television film, this time Inherit the Wind (1999).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Lemmon was a guest voice on The Simpsons episode \"The Twisted World of Marge Simpson\" (1997), as the owner of the pretzel business. For his role as Morrie Schwartz in his final television role, Tuesdays with Morrie (1999), Lemmon won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie. His final film role was uncredited: the narrator in Robert Redford's film The Legend of Bagger Vance.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Lemmon was married twice. He and first wife actress Cynthia Stone, with whom he had a son, Chris Lemmon (born 1954), divorced. Lemmon married actress Felicia Farr on August 17, 1962, while shooting Irma La Douce in Paris. The couple's daughter, Courtney, was born in 1966. Lemmon was the stepfather to Denise, from Farr's previous marriage to Lee Farr. He was close friends with actors Tony Curtis and Kevin Spacey, among others.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "His publicist Geraldine McInerney said, \"I remember Jack once telling me he lived in terror his whole life that he'd never get another job. Here was one of America's most established actors and yet he was without any confidence. It was like every job was going to be his last\". As the 1970s progressed, Lemmon increased his drinking to cope with stress. He was fined for driving under the influence in 1976, finally quitting alcohol in the early 1980s. On a 1998 episode of the television program Inside the Actors Studio, he stated that he was a recovering alcoholic.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Lemmon was known as the \"star\" of the celebrity-packed, third-round telecast of the annual AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, held at Pebble Beach Golf Links each February. Lemmon's packed gallery was there not only for his humor, but also to root him on in his lifelong quest to \"make the cut\" to round four, something he was never able to achieve. The amateur who helps his team most in the Pro-Am portion is annually awarded the Jack Lemmon Award. During the 1980s and 1990s, Lemmon served on the advisory board of the National Student Film Institute. Lemmon was a registered Democrat.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Lemmon died of bladder cancer on June 27, 2001. He had suffered from the disease privately for two years before his death. His body was interred at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California. (The graves of Marilyn Monroe, Walter Matthau, George C. Scott, Rodney Dangerfield, and film director Billy Wilder lie in the same cemetery.) Lemmon's gravestone reads like a title screen from a film: \"JACK LEMMON in\". Guests who attended the private ceremony included Billy Wilder, Shirley MacLaine, Kevin Spacey, Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier, Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Frank Sinatra's widow Barbara and Walter Matthau's son Charlie.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Lemmon received eight Academy Award nominations and won for Mister Roberts (1955) and Save the Tiger (1973). He was nominated for Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The China Syndrome (1979), Tribute (1981), and Missing (1982). He received two Tony Award nominations for his performances in Tribute (1979), and Long Day's Journey into Night (1986). He received four Golden Globe Awards from 21 nominations, and received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for his lifetime achievement in 1991. The year before he won the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. He was given tribute at the Kennedy Center Honors in 1996. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.",
"title": "Acting credits and accolades"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 1986, the U.S. National Board of Review of Motion Pictures gave Lemmon a \"Career Achievement\" Award; two years later, the American Film Institute gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in March 1988. In 1995, Lemmon was awarded the inaugural Harvard Arts Medal. In 1996, Lemmon was awarded the Honorary Golden Bear award at the 46th Berlin International Film Festival.",
"title": "Acting credits and accolades"
}
]
| John Uhler Lemmon III was an American actor, musician, producer, director and comedian. Considered equally proficient in both dramatic and comic roles, Lemmon was known for his anxious, middle-class everyman screen persona in dramedy pictures, leading The Guardian to label him as "the most successful tragi-comedian of his age." He starred in over sixty films and was nominated for an Academy Award eight times, winning twice, and received many other accolades, including six Golden Globe Awards, two Cannes Film Festival Awards, two Volpi Cups, one Silver Bear, three BAFTA Awards, and two Emmy Awards. In 1988, he was awarded the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the American cinema. His best known films include Mister Roberts, Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Irma la Douce (1963), The Great Race (1965), Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome (1979), Missing (1982), and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). He also acted in several Broadway plays, earning Tony Award nominations for Tribute, which earned him another Oscar nomination for its film adaptation, as well as the 1986 revival of Long Day's Journey into Night. Lemmon had a long-running collaboration with actor and real-life friend Walter Matthau, which The New York Times called "one of Hollywood's most successful pairings," that spanned ten films between 1966 and 1998; The Fortune Cookie (1966), The Odd Couple (1968) and its sequel The Odd Couple II (1998), The Front Page (1974), Buddy Buddy (1981), JFK (1991), Grumpy Old Men (1993) and its sequel Grumpier Old Men (1995), The Grass Harp (1995), and Out to Sea (1997). | 2001-06-16T10:15:47Z | 2023-12-16T18:41:49Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Lemmon |
15,823 | Joseph Conrad | Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, Polish: [ˈjuzɛf tɛˈɔdɔr ˈkɔnrat kɔʐɛˈɲɔfskʲi] ; 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language; though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable and amoral world.
Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.
Conrad was born on 3 December 1857 in Berdychiv (Polish: Berdyczów), Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire; the region had once been part of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. He was the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski—a writer, translator, political activist, and would-be revolutionary—and his wife Ewa Bobrowska. He was christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski after his maternal grandfather Józef, his paternal grandfather Teodor, and the heroes (both named "Konrad") of two poems by Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady and Konrad Wallenrod. His family called him "Konrad", rather than "Józef".
Though the vast majority of the surrounding area's inhabitants were Ukrainians, and the great majority of Berdychiv's residents were Jewish, almost all the countryside was owned by the Polish szlachta (nobility), to which Conrad's family belonged as bearers of the Nałęcz coat-of-arms. Polish literature, particularly patriotic literature, was held in high esteem by the area's Polish population.
Poland had been divided among Prussia, Austria and Russia in 1795. The Korzeniowski family had played a significant role in Polish attempts to regain independence. Conrad's paternal grandfather Teodor had served under Prince Józef Poniatowski during Napoleon's Russian campaign and had formed his own cavalry squadron during the November 1830 Uprising of Poland-Lithuania against the Russian Empire. Conrad's fiercely patriotic father Apollo belonged to the "Red" political faction, whose goal was to re-establish the pre-partition boundaries of Poland and which also advocated land reform and the abolition of serfdom. Conrad's subsequent refusal to follow in Apollo's footsteps, and his choice of exile over resistance, were a source of lifelong guilt for Conrad.
Because of the father's attempts at farming and his political activism, the family moved repeatedly. In May 1861 they moved to Warsaw, where Apollo joined the resistance against the Russian Empire. He was arrested and imprisoned in Pavilion X of the Warsaw Citadel. Conrad would write: "[I]n the courtyard of this Citadel—characteristically for our nation—my childhood memories begin." On 9 May 1862 Apollo and his family were exiled to Vologda, 500 kilometres (310 mi) north of Moscow and known for its bad climate. In January 1863 Apollo's sentence was commuted, and the family was sent to Chernihiv in northeast Ukraine, where conditions were much better. However, on 18 April 1865 Ewa died of tuberculosis.
Apollo did his best to teach Conrad at home. The boy's early reading introduced him to the two elements that later dominated his life: in Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, he encountered the sphere of activity to which he would devote his youth; Shakespeare brought him into the orbit of English literature. Most of all, though, he read Polish Romantic poetry. Half a century later he explained that
"The Polishness in my works comes from Mickiewicz and Słowacki. My father read [Mickiewicz's] Pan Tadeusz aloud to me and made me read it aloud.... I used to prefer [Mickiewicz's] Konrad Wallenrod [and] Grażyna. Later I preferred Słowacki. You know why Słowacki?... [He is the soul of all Poland]".
In the autumn of 1866, young Conrad was sent for a year-long retreat for health reasons, to Kyiv and his mother's family estate at Novofastiv [de].
In December 1867, Apollo took his son to the Austrian-held part of Poland, which for two years had been enjoying considerable internal freedom and a degree of self-government. After sojourns in Lwów and several smaller localities, on 20 February 1869 they moved to Kraków (until 1596 the capital of Poland), likewise in Austrian Poland. A few months later, on 23 May 1869, Apollo Korzeniowski died, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven. Like Conrad's mother, Apollo had been gravely ill with tuberculosis.
The young Conrad was placed in the care of Ewa's brother, Tadeusz Bobrowski. Conrad's poor health and his unsatisfactory schoolwork caused his uncle constant problems and no end of financial outlay. Conrad was not a good student; despite tutoring, he excelled only in geography. At that time he likely received private tutoring only, as there is no evidence he attended any school regularly. Since the boy's illness was clearly of nervous origin, the physicians supposed that fresh air and physical work would harden him; his uncle hoped that well-defined duties and the rigors of work would teach him discipline. Since he showed little inclination to study, it was essential that he learn a trade; his uncle thought he could work as a sailor-cum-businessman, who would combine maritime skills with commercial activities. In the autumn of 1871, thirteen-year-old Conrad announced his intention to become a sailor. He later recalled that as a child he had read (apparently in French translation) Leopold McClintock's book about his 1857–59 expeditions in the Fox, in search of Sir John Franklin's lost ships Erebus and Terror. Conrad also recalled having read books by the American James Fenimore Cooper and the English Captain Frederick Marryat. A playmate of his adolescence recalled that Conrad spun fantastic yarns, always set at sea, presented so realistically that listeners thought the action was happening before their eyes.
In August 1873 Bobrowski sent fifteen-year-old Conrad to Lwów to a cousin who ran a small boarding house for boys orphaned by the 1863 Uprising; group conversation there was in French. The owner's daughter recalled:
He stayed with us ten months... Intellectually he was extremely advanced but [he] disliked school routine, which he found tiring and dull; he used to say... he... planned to become a great writer.... He disliked all restrictions. At home, at school, or in the living room he would sprawl unceremoniously. He... suffer[ed] from severe headaches and nervous attacks...
Conrad had been at the establishment for just over a year when in September 1874, for uncertain reasons, his uncle removed him from school in Lwów and took him back to Kraków.
On 13 October 1874 Bobrowski sent the sixteen-year-old to Marseilles, France, for Conrad's planned merchant-marine career on French merchant ships. His uncle provided him with a monthly stipend as well (set at 150 francs). Though Conrad had not completed secondary school, his accomplishments included fluency in French (with a correct accent), some knowledge of Latin, German and Greek; probably a good knowledge of history, some geography, and probably already an interest in physics. He was well read, particularly in Polish Romantic literature. He belonged to the second generation in his family that had had to earn a living outside the family estates. They were born and reared partly in the milieu of the working intelligentsia, a social class that was starting to play an important role in Central and Eastern Europe. He had absorbed enough of the history, culture and literature of his native land to be able eventually to develop a distinctive world view and make unique contributions to the literature of his adoptive Britain.
Tensions that originated in his childhood in Poland and increased in his adulthood abroad contributed to Conrad's greatest literary achievements. Zdzisław Najder, himself an emigrant from Poland, observes:
Living away from one's natural environment—family, friends, social group, language—even if it results from a conscious decision, usually gives rise to... internal tensions, because it tends to make people less sure of themselves, more vulnerable, less certain of their... position and... value... The Polish szlachta and... intelligentsia were social strata in which reputation... was felt... very important... for a feeling of self-worth. Men strove... to find confirmation of their... self-regard... in the eyes of others... Such a psychological heritage forms both a spur to ambition and a source of constant stress, especially if [one has been inculcated with] the idea of [one]'s public duty...
Some critics have suggested that when Conrad left Poland, he wanted to break once and for all with his Polish past. In refutation of this, Najder quotes from Conrad's 14 August 1883 letter to family friend Stefan Buszczyński, written nine years after Conrad had left Poland:
... I always remember what you said when I was leaving [Kraków]: "Remember"—you said—"wherever you may sail, you are sailing towards Poland!" That I have never forgotten, and never will forget!
In Marseilles Conrad had an intense social life, often stretching his budget. A trace of these years can be found in the northern Corsica town of Luri, where there is a plaque to a Corsican merchant seaman, Dominique Cervoni, whom Conrad befriended. Cervoni became the inspiration for some of Conrad's characters, such as the title character of the 1904 novel Nostromo. Conrad visited Corsica with his wife in 1921, partly in search of connections with his long-dead friend and fellow merchant seaman.
In late 1877, Conrad's maritime career was interrupted by the refusal of the Russian consul to provide documents needed for him to continue his service. As a result, Conrad fell into debt and, in March 1878, he attempted suicide. He survived, and received further financial aid from his uncle, allowing him to resume his normal life. After nearly four years in France and on French ships, Conrad joined the British merchant marine, enlisting in April 1878 (he had most likely started learning English shortly before).
For the next fifteen years, he served under the Red Ensign. He worked on a variety of ships as crew member (steward, apprentice, able seaman) and then as third, second and first mate, until eventually achieving captain's rank. During the 19 years from the time that Conrad had left Kraków, in October 1874, until he signed off the Adowa, in January 1894, he had worked in ships, including long periods in port, for 10 years and almost 8 months. He had spent just over 8 years at sea—9 months of it as a passenger. His sole captaincy took place in 1888–89, when he commanded the barque Otago from Sydney to Mauritius.
During a brief call in India in 1885–86, 28-year-old Conrad sent five letters to Joseph Spiridion, a Pole eight years his senior whom he had befriended at Cardiff in June 1885, just before sailing for Singapore in the clipper ship Tilkhurst. These letters are Conrad's first preserved texts in English. His English is generally correct but stiff to the point of artificiality; many fragments suggest that his thoughts ran along the lines of Polish syntax and phraseology.
More importantly, the letters show a marked change in views from those implied in his earlier correspondence of 1881–83. He had abandoned "hope for the future" and the conceit of "sailing [ever] toward Poland", and his Panslavic ideas. He was left with a painful sense of the hopelessness of the Polish question and an acceptance of England as a possible refuge. While he often adjusted his statements to accord to some extent with the views of his addressees, the theme of hopelessness concerning the prospects for Polish independence often occurs authentically in his correspondence and works before 1914.
The year 1890 marked Conrad's first return to Poland, where he would visit his uncle and other relatives and acquaintances. This visit took place while he was waiting to proceed to the Congo Free State, having been hired by Albert Thys, deputy director of the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. Conrad's association with the Belgian company, on the Congo River, would inspire his novella, Heart of Darkness. During this 1890 period in the Congo, Conrad befriended Roger Casement, who was also working for Thys, operating a trading and transport station in Matadi. In 1903, as British Consul to Boma, Casement was commissioned to investigate abuses in the Congo, and later in Amazonian Peru, and was knighted in 1911 for his advocacy of human rights. Casement later became active in Irish Republicanism after leaving the British consular service.
Conrad left Africa at the end of December 1890, arriving in Brussels by late January of the following year. He rejoined the British merchant marines, as first mate, in November. When he left London on 25 October 1892 aboard the passenger clipper ship Torrens, one of the passengers was William Henry Jacques, a consumptive Cambridge University graduate who died less than a year later on 19 September 1893. According to Conrad's A Personal Record, Jacques was the first reader of the still-unfinished manuscript of Conrad's Almayer's Folly. Jacques encouraged Conrad to continue writing the novel.
Conrad completed his last long-distance voyage as a seaman on 26 July 1893 when the Torrens docked at London and "J. Conrad Korzemowin"—per the certificate of discharge—debarked.
When the Torrens had left Adelaide on 13 March 1893, the passengers had included two young Englishmen returning from Australia and New Zealand: 25-year-old lawyer and future novelist John Galsworthy; and Edward Lancelot Sanderson, who was going to help his father run a boys' preparatory school at Elstree. They were probably the first Englishmen and non-sailors with whom Conrad struck up a friendship and he would remain in touch with both. In one of Galsworthy's first literary attempts, The Doldrums (1895–96), the protagonist—first mate Armand—is modelled after Conrad.
At Cape Town, where the Torrens remained from 17 to 19 May, Galsworthy left the ship to look at the local mines. Sanderson continued his voyage and seems to have been the first to develop closer ties with Conrad. Later that year, Conrad would visit his relatives in Poland and Ukraine once again.
In the autumn of 1889, Conrad began writing his first novel, Almayer's Folly.
[T]he son of a writer, praised by his [maternal] uncle [Tadeusz Bobrowski] for the beautiful style of his letters, the man who from the very first page showed a serious, professional approach to his work, presented his start on Almayer's Folly as a casual and non-binding incident... [Y]et he must have felt a pronounced need to write. Every page right from th[e] first one testifies that writing was not something he took up for amusement or to pass time. Just the contrary: it was a serious undertaking, supported by careful, diligent reading of the masters and aimed at shaping his own attitude to art and to reality.... [W]e do not know the sources of his artistic impulses and creative gifts.
Conrad's later letters to literary friends show the attention that he devoted to analysis of style, to individual words and expressions, to the emotional tone of phrases, to the atmosphere created by language. In this, Conrad in his own way followed the example of Gustave Flaubert, notorious for searching days on end for le mot juste—for the right word to render the "essence of the matter." Najder opines:
"[W]riting in a foreign language admits a greater temerity in tackling personally sensitive problems, for it leaves uncommitted the most spontaneous, deeper reaches of the psyche, and allows a greater distance in treating matters we would hardly dare approach in the language of our childhood. As a rule it is easier both to swear and to analyze dispassionately in an acquired language."
In 1894, aged 36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health, partly due to unavailability of ships, and partly because he had become so fascinated with writing that he had decided on a literary career. Almayer's Folly, set on the east coast of Borneo, was published in 1895. Its appearance marked his first use of the pen name "Joseph Conrad"; "Konrad" was, of course, the third of his Polish given names, but his use of it—in the anglicised version, "Conrad"—may also have been an homage to the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz's patriotic narrative poem, Konrad Wallenrod.
Edward Garnett, a young publisher's reader and literary critic who would play one of the chief supporting roles in Conrad's literary career, had—like Unwin's first reader of Almayer's Folly, Wilfrid Hugh Chesson—been impressed by the manuscript, but Garnett had been "uncertain whether the English was good enough for publication." Garnett had shown the novel to his wife, Constance Garnett, later a translator of Russian literature. She had thought Conrad's foreignness a positive merit.
While Conrad had only limited personal acquaintance with the peoples of Maritime Southeast Asia, the region looms large in his early work. According to Najder, Conrad, the exile and wanderer, was aware of a difficulty that he confessed more than once: the lack of a common cultural background with his Anglophone readers meant he could not compete with English-language authors writing about the English-speaking world. At the same time, the choice of a non-English colonial setting freed him from an embarrassing division of loyalty: Almayer's Folly, and later "An Outpost of Progress" (1897, set in a Congo exploited by King Leopold II of Belgium) and Heart of Darkness (1899, likewise set in the Congo), contain bitter reflections on colonialism. The Malay states came theoretically under the suzerainty of the Dutch government; Conrad did not write about the area's British dependencies, which he never visited. He "was apparently intrigued by... struggles aimed at preserving national independence. The prolific and destructive richness of tropical nature and the dreariness of human life within it accorded well with the pessimistic mood of his early works."
Almayer's Folly, together with its successor, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), laid the foundation for Conrad's reputation as a romantic teller of exotic tales—a misunderstanding of his purpose that was to frustrate him for the rest of his career.
Almost all of Conrad's writings were first published in newspapers and magazines: influential reviews like The Fortnightly Review and the North American Review; avant-garde publications like the Savoy, New Review, and The English Review; popular short-fiction magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Harper's Magazine; women's journals like the Pictorial Review and Romance; mass-circulation dailies like the Daily Mail and the New York Herald; and illustrated newspapers like The Illustrated London News and the Illustrated Buffalo Express. He also wrote for The Outlook, an imperialist weekly magazine, between 1898 and 1906.
Financial success long eluded Conrad, who often requested advances from magazine and book publishers, and loans from acquaintances such as John Galsworthy. Eventually a government grant ("civil list pension") of £100 per annum, awarded on 9 August 1910, somewhat relieved his financial worries, and in time collectors began purchasing his manuscripts. Though his talent was early on recognised by English intellectuals, popular success eluded him until the 1913 publication of Chance, which is often considered one of his weaker novels.
Conrad was a reserved man, wary of showing emotion. He scorned sentimentality; his manner of portraying emotion in his books was full of restraint, scepticism and irony. In the words of his uncle Bobrowski, as a young man Conrad was "extremely sensitive, conceited, reserved, and in addition excitable. In short [...] all the defects of the Nałęcz family."
Conrad suffered throughout life from ill health, physical and mental. A newspaper review of a Conrad biography suggested that the book could have been subtitled Thirty Years of Debt, Gout, Depression and Angst. In 1891 he was hospitalised for several months, suffering from gout, neuralgic pains in his right arm and recurrent attacks of malaria. He also complained of swollen hands "which made writing difficult". Taking his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski's advice, he convalesced at a spa in Switzerland. Conrad had a phobia of dentistry, neglecting his teeth until they had to be extracted. In one letter he remarked that every novel he had written had cost him a tooth. Conrad's physical afflictions were, if anything, less vexatious than his mental ones. In his letters he often described symptoms of depression; "the evidence", writes Najder, "is so strong that it is nearly impossible to doubt it."
In March 1878, at the end of his Marseilles period, 20-year-old Conrad attempted suicide, by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver. According to his uncle, who was summoned by a friend, Conrad had fallen into debt. Bobrowski described his subsequent "study" of his nephew in an extensive letter to Stefan Buszczyński, his own ideological opponent and a friend of Conrad's late father Apollo. To what extent the suicide attempt had been made in earnest likely will never be known, but it is suggestive of a situational depression.
In 1888 during a stop-over on Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, Conrad developed a couple of romantic interests. One of these would be described in his 1910 story "A Smile of Fortune", which contains autobiographical elements (e.g., one of the characters is the same Chief Mate Burns who appears in The Shadow Line). The narrator, a young captain, flirts ambiguously and surreptitiously with Alice Jacobus, daughter of a local merchant living in a house surrounded by a magnificent rose garden. Research has confirmed that in Port Louis at the time there was a 17-year-old Alice Shaw, whose father, a shipping agent, owned the only rose garden in town.
More is known about Conrad's other, more open flirtation. An old friend, Captain Gabriel Renouf of the French merchant marine, introduced him to the family of his brother-in-law. Renouf's eldest sister was the wife of Louis Edward Schmidt, a senior official in the colony; with them lived two other sisters and two brothers. Though the island had been taken over in 1810 by Britain, many of the inhabitants were descendants of the original French colonists, and Conrad's excellent French and perfect manners opened all local salons to him. He became a frequent guest at the Schmidts', where he often met the Misses Renouf. A couple of days before leaving Port Louis, Conrad asked one of the Renouf brothers for the hand of his 26-year-old sister Eugenie. She was already, however, engaged to marry her pharmacist cousin. After the rebuff, Conrad did not pay a farewell visit but sent a polite letter to Gabriel Renouf, saying he would never return to Mauritius and adding that on the day of the wedding his thoughts would be with them.
On 24 March 1896 Conrad married an Englishwoman, Jessie George. The couple had two sons, Borys and John. The elder, Borys, proved a disappointment in scholarship and integrity. Jessie was an unsophisticated, working-class girl, sixteen years younger than Conrad. To his friends, she was an inexplicable choice of wife, and the subject of some rather disparaging and unkind remarks. (See Lady Ottoline Morrell's opinion of Jessie in Impressions.) However, according to other biographers such as Frederick Karl, Jessie provided what Conrad needed, namely a "straightforward, devoted, quite competent" companion. Similarly, Jones remarks that, despite whatever difficulties the marriage endured, "there can be no doubt that the relationship sustained Conrad's career as a writer", which might have been much less successful without her.
The couple rented a long series of successive homes, mostly in the English countryside. Conrad, who suffered frequent depressions, made great efforts to change his mood; the most important step was to move into another house. His frequent changes of home were usually signs of a search for psychological regeneration. Between 1910 and 1919 Conrad's home was Capel House in Orlestone, Kent, which was rented to him by Lord and Lady Oliver. It was here that he wrote The Rescue, Victory, and The Arrow of Gold.
Except for several vacations in France and Italy, a 1914 vacation in his native Poland, and a 1923 visit to the United States, Conrad lived the rest of his life in England.
The 1914 vacation with his wife and sons in Poland, at the urging of Józef Retinger, coincided with the outbreak of World War I. On 28 July 1914, the day war broke out between Austro-Hungary and Serbia, Conrad and the Retingers arrived in Kraków (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), where Conrad visited childhood haunts. As the city lay only a few miles from the Russian border, there was a risk of being stranded in a battle zone. With wife Jessie and younger son John ill, Conrad decided to take refuge in the mountain resort town of Zakopane. They left Kraków on 2 August. A few days after arrival in Zakopane, they moved to the Konstantynówka pension operated by Conrad's cousin Aniela Zagórska; it had been frequented by celebrities including the statesman Józef Piłsudski and Conrad's acquaintance, the young concert pianist Artur Rubinstein.
Zagórska introduced Conrad to Polish writers, intellectuals, and artists who had also taken refuge in Zakopane, including novelist Stefan Żeromski and Tadeusz Nalepiński, a writer friend of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. Conrad aroused interest among the Poles as a famous writer and an exotic compatriot from abroad. He charmed new acquaintances, especially women. However, Marie Curie's physician sister, Bronisława Dłuska, wife of fellow physician and eminent socialist activist Kazimierz Dłuski, openly berated Conrad for having used his great talent for purposes other than bettering the future of his native land.
But thirty-two-year-old Aniela Zagórska (daughter of the pension keeper), Conrad's niece who would translate his works into Polish in 1923–39, idolised him, kept him company, and provided him with books. He particularly delighted in the stories and novels of the ten-years-older, recently deceased Bolesław Prus (who also had visited Zakopane), read everything by his fellow victim of Poland's 1863 Uprising—"my beloved Prus"—that he could get his hands on, and pronounced him "better than Dickens"—a favourite English novelist of Conrad's.
Conrad, who was noted by his Polish acquaintances to still be fluent in his native tongue, participated in their impassioned political discussions. He declared presciently, as Józef Piłsudski had earlier in 1914 in Paris, that in the war, for Poland to regain independence, Russia must be beaten by the Central Powers (the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires), and the Central Powers must in turn be beaten by France and Britain.
After many travails and vicissitudes, at the beginning of November 1914 Conrad managed to bring his family back to England. On his return, he was determined to work on swaying British opinion in favour of restoring Poland's sovereignty.
Jessie Conrad would later write in her memoirs: "I understood my husband so much better after those months in Poland. So many characteristics that had been strange and unfathomable to me before, took, as it were, their right proportions. I understood that his temperament was that of his countrymen."
Biographer Zdzisław Najder wrote:
Conrad was passionately concerned with politics. [This] is confirmed by several of his works, starting with Almayer's Folly. [...] Nostromo revealed his concern with these matters more fully; it was, of course, a concern quite natural for someone from a country [Poland] where politics was a matter not only of everyday existence but also of life and death. Moreover, Conrad himself came from a social class that claimed exclusive responsibility for state affairs, and from a very politically active family. Norman Douglas sums it up: "Conrad was first and foremost a Pole and like many Poles a politician and moralist malgré lui [French: "in spite of himself"]. These are his fundamentals." [What made] Conrad see political problems in terms of a continuous struggle between law and violence, anarchy and order, freedom and autocracy, material interests and the noble idealism of individuals [...] was Conrad's historical awareness. His Polish experience endowed him with the perception, exceptional in the Western European literature of his time, of how winding and constantly changing were the front lines in these struggles.
The most extensive and ambitious political statement that Conrad ever made was his 1905 essay, "Autocracy and War", whose starting point was the Russo-Japanese War (he finished the article a month before the Battle of Tsushima Strait). The essay begins with a statement about Russia's incurable weakness and ends with warnings against Prussia, the dangerous aggressor in a future European war. For Russia he predicted a violent outburst in the near future, but Russia's lack of democratic traditions and the backwardness of her masses made it impossible for the revolution to have a salutary effect. Conrad regarded the formation of a representative government in Russia as unfeasible and foresaw a transition from autocracy to dictatorship. He saw western Europe as torn by antagonisms engendered by economic rivalry and commercial selfishness. In vain might a Russian revolution seek advice or help from a materialistic and egoistic western Europe that armed itself in preparation for wars far more brutal than those of the past.
Conrad's distrust of democracy sprang from his doubts whether the propagation of democracy as an aim in itself could solve any problems. He thought that, in view of the weakness of human nature and of the "criminal" character of society, democracy offered boundless opportunities for demagogues and charlatans. Conrad kept his distance from partisan politics, and never voted in British national elections.
He accused social democrats of his time of acting to weaken "the national sentiment, the preservation of which [was his] concern"—of attempting to dissolve national identities in an impersonal melting-pot. "I look at the future from the depth of a very black past and I find that nothing is left for me except fidelity to a cause lost, to an idea without future." It was Conrad's hopeless fidelity to the memory of Poland that prevented him from believing in the idea of "international fraternity", which he considered, under the circumstances, just a verbal exercise. He resented some socialists' talk of freedom and world brotherhood while keeping silent about his own partitioned and oppressed Poland.
Before that, in the early 1880s, letters to Conrad from his uncle Tadeusz show Conrad apparently having hoped for an improvement in Poland's situation not through a liberation movement but by establishing an alliance with neighbouring Slavic nations. This had been accompanied by a faith in the Panslavic ideology—"surprising", Najder writes, "in a man who was later to emphasize his hostility towards Russia, a conviction that... Poland's [superior] civilization and... historic... traditions would [let] her play a leading role... in the Panslavic community, [and his] doubts about Poland's chances of becoming a fully sovereign nation-state."
Conrad's alienation from partisan politics went together with an abiding sense of the thinking man's burden imposed by his personality, as described in an 1894 letter by Conrad to a relative-by-marriage and fellow author, Marguerite Poradowska (née Gachet, and cousin of Vincent van Gogh's physician, Paul Gachet) of Brussels:
We must drag the chain and ball of our personality to the end. This is the price one pays for the infernal and divine privilege of thought; so in this life it is only the chosen who are convicts—a glorious band which understands and groans but which treads the earth amidst a multitude of phantoms with maniacal gestures and idiotic grimaces. Which would you rather be: idiot or convict?
Conrad wrote H. G. Wells that the latter's 1901 book, Anticipations, an ambitious attempt to predict major social trends, "seems to presuppose... a sort of select circle to which you address yourself, leaving the rest of the world outside the pale. [In addition,] you do not take sufficient account of human imbecility which is cunning and perfidious."
In a 23 October 1922 letter to mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell, in response to the latter's book, The Problem of China, which advocated socialist reforms and an oligarchy of sages who would reshape Chinese society, Conrad explained his own distrust of political panaceas:
I have never [found] in any man's book or... talk anything... to stand up... against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world.... The only remedy for Chinamen and for the rest of us is [a] change of hearts, but looking at the history of the last 2000 years there is not much reason to expect [it], even if man has taken to flying—a great "uplift" no doubt but no great change....
Leo Robson writes:
Conrad... adopted a broader ironic stance—a sort of blanket incredulity, defined by a character in Under Western Eyes as the negation of all faith, devotion, and action. Through control of tone and narrative detail... Conrad exposes what he considered to be the naïveté of movements like anarchism and socialism, and the self-serving logic of such historical but "naturalized" phenomena as capitalism (piracy with good PR), rationalism (an elaborate defense against our innate irrationality), and imperialism (a grandiose front for old-school rape and pillage). To be ironic is to be awake—and alert to the prevailing "somnolence." In Nostromo... the journalist Martin Decoud... ridicul[es] the idea that people "believe themselves to be influencing the fate of the universe." (H. G. Wells recalled Conrad's astonishment that "I could take social and political issues seriously.")
But, writes Robson, Conrad is no moral nihilist:
If irony exists to suggest that there's more to things than meets the eye, Conrad further insists that, when we pay close enough attention, the "more" can be endless. He doesn't reject what [his character] Marlow [introduced in Youth] calls "the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation" in favor of nothing; he rejects them in favor of "something", "some saving truth", "some exorcism against the ghost of doubt"—an intimation of a deeper order, one not easily reduced to words. Authentic, self-aware emotion—feeling that doesn't call itself "theory" or "wisdom"—becomes a kind of standard-bearer, with "impressions" or "sensations" the nearest you get to solid proof.
In an August 1901 letter to the editor of The New York Times Saturday Book Review, Conrad wrote: "Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism."
On 3 August 1924, Conrad died at his house, Oswalds, in Bishopsbourne, Kent, England, probably of a heart attack. He was interred at Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, under a misspelled version of his original Polish name, as "Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski". Inscribed on his gravestone are the lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene which he had chosen as the epigraph to his last complete novel, The Rover:
Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, doth greatly please
Conrad's modest funeral took place amid great crowds. His old friend Edward Garnett recalled bitterly:
To those who attended Conrad's funeral in Canterbury during the Cricket Festival of 1924, and drove through the crowded streets festooned with flags, there was something symbolical in England's hospitality and in the crowd's ignorance of even the existence of this great writer. A few old friends, acquaintances and pressmen stood by his grave.
Another old friend of Conrad's, Cunninghame Graham, wrote Garnett: "Aubry was saying to me... that had Anatole France died, all Paris would have been at his funeral."
Conrad's wife Jessie died twelve years later, on 6 December 1936, and was interred with him.
In 1996 his grave was designated a Grade II listed structure.
Despite the opinions even of some who knew Conrad personally, such as fellow-novelist Henry James, Conrad—even when only writing elegantly crafted letters to his uncle and acquaintances—was always at heart a writer who sailed, rather than a sailor who wrote. He used his sailing experiences as a backdrop for many of his works, but he also produced works of similar world view, without the nautical motifs. The failure of many critics to appreciate this caused him much frustration.
He wrote oftener about life at sea and in exotic parts than about life on British land because—unlike, for example, his friend John Galsworthy, author of The Forsyte Saga—he knew little about everyday domestic relations in Britain. When Conrad's The Mirror of the Sea was published in 1906 to critical acclaim, he wrote to his French translator: "The critics have been vigorously swinging the censer to me.... Behind the concert of flattery, I can hear something like a whisper: 'Keep to the open sea! Don't land!' They want to banish me to the middle of the ocean." Writing to his friend Richard Curle, Conrad remarked that "the public mind fastens on externals" such as his "sea life", oblivious to how authors transform their material "from particular to general, and appeal to universal emotions by the temperamental handling of personal experience".
Nevertheless, Conrad found much sympathetic readership, especially in the United States. H.L. Mencken was one of the earliest and most influential American readers to recognise how Conrad conjured up "the general out of the particular". F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing to Mencken, complained about having been omitted from a list of Conrad imitators. Since Fitzgerald, dozens of other American writers have acknowledged their debts to Conrad, including William Faulkner, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Thomas Pynchon.
An October 1923 visitor to Oswalds, Conrad's home at the time—Cyril Clemens, a cousin of Mark Twain—quoted Conrad as saying: "In everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's attention."
Conrad the artist famously aspired, in the words of his preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel... before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."
Writing in what to the visual arts was the age of Impressionism, and what to music was the age of impressionist music, Conrad showed himself in many of his works a prose poet of the highest order: for instance, in the evocative Patna and courtroom scenes of Lord Jim; in the scenes of the "melancholy-mad elephant" and the "French gunboat firing into a continent", in Heart of Darkness; in the doubled protagonists of "The Secret Sharer"; and in the verbal and conceptual resonances of Nostromo and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'.
Conrad used his own memories as literary material so often that readers are tempted to treat his life and work as a single whole. His "view of the world", or elements of it, is often described by citing at once both his private and public statements, passages from his letters, and citations from his books. Najder warns that this approach produces an incoherent and misleading picture. "An... uncritical linking of the two spheres, literature and private life, distorts each. Conrad used his own experiences as raw material, but the finished product should not be confused with the experiences themselves."
Many of Conrad's characters were inspired by actual persons he had met, including, in his first novel, Almayer's Folly (completed 1894), William Charles Olmeijer, the spelling of whose surname Conrad probably altered to "Almayer" inadvertently. The historic trader Olmeijer, whom Conrad encountered on his four short visits to Berau in Borneo, subsequently haunted Conrad's imagination. Conrad often borrowed the authentic names of actual individuals, e.g., Captain McWhirr (Typhoon), Captain Beard and Mr. Mahon ("Youth"), Captain Lingard (Almayer's Folly and elsewhere), and Captain Ellis (The Shadow Line). "Conrad", writes J. I. M. Stewart, "appears to have attached some mysterious significance to such links with actuality." Equally curious is "a great deal of namelessness in Conrad, requiring some minor virtuosity to maintain." Thus we never learn the surname of the protagonist of Lord Jim. Conrad also preserves, in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', the authentic name of the ship, the Narcissus, in which he sailed in 1884.
Apart from Conrad's own experiences, a number of episodes in his fiction were suggested by past or contemporary publicly known events or literary works. The first half of the 1900 novel Lord Jim (the Patna episode) was inspired by the real-life 1880 story of the SS Jeddah; the second part, to some extent by the life of James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak. The 1901 short story "Amy Foster" was inspired partly by an anecdote in Ford Madox Ford's The Cinque Ports (1900), wherein a shipwrecked sailor from a German merchant ship, unable to communicate in English, and driven away by the local country people, finally found shelter in a pigsty.
In Nostromo (completed 1904), the theft of a massive consignment of silver was suggested to Conrad by a story he had heard in the Gulf of Mexico and later read about in a "volume picked up outside a second-hand bookshop." The novel's political strand, according to Maya Jasanoff, is related to the creation of the Panama Canal. "In January 1903", she writes, "just as Conrad started writing Nostromo, the US and Colombian secretaries of state signed a treaty granting the United States a one-hundred-year renewable lease on a six-mile strip flanking the canal... While the [news]papers murmured about revolution in Colombia, Conrad opened a fresh section of Nostromo with hints of dissent in Costaguana", his fictional South American country. He plotted a revolution in the Costaguanan fictional port of Sulaco that mirrored the real-life secessionist movement brewing in Panama. When Conrad finished the novel on 1 September 1904, writes Jasanoff, "he left Sulaco in the condition of Panama. As Panama had gotten its independence instantly recognized by the United States and its economy bolstered by American investment in the canal, so Sulaco had its independence instantly recognized by the United States, and its economy underwritten by investment in the [fictional] San Tomé [silver] mine."
The Secret Agent (completed 1906) was inspired by the French anarchist Martial Bourdin's 1894 death while apparently attempting to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. Conrad's story "The Secret Sharer" (completed 1909) was inspired by an 1880 incident when Sydney Smith, first mate of the Cutty Sark, had killed a seaman and fled from justice, aided by the ship's captain. The plot of Under Western Eyes (completed 1910) is kicked off by the assassination of a brutal Russian government minister, modelled after the real-life 1904 assassination of Russian Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve. The near-novella "Freya of the Seven Isles" (completed in March 1911) was inspired by a story told to Conrad by a Malaya old hand and fan of Conrad's, Captain Carlos M. Marris.
For the natural surroundings of the high seas, the Malay Archipelago and South America, which Conrad described so vividly, he could rely on his own observations. What his brief landfalls could not provide was a thorough understanding of exotic cultures. For this he resorted, like other writers, to literary sources. When writing his Malayan stories, he consulted Alfred Russel Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (1869), James Brooke's journals, and books with titles like Perak and the Malays, My Journal in Malayan Waters, and Life in the Forests of the Far East. When he set about writing his novel Nostromo, set in the fictional South American country of Costaguana, he turned to The War between Peru and Chile; Edward Eastwick, Venezuela: or, Sketches of Life in a South American Republic (1868); and George Frederick Masterman, Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay (1869). As a result of relying on literary sources, in Lord Jim, as J. I. M. Stewart writes, Conrad's "need to work to some extent from second-hand" led to "a certain thinness in Jim's relations with the... peoples... of Patusan..." This prompted Conrad at some points to alter the nature of Charles Marlow's narrative to "distanc[e] an uncertain command of the detail of Tuan Jim's empire."
In keeping with his scepticism and melancholy, Conrad almost invariably gives lethal fates to the characters in his principal novels and stories. Almayer (Almayer's Folly, 1894), abandoned by his beloved daughter, takes to opium, and dies. Peter Willems (An Outcast of the Islands, 1895) is killed by his jealous lover Aïssa. The ineffectual "Nigger", James Wait (The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', 1897), dies aboard ship and is buried at sea. Mr. Kurtz (Heart of Darkness, 1899) expires, uttering the words, "The horror! The horror!" Tuan Jim (Lord Jim, 1900), having inadvertently precipitated a massacre of his adoptive community, deliberately walks to his death at the hands of the community's leader. In Conrad's 1901 short story, "Amy Foster", a Pole transplanted to England, Yanko Goorall (an English transliteration of the Polish Janko Góral, "Johnny Highlander"), falls ill and, suffering from a fever, raves in his native language, frightening his wife Amy, who flees; next morning Yanko dies of heart failure, and it transpires that he had simply been asking in Polish for water. Captain Whalley (The End of the Tether, 1902), betrayed by failing eyesight and an unscrupulous partner, drowns himself. Gian' Battista Fidanza, the eponymous respected Italian-immigrant Nostromo (Italian: "Our Man") of the novel Nostromo (1904), illicitly obtains a treasure of silver mined in the South American country of "Costaguana" and is shot dead due to mistaken identity. Mr. Verloc, The Secret Agent (1906) of divided loyalties, attempts a bombing, to be blamed on terrorists, that accidentally kills his mentally defective brother-in-law Stevie, and Verloc himself is killed by his distraught wife, who drowns herself by jumping overboard from a channel steamer. In Chance (1913), Roderick Anthony, a sailing-ship captain, and benefactor and husband of Flora de Barral, becomes the target of a poisoning attempt by her jealous disgraced financier father who, when detected, swallows the poison himself and dies (some years later, Captain Anthony drowns at sea). In Victory (1915), Lena is shot dead by Jones, who had meant to kill his accomplice Ricardo and later succeeds in doing so, then himself perishes along with another accomplice, after which Lena's protector Axel Heyst sets fire to his bungalow and dies beside Lena's body.
When a principal character of Conrad's does escape with his life, he sometimes does not fare much better. In Under Western Eyes (1911), Razumov betrays a fellow University of St. Petersburg student, the revolutionist Victor Haldin, who has assassinated a savagely repressive Russian government minister. Haldin is tortured and hanged by the authorities. Later Razumov, sent as a government spy to Geneva, a centre of anti-tsarist intrigue, meets the mother and sister of Haldin, who share Haldin's liberal convictions. Razumov falls in love with the sister and confesses his betrayal of her brother; later, he makes the same avowal to assembled revolutionists, and their professional executioner bursts his eardrums, making him deaf for life. Razumov staggers away, is knocked down by a streetcar, and finally returns as a cripple to Russia.
Conrad was keenly conscious of tragedy in the world and in his works. In 1898, at the start of his writing career, he had written to his Scottish writer-politician friend Cunninghame Graham: "What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. [A]s soon as you know of your slavery the pain, the anger, the strife—the tragedy begins." But in 1922, near the end of his life and career, when another Scottish friend, Richard Curle, sent Conrad proofs of two articles he had written about Conrad, the latter objected to being characterised as a gloomy and tragic writer. "That reputation... has deprived me of innumerable readers... I absolutely object to being called a tragedian."
Conrad claimed that he "never kept a diary and never owned a notebook." John Galsworthy, who knew him well, described this as "a statement which surprised no one who knew the resources of his memory and the brooding nature of his creative spirit." Nevertheless, after Conrad's death, Richard Curle published a heavily modified version of Conrad's diaries describing his experiences in the Congo; in 1978 a more complete version was published as The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces. The first accurate transcription was published in Robert Hampson's Penguin edition of Heart of Darkness in 1995; Hampson's transcription and annotations were reprinted in the Penguin edition of 2007.
Unlike many authors who make it a point not to discuss work in progress, Conrad often did discuss his current work and even showed it to select friends and fellow authors, such as Edward Garnett, and sometimes modified it in the light of their critiques and suggestions.
Edward Said was struck by the sheer quantity of Conrad's correspondence with friends and fellow writers; by 1966, it "amount[ed] to eight published volumes". Said comments: "[I]t seemed to me that if Conrad wrote of himself, of the problem of self-definition, with such sustained urgency, some of what he wrote must have had meaning for his fiction. [I]t [was] difficult to believe that a man would be so uneconomical as to pour himself out in letter after letter and then not use and reformulate his insights and discoveries in his fiction." Said found especially close parallels between Conrad's letters and his shorter fiction. "Conrad... believed... that artistic distinction was more tellingly demonstrated in a shorter rather than a longer work.... He believed that his [own] life was like a series of short episodes... because he was himself so many different people...: he was a Pole and an Englishman, a sailor and a writer." Another scholar, Najder, writes:
Throughout almost his entire life Conrad was an outsider and felt himself to be one. An outsider in exile; an outsider during his visits to his family in the Ukraine; an outsider—because of his experiences and bereavement—in [Kraków] and Lwów; an outsider in Marseilles; an outsider, nationally and culturally, on British ships; an outsider as an English writer.... Conrad called himself (to Graham) a "bloody foreigner." At the same time... [h]e regarded "the national spirit" as the only truly permanent and reliable element of communal life.
Conrad borrowed from other, Polish- and French-language authors, to an extent sometimes skirting plagiarism. When the Polish translation of his 1915 novel Victory appeared in 1931, readers noted striking similarities to Stefan Żeromski's kitschy novel, The History of a Sin (Dzieje grzechu, 1908), including their endings. Comparative-literature scholar Yves Hervouet has demonstrated in the text of Victory a whole mosaic of influences, borrowings, similarities and allusions. He further lists hundreds of concrete borrowings from other, mostly French authors in nearly all of Conrad's works, from Almayer's Folly (1895) to his unfinished Suspense. Conrad seems to have used eminent writers' texts as raw material of the same kind as the content of his own memory. Materials borrowed from other authors often functioned as allusions. Moreover, he had a phenomenal memory for texts and remembered details, "but [writes Najder] it was not a memory strictly categorized according to sources, marshalled into homogeneous entities; it was, rather, an enormous receptacle of images and pieces from which he would draw."
Continues Najder: "[H]e can never be accused of outright plagiarism. Even when lifting sentences and scenes, Conrad changed their character, inserted them within novel structures. He did not imitate, but (as Hervouet says) 'continued' his masters. He was right in saying: 'I don't resemble anybody.' Ian Watt put it succinctly: 'In a sense, Conrad is the least derivative of writers; he wrote very little that could possibly be mistaken for the work of anyone else.' Conrad's acquaintance George Bernard Shaw says it well: "[A] man can no more be completely original [...] than a tree can grow out of air."
Conrad, like other artists, faced constraints arising from the need to propitiate his audience and confirm their own favourable self-regard. This may account for his describing the admirable crew of the Judea in his 1898 story "Youth" as "Liverpool hard cases", whereas the crew of the Judea's actual 1882 prototype, the Palestine, had included not a single Liverpudlian, and half the crew had been non-Britons; and for Conrad's transforming the real-life 1880 criminally negligent British captain J. L. Clark, of the SS Jeddah, in his 1900 novel Lord Jim, into the captain of the fictitious Patna—"a sort of renegade New South Wales German" so monstrous in physical appearance as to suggest "a trained baby elephant". Similarly, in his letters Conrad—during most of his literary career, struggling for sheer financial survival—often adjusted his views to the predilections of his correspondents. Historians have also noted that Conrad's works which were set in European colonies and intended to critique the effects of colonialism were set in Dutch and Belgian colonies, instead of the British Empire.
The singularity of the universe depicted in Conrad's novels, especially compared to those of near-contemporaries like his friend and frequent benefactor John Galsworthy, is such as to open him to criticism similar to that later applied to Graham Greene. But where "Greeneland" has been characterised as a recurring and recognisable atmosphere independent of setting, Conrad is at pains to create a sense of place, be it aboard ship or in a remote village; often he chose to have his characters play out their destinies in isolated or confined circumstances. In the view of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, it was not until the first volumes of Anthony Powell's sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, were published in the 1950s, that an English novelist achieved the same command of atmosphere and precision of language with consistency, a view supported by later critics like A. N. Wilson; Powell acknowledged his debt to Conrad. Leo Gurko, too, remarks, as "one of Conrad's special qualities, his abnormal awareness of place, an awareness magnified to almost a new dimension in art, an ecological dimension defining the relationship between earth and man."
T. E. Lawrence, one of many writers whom Conrad befriended, offered some perceptive observations about Conrad's writing:
He's absolutely the most haunting thing in prose that ever was: I wish I knew how every paragraph he writes (...they are all paragraphs: he seldom writes a single sentence...) goes on sounding in waves, like the note of a tenor bell, after it stops. It's not built in the rhythm of ordinary prose, but on something existing only in his head, and as he can never say what it is he wants to say, all his things end in a kind of hunger, a suggestion of something he can't say or do or think. So his books always look bigger than they are. He's as much a giant of the subjective as Kipling is of the objective. Do they hate one another?
The Irish novelist-poet-critic Colm Tóibín captures something similar:
Joseph Conrad's heroes were often alone, and close to hostility and danger. Sometimes, when Conrad's imagination was at its most fertile and his command of English at its most precise, the danger came darkly from within the self. At other times, however, it came from what could not be named. Conrad sought then to evoke rather than delineate, using something close to the language of prayer. While his imagination was content at times with the tiny, vivid, perfectly observed detail, it was also nourished by the need to suggest and symbolize. Like a poet, he often left the space in between strangely, alluringly vacant.
His own vague terms—words like "ineffable", "infinite", "mysterious", "unknowable"—were as close as he could come to a sense of our fate in the world or the essence of the universe, a sense that reached beyond the time he described and beyond his characters' circumstances. This idea of "beyond" satisfied something in his imagination. He worked as though between the intricate systems of a ship and the vague horizon of a vast sea.
This irreconcilable distance between what was precise and what was shimmering made him much more than a novelist of adventure, a chronicler of the issues that haunted his time, or a writer who dramatized moral questions. This left him open to interpretation—and indeed to attack [by critics such as the novelists V.S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe].
In a letter of 14 December 1897 to his Scottish friend, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, Conrad wrote that science tells us, "Understand that thou art nothing, less than a shadow, more insignificant than a drop of water in the ocean, more fleeting than the illusion of a dream."
In a letter of 20 December 1897 to Cunninghame Graham, Conrad metaphorically described the universe as a huge machine:
It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold!—it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider—but it goes on knitting. You come and say: "this is all right; it's only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this—for instance—celestial oil and the machine shall embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold." Will it? Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident—and it has happened. You can't interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can't even smash it. In virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that made it spring into existence it is what it is—and it is indestructible! It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions—and nothing matters.
Conrad wrote Cunninghame Graham on 31 January 1898:
Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow....
In this world—as I have known it—we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt....
There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that... is always but a vain and fleeting appearance....
A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains—but a clod of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.
Leo Robson suggests that
What [Conrad] really learned as a sailor was not something empirical—an assembly of "places and events"—but the vindication of a perspective he had developed in childhood, an impartial, unillusioned view of the world as a place of mystery and contingency, horror and splendor, where, as he put it in a letter to the London Times, the only indisputable truth is "our ignorance."
According to Robson,
[Conrad's] treatment of knowledge as contingent and provisional commands a range of comparisons, from Rashomon to [the views of philosopher] Richard Rorty; reference points for Conrad's fragmentary method [of presenting information about characters and events] include Picasso and T.S. Eliot—who took the epigraph of "The Hollow Men" from Heart of Darkness.... Even Henry James's late period, that other harbinger of the modernist novel, had not yet begun when Conrad invented Marlow, and James's earlier experiments in perspective (The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew) don't go nearly as far as Lord Jim.
Conrad spoke his native Polish and the French language fluently from childhood and only acquired English in his twenties. He would probably have spoken some Ukrainian as a child; he certainly had to have some knowledge of German and Russian. His son Borys records that, though Conrad had insisted that he spoke only a few words of German, when they reached the Austrian frontier in the family's attempt to leave Poland in 1914, Conrad spoke German "at considerable length and extreme fluency". Russia, Prussia, and Austria had divided up Poland among them, and he was officially a Russian subject until his naturalization as a British subject. As a result, up to this point, his official documents were in Russian. His knowledge of Russian was good enough that his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski wrote him (22 May 1893) advising that, when Conrad came to visit, he should "telegraph for horses, but in Russian, for Oratów doesn't receive or accept messages in an 'alien' language."
Conrad chose, however, to write his fiction in English. He says in his preface to A Personal Record that writing in English was for him "natural", and that the idea of his having made a deliberate choice between English and French, as some had suggested, was in error. He explained that, though he had been familiar with French from childhood, "I would have been afraid to attempt expression in a language so perfectly 'crystallized'." In 1915, as Jo Davidson sculpted his bust, Conrad answered his question: "Ah… to write French you have to know it. English is so plastic—if you haven't got a word you need you can make it, but to write French you have to be an artist like Anatole France." These statements, as so often in Conrad's "autobiographical" writings, are subtly disingenuous. In 1897 Conrad was visited by a fellow Pole, the philosopher Wincenty Lutosławski, who asked Conrad, "Why don't you write in Polish?" Lutosławski recalled Conrad explaining: "I value our beautiful Polish literature too much to bring into it my clumsy efforts. But for the English my gifts are sufficient and secure my daily bread."
Conrad wrote in A Personal Record that English was "the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions—of my very dreams!" In 1878 Conrad's four-year experience in the French merchant marine had been cut short when the French discovered he did not have a permit from the Imperial Russian consul to sail with the French. This, and some typically disastrous Conradian investments, had left him destitute and had precipitated a suicide attempt. With the concurrence of his mentor-uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, who had been summoned to Marseilles, Conrad decided to seek employment with the British merchant marine, which did not require Russia's permission. Thus began Conrad's sixteen years' seafarer's acquaintance with the British and with the English language.
Had Conrad remained in the Francophone sphere or had he returned to Poland, the son of the Polish poet, playwright, and translator Apollo Korzeniowski—from childhood exposed to Polish and foreign literature, and ambitious to himself become a writer—he might have ended up writing in French or Polish instead of English. Certainly his Uncle Tadeusz thought Conrad might write in Polish; in an 1881 letter he advised his 23-year-old nephew:
As, thank God, you do not forget your Polish... and your writing is not bad, I repeat what I have... written and said before—you would do well to write... for Wędrowiec [The Wanderer] in Warsaw. We have few travelers, and even fewer genuine correspondents: the words of an eyewitness would be of great interest and in time would bring you... money. It would be an exercise in your native tongue—that thread which binds you to your country and countrymen—and finally a tribute to the memory of your father who always wanted to and did serve his country by his pen.
In the opinion of some biographers, Conrad's third language, English, remained under the influence of his first two languages—Polish and French. This makes his English seem unusual. Najder writes that:
[H]e was a man of three cultures: Polish, French, and English. Brought up in a Polish family and cultural environment... he learned French as a child, and at the age of less than seventeen went to France, to serve... four years in the French merchant marine. At school he must have learned German, but French remained the language he spoke with greatest fluency (and no foreign accent) until the end of his life. He was well versed in French history and literature, and French novelists were his artistic models. But he wrote all his books in English—the tongue he started to learn at the age of twenty. He was thus an English writer who grew up in other linguistic and cultural environments. His work can be seen as located in the borderland of auto-translation.
Inevitably for a trilingual Polish–French–English-speaker, Conrad's writings occasionally show linguistic spillover: "Franglais" or "Poglish"—the inadvertent use of French or Polish vocabulary, grammar, or syntax in his English writings. In one instance, Najder uses "several slips in vocabulary, typical for Conrad (Gallicisms) and grammar (usually Polonisms)" as part of internal evidence against Conrad's sometime literary collaborator Ford Madox Ford's claim to have written a certain instalment of Conrad's novel Nostromo, for publication in T. P.'s Weekly, on behalf of an ill Conrad.
The impracticality of working with a language which has long ceased to be one's principal language of daily use is illustrated by Conrad's 1921 attempt at translating into English the Polish physicist, columnist, story-writer, and comedy-writer Bruno Winawer's short play, The Book of Job. Najder writes:
[T]he [play's] language is easy, colloquial, slightly individualized. Particularly Herup and a snobbish Jew, "Bolo" Bendziner, have their characteristic ways of speaking. Conrad, who had had little contact with everyday spoken Polish, simplified the dialogue, left out Herup's scientific expressions, and missed many amusing nuances. The action in the original is quite clearly set in contemporary Warsaw, somewhere between elegant society and the demimonde; this specific cultural setting is lost in the translation. Conrad left out many accents of topical satire in the presentation of the dramatis personae and ignored not only the ungrammatical speech (which might have escaped him) of some characters but even the Jewishness of two of them, Bolo and Mosan.
As a practical matter, by the time Conrad set about writing fiction, he had little choice but to write in English. Poles who accused Conrad of cultural apostasy because he wrote in English instead of Polish missed the point—as do Anglophones who see, in Conrad's default choice of English as his artistic medium, a testimonial to some sort of innate superiority of the English language.
According to Conrad's close friend and literary assistant Richard Curle, the fact of Conrad writing in English was "obviously misleading" because Conrad "is no more completely English in his art than he is in his nationality". Conrad, according to Curle, "could never have written in any other language save the English language....for he would have been dumb in any other language but the English."
Conrad always retained a strong emotional attachment to his native language. He asked his visiting Polish niece Karola Zagórska, "Will you forgive me that my sons don't speak Polish?" In June 1924, shortly before his death, he apparently expressed a desire that his son John marry a Polish girl and learn Polish, and toyed with the idea of returning for good to now independent Poland.
Conrad bridled at being referred to as a Russian or "Slavonic" writer. The only Russian writer he admired was Ivan Turgenev. "The critics", he wrote an acquaintance on 31 January 1924, six months before his death, "detected in me a new note and as, just when I began to write, they had discovered the existence of Russian authors, they stuck that label on me under the name of Slavonism. What I venture to say is that it would have been more just to charge me at most with Polonism." However, though Conrad protested that Dostoyevsky was "too Russian for me" and that Russian literature generally was "repugnant to me hereditarily and individually", Under Western Eyes is viewed as Conrad's response to the themes explored in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.
Conrad had an awareness that, in any language, individual expressions – words, phrases, sentences – are fraught with connotations. He once wrote: "No English word has clean edges." All expressions, he thought, carried so many connotations as to be little more than "instruments for exciting blurred emotions." This might help elucidate the impressionistic quality of many passages in his writings. It also explains why he chose to write his literary works not in Polish or French but in English, with which for decades he had had the greatest contact.
In 1975 the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe published an essay, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'", which provoked controversy by calling Conrad a "thoroughgoing racist". Achebe's view was that Heart of Darkness cannot be considered a great work of art because it is "a novel which celebrates... dehumanisation, which depersonalises a portion of the human race." Referring to Conrad as a "talented, tormented man", Achebe notes that Conrad (via the protagonist, Charles Marlow) reduces and degrades Africans to "limbs", "ankles", "glistening white eyeballs", etc., while simultaneously (and fearfully) suspecting a common kinship between himself and these natives—leading Marlow to sneer the word "ugly." Achebe also cited Conrad's description of an encounter with an African: "A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days." Achebe's essay, a landmark in postcolonial discourse, provoked debate, and the questions it raised have been addressed in most subsequent literary criticism of Conrad.
Achebe's critics argue that he fails to distinguish Marlow's view from Conrad's, which results in very clumsy interpretations of the novella. In their view, Conrad portrays Africans sympathetically and their plight tragically, and refers sarcastically to, and condemns outright, the supposedly noble aims of European colonists, thereby demonstrating his skepticism about the moral superiority of white men. Ending a passage that describes the condition of chained, emaciated slaves, the novelist remarks: "After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings." Some observers assert that Conrad, whose native country had been conquered by imperial powers, empathised by default with other subjugated peoples. Jeffrey Meyers notes that Conrad, like his acquaintance Roger Casement, "was one of the first men to question the Western notion of progress, a dominant idea in Europe from the Renaissance to the Great War, to attack the hypocritical justification of colonialism and to reveal... the savage degradation of the white man in Africa." Likewise, E.D. Morel, who led international opposition to King Leopold II's rule in the Congo, saw Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a condemnation of colonial brutality and referred to the novella as "the most powerful thing written on the subject." More recently, Nidesh Lawtoo complicated the race debate by showing that Conrad's images of "frenzy" depict rituals of "possession trance" that are equally central to Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
Conrad scholar Peter Firchow writes that "nowhere in the novel does Conrad or any of his narrators, personified or otherwise, claim superiority on the part of Europeans on the grounds of alleged genetic or biological difference." If Conrad or his novel is racist, it is only in a weak sense, since Heart of Darkness acknowledges racial distinctions "but does not suggest an essential superiority" of any group. Achebe's reading of Heart of Darkness can be (and has been) challenged by a reading of Conrad's other African story, "An Outpost of Progress", which has an omniscient narrator, rather than the embodied narrator, Marlow. Some younger scholars, such as Masood Ashraf Raja, have also suggested that if we read Conrad beyond Heart of Darkness, especially his Malay novels, racism can be further complicated by foregrounding Conrad's positive representation of Muslims.
In 1998 H.S. Zins wrote in Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies:
Conrad made English literature more mature and reflective because he called attention to the sheer horror of political realities overlooked by English citizens and politicians. The case of Poland, his oppressed homeland, was one such issue. The colonial exploitation of Africans was another. His condemnation of imperialism and colonialism, combined with sympathy for its persecuted and suffering victims, was drawn from his Polish background, his own personal sufferings, and the experience of a persecuted people living under foreign occupation. Personal memories created in him a great sensitivity for human degradation and a sense of moral responsibility."
Adam Hochschild makes a similar point:
What gave [Conrad] such a rare ability to see the arrogance and theft at the heart of imperialism?... Much of it surely had to do with the fact that he himself, as a Pole, knew what it was like to live in conquered territory.... [F]or the first few years of his life, tens of millions of peasants in the Russian empire were the equivalent of slave laborers: serfs. Conrad's poet father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a Polish nationalist and an opponent of serfdom... [The] boy [Konrad] grew up among exiled prison veterans, talk of serfdom, and the news of relatives killed in uprisings [and he] was ready to distrust imperial conquerors who claimed they had the right to rule other peoples.
Conrad's experience in the Belgian-run Congo made him one of the fiercest critics of the "white man's mission." It was also, writes Najder, Conrad's most daring and last "attempt to become a homo socialis, a cog in the mechanism of society. By accepting the job in the trading company, he joined, for once in his life, an organized, large-scale group activity on land.... It is not accidental that the Congo expedition remained an isolated event in Conrad's life. Until his death he remained a recluse in the social sense and never became involved with any institution or clearly defined group of people."
Conrad was a Russian subject, having been born in the Russian part of what had once been the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. After his father's death, Conrad's uncle Bobrowski had attempted to secure Austrian citizenship for him—to no avail, probably because Conrad had not received permission from Russian authorities to remain abroad permanently and had not been released from being a Russian subject. Conrad could not return to Ukraine, in the Russian Empire—he would have been liable to many years' military service and, as the son of political exiles, to harassment.
In a letter of 9 August 1877, Conrad's uncle Bobrowski broached two important subjects: the desirability of Conrad's naturalisation abroad (tantamount to release from being a Russian subject) and Conrad's plans to join the British merchant marine. "[D]o you speak English?... I never wished you to become naturalized in France, mainly because of the compulsory military service... I thought, however, of your getting naturalized in Switzerland..." In his next letter, Bobrowski supported Conrad's idea of seeking citizenship of the United States or of "one of the more important Southern [American] Republics".
Eventually Conrad would make his home in England. On 2 July 1886 he applied for British nationality, which was granted on 19 August 1886. Yet, in spite of having become a subject of Queen Victoria, Conrad had not ceased to be a subject of Tsar Alexander III. To achieve his freedom from that subjection, he had to make many visits to the Russian Embassy in London and politely reiterate his request. He would later recall the Embassy's home at Belgrave Square in his novel The Secret Agent. Finally, on 2 April 1889, the Russian Ministry of Home Affairs released "the son of a Polish man of letters, captain of the British merchant marine" from the status of Russian subject.
An anchor-shaped monument to Conrad at Gdynia, on Poland's Baltic Seacoast, features a quotation from him in Polish: "Nic tak nie nęci, nie rozczarowuje i nie zniewala, jak życie na morzu" ("[T]here is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea" – Lord Jim, chapter 2, paragraph 1).
In Circular Quay, Sydney, Australia, a plaque in a "writers walk" commemorates Conrad's visits to Australia between 1879 and 1892. The plaque notes that "Many of his works reflect his 'affection for that young continent.'"
In San Francisco in 1979, a small triangular square at Columbus Avenue and Beach Street, near Fisherman's Wharf, was dedicated as "Joseph Conrad Square" after Conrad. The square's dedication was timed to coincide with release of Francis Ford Coppola's Heart of Darkness-inspired film, Apocalypse Now. Conrad does not appear to have ever visited San Francisco.
In the latter part of World War II, the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Danae was rechristened ORP Conrad and served as part of the Polish Navy.
Notwithstanding the undoubted sufferings that Conrad endured on many of his voyages, sentimentality and canny marketing place him at the best lodgings in several of his destinations. Hotels across the Far East still lay claim to him as an honoured guest, with, however, no evidence to back their claims: Singapore's Raffles Hotel continues to claim he stayed there though he lodged, in fact, at the Sailors' Home nearby. His visit to Bangkok also remains in that city's collective memory, and is recorded in the official history of The Oriental Hotel (where he never, in fact, stayed, lodging aboard his ship, the Otago) along with that of a less well-behaved guest, Somerset Maugham, who pilloried the hotel in a short story in revenge for attempts to eject him.
A plaque commemorating "Joseph Conrad–Korzeniowski" has been installed near Singapore's Fullerton Hotel.
Conrad is also reported to have stayed at Hong Kong's Peninsula Hotel—at a port that, in fact, he never visited. Later literary admirers, notably Graham Greene, followed closely in his footsteps, sometimes requesting the same room and perpetuating myths that have no basis in fact. No Caribbean resort is yet known to have claimed Conrad's patronage, although he is believed to have stayed at a Fort-de-France pension upon arrival in Martinique on his first voyage, in 1875, when he travelled as a passenger on the Mont Blanc.
In April 2013, a monument to Conrad was unveiled in the Russian town of Vologda, where he and his parents lived in exile in 1862–63. The monument was removed, with unclear explanation, in June 2016.
After the publication of Chance in 1913, Conrad was the subject of more discussion and praise than any other English writer of the time. He had a genius for companionship, and his circle of friends, which he had begun assembling even prior to his first publications, included authors and other leading lights in the arts, such as Henry James, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, John Galsworthy, Galsworthy's wife Ada Galsworthy (translator of French literature), Edward Garnett, Garnett's wife Constance Garnett (translator of Russian literature), Stephen Crane, Hugh Walpole, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells (whom Conrad dubbed "the historian of the ages to come"), Arnold Bennett, Norman Douglas, Jacob Epstein, T. E. Lawrence, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Maurice Ravel, Valery Larbaud, Saint-John Perse, Edith Wharton, James Huneker, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, Józef Retinger (later a founder of the European Movement, which led to the European Union, and author of Conrad and His Contemporaries). In the early 1900s Conrad composed a short series of novels in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford.
In 1919 and 1922 Conrad's growing renown and prestige among writers and critics in continental Europe fostered his hopes for a Nobel Prize in Literature. It was apparently the French and Swedes—not the English—who favoured Conrad's candidacy.
In April 1924 Conrad, who possessed a hereditary Polish status of nobility and coat-of-arms (Nałęcz), declined a (non-hereditary) British knighthood offered by Labour Party Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. Conrad kept a distance from official structures—he never voted in British national elections—and seems to have been averse to public honours generally; he had already refused honorary degrees from Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Yale universities.
In the Polish People's Republic, translations of Conrad's works were openly published, except for Under Western Eyes, which in the 1980s was published as an underground "bibuła".
Conrad's narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including T. S. Eliot, Maria Dąbrowska, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Gerald Basil Edwards, Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, André Malraux, George Orwell, Graham Greene, William Golding, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Gabriel García Márquez, Peter Matthiessen, John le Carré, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie. Many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's works.
A striking portrait of Conrad, aged about 46, was drawn by the historian and poet Henry Newbolt, who met him about 1903:
One thing struck me at once—the extraordinary difference between his expression in profile and when looked at full face. [W]hile the profile was aquiline and commanding, in the front view the broad brow, wide-apart eyes and full lips produced the effect of an intellectual calm and even at times of a dreaming philosophy. Then [a]s we sat in our little half-circle round the fire, and talked on anything and everything, I saw a third Conrad emerge—an artistic self, sensitive and restless to the last degree. The more he talked the more quickly he consumed his cigarettes... And presently, when I asked him why he was leaving London after... only two days, he replied that... the crowd in the streets... terrified him. "Terrified? By that dull stream of obliterated faces?" He leaned forward with both hands raised and clenched. "Yes, terrified: I see their personalities all leaping out at me like tigers!" He acted the tiger well enough almost to terrify his hearers: but the moment after he was talking again wisely and soberly as if he were an average Englishman with not an irritable nerve in his body.
On 12 October 1912, American music critic James Huneker visited Conrad and later recalled being received by "a man of the world, neither sailor nor novelist, just a simple-mannered gentleman, whose welcome was sincere, whose glance was veiled, at times far-away, whose ways were French, Polish, anything but 'literary,' bluff or English."
After respective separate visits to Conrad in August and September 1913, two British aristocrats, the socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell and the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell—who were lovers at the time—recorded their impressions of the novelist. In her diary, Morrell wrote:
I found Conrad himself standing at the door of the house ready to receive me.... [His] appearance was really that of a Polish nobleman. His manner was perfect, almost too elaborate; so nervous and sympathetic that every fibre of him seemed electric... He talked English with a strong accent, as if he tasted his words in his mouth before pronouncing them; but he talked extremely well, though he had always the talk and manner of a foreigner.... He was dressed very carefully in a blue double-breasted jacket. He talked... apparently with great freedom about his life—more ease and freedom indeed than an Englishman would have allowed himself. He spoke of the horrors of the Congo, from the moral and physical shock of which he said he had never recovered... [His wife Jessie] seemed a nice and good-looking fat creature, an excellent cook, ... a good and reposeful mattress for this hypersensitive, nerve-wracked man, who did not ask from his wife high intelligence, only an assuagement of life's vibrations.... He made me feel so natural and very much myself, that I was almost afraid of losing the thrill and wonder of being there, although I was vibrating with intense excitement inside .... His eyes under their pent-house lids revealed the suffering and the intensity of his experiences; when he spoke of his work, there came over them a sort of misty, sensuous, dreamy look, but they seemed to hold deep down the ghosts of old adventures and experiences—once or twice there was something in them one almost suspected of being wicked.... But then I believe whatever strange wickedness would tempt this super-subtle Pole, he would be held in restraint by an equally delicate sense of honour.... In his talk he led me along many paths of his life, but I felt that he did not wish to explore the jungle of emotions that lay dense on either side, and that his apparent frankness had a great reserve.
A month later, Bertrand Russell visited Conrad at Capel House in Orlestone, and the same day on the train wrote down his impressions:
It was wonderful—I loved him & I think he liked me. He talked a great deal about his work & life & aims, & about other writers.... Then we went for a little walk, & somehow grew very intimate. I plucked up courage to tell him what I find in his work—the boring down into things to get to the very bottom below the apparent facts. He seemed to feel I had understood him; then I stopped & we just looked into each other's eyes for some time, & then he said he had grown to wish he could live on the surface and write differently, that he had grown frightened. His eyes at the moment expressed the inward pain & terror that one feels him always fighting.... Then he talked a lot about Poland, & showed me an album of family photographs of the [18]60's—spoke about how dream-like all that seems, & how he sometimes feels he ought not to have had any children, because they have no roots or traditions or relations.
Russell's Autobiography, published over half a century later in 1968, confirms his original experience:
My first impression was one of surprise. He spoke English with a very strong foreign accent, and nothing in his demeanour in any way suggested the sea. He was an aristocratic Polish gentleman to his fingertips.... At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other... I have known. We looked into each other's eyes, half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region. The emotion was as intense as passionate love, and at the same time all-embracing. I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs.
It was not only Anglophones who remarked Conrad's strong foreign accent when speaking English. After French poet Paul Valéry and French composer Maurice Ravel made Conrad's acquaintance in December 1922, Valéry wrote in 1924 of having been astonished at Conrad's "horrible" accent in English.
The subsequent friendship and correspondence between Conrad and Russell lasted, with long intervals, to the end of Conrad's life. In one letter, Conrad avowed his "deep admiring affection, which, if you were never to see me again and forget my existence tomorrow will be unalterably yours usque ad finem." Conrad in his correspondence often used the Latin expression meaning "to the very end", which he seems to have adopted from his faithful guardian, mentor and benefactor, his maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski.
Conrad looked with less optimism than Russell on the possibilities of scientific and philosophic knowledge. In a 1913 letter to acquaintances who had invited Conrad to join their society, he reiterated his belief that it was impossible to understand the essence of either reality or life: both science and art penetrate no further than the outer shapes.
Najder describes Conrad as "[a]n alienated émigré... haunted by a sense of the unreality of other people – a feeling natural to someone living outside the established structures of family, social milieu, and country".
Throughout almost his entire life Conrad was an outsider and felt himself to be one. An outsider in exile; an outsider during his visits to his family in... Poland; an outsider—because of his experiences and bereavement—in [Kraków] and Lwów; an outsider in Marseilles; an outsider, nationally and culturally, on British ships; an outsider as an English writer.
Conrad's sense of loneliness throughout his life in exile found memorable expression in the 1901 short story "Amy Foster".
A number of works in various genres and media have been based on, or inspired by, Conrad's writings, including: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, Polish: [ˈjuzɛf tɛˈɔdɔr ˈkɔnrat kɔʐɛˈɲɔfskʲi] ; 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language; though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable and amoral world.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Conrad was born on 3 December 1857 in Berdychiv (Polish: Berdyczów), Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire; the region had once been part of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. He was the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski—a writer, translator, political activist, and would-be revolutionary—and his wife Ewa Bobrowska. He was christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski after his maternal grandfather Józef, his paternal grandfather Teodor, and the heroes (both named \"Konrad\") of two poems by Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady and Konrad Wallenrod. His family called him \"Konrad\", rather than \"Józef\".",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Though the vast majority of the surrounding area's inhabitants were Ukrainians, and the great majority of Berdychiv's residents were Jewish, almost all the countryside was owned by the Polish szlachta (nobility), to which Conrad's family belonged as bearers of the Nałęcz coat-of-arms. Polish literature, particularly patriotic literature, was held in high esteem by the area's Polish population.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Poland had been divided among Prussia, Austria and Russia in 1795. The Korzeniowski family had played a significant role in Polish attempts to regain independence. Conrad's paternal grandfather Teodor had served under Prince Józef Poniatowski during Napoleon's Russian campaign and had formed his own cavalry squadron during the November 1830 Uprising of Poland-Lithuania against the Russian Empire. Conrad's fiercely patriotic father Apollo belonged to the \"Red\" political faction, whose goal was to re-establish the pre-partition boundaries of Poland and which also advocated land reform and the abolition of serfdom. Conrad's subsequent refusal to follow in Apollo's footsteps, and his choice of exile over resistance, were a source of lifelong guilt for Conrad.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Because of the father's attempts at farming and his political activism, the family moved repeatedly. In May 1861 they moved to Warsaw, where Apollo joined the resistance against the Russian Empire. He was arrested and imprisoned in Pavilion X of the Warsaw Citadel. Conrad would write: \"[I]n the courtyard of this Citadel—characteristically for our nation—my childhood memories begin.\" On 9 May 1862 Apollo and his family were exiled to Vologda, 500 kilometres (310 mi) north of Moscow and known for its bad climate. In January 1863 Apollo's sentence was commuted, and the family was sent to Chernihiv in northeast Ukraine, where conditions were much better. However, on 18 April 1865 Ewa died of tuberculosis.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Apollo did his best to teach Conrad at home. The boy's early reading introduced him to the two elements that later dominated his life: in Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, he encountered the sphere of activity to which he would devote his youth; Shakespeare brought him into the orbit of English literature. Most of all, though, he read Polish Romantic poetry. Half a century later he explained that",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "\"The Polishness in my works comes from Mickiewicz and Słowacki. My father read [Mickiewicz's] Pan Tadeusz aloud to me and made me read it aloud.... I used to prefer [Mickiewicz's] Konrad Wallenrod [and] Grażyna. Later I preferred Słowacki. You know why Słowacki?... [He is the soul of all Poland]\".",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In the autumn of 1866, young Conrad was sent for a year-long retreat for health reasons, to Kyiv and his mother's family estate at Novofastiv [de].",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In December 1867, Apollo took his son to the Austrian-held part of Poland, which for two years had been enjoying considerable internal freedom and a degree of self-government. After sojourns in Lwów and several smaller localities, on 20 February 1869 they moved to Kraków (until 1596 the capital of Poland), likewise in Austrian Poland. A few months later, on 23 May 1869, Apollo Korzeniowski died, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven. Like Conrad's mother, Apollo had been gravely ill with tuberculosis.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The young Conrad was placed in the care of Ewa's brother, Tadeusz Bobrowski. Conrad's poor health and his unsatisfactory schoolwork caused his uncle constant problems and no end of financial outlay. Conrad was not a good student; despite tutoring, he excelled only in geography. At that time he likely received private tutoring only, as there is no evidence he attended any school regularly. Since the boy's illness was clearly of nervous origin, the physicians supposed that fresh air and physical work would harden him; his uncle hoped that well-defined duties and the rigors of work would teach him discipline. Since he showed little inclination to study, it was essential that he learn a trade; his uncle thought he could work as a sailor-cum-businessman, who would combine maritime skills with commercial activities. In the autumn of 1871, thirteen-year-old Conrad announced his intention to become a sailor. He later recalled that as a child he had read (apparently in French translation) Leopold McClintock's book about his 1857–59 expeditions in the Fox, in search of Sir John Franklin's lost ships Erebus and Terror. Conrad also recalled having read books by the American James Fenimore Cooper and the English Captain Frederick Marryat. A playmate of his adolescence recalled that Conrad spun fantastic yarns, always set at sea, presented so realistically that listeners thought the action was happening before their eyes.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In August 1873 Bobrowski sent fifteen-year-old Conrad to Lwów to a cousin who ran a small boarding house for boys orphaned by the 1863 Uprising; group conversation there was in French. The owner's daughter recalled:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "He stayed with us ten months... Intellectually he was extremely advanced but [he] disliked school routine, which he found tiring and dull; he used to say... he... planned to become a great writer.... He disliked all restrictions. At home, at school, or in the living room he would sprawl unceremoniously. He... suffer[ed] from severe headaches and nervous attacks...",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Conrad had been at the establishment for just over a year when in September 1874, for uncertain reasons, his uncle removed him from school in Lwów and took him back to Kraków.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "On 13 October 1874 Bobrowski sent the sixteen-year-old to Marseilles, France, for Conrad's planned merchant-marine career on French merchant ships. His uncle provided him with a monthly stipend as well (set at 150 francs). Though Conrad had not completed secondary school, his accomplishments included fluency in French (with a correct accent), some knowledge of Latin, German and Greek; probably a good knowledge of history, some geography, and probably already an interest in physics. He was well read, particularly in Polish Romantic literature. He belonged to the second generation in his family that had had to earn a living outside the family estates. They were born and reared partly in the milieu of the working intelligentsia, a social class that was starting to play an important role in Central and Eastern Europe. He had absorbed enough of the history, culture and literature of his native land to be able eventually to develop a distinctive world view and make unique contributions to the literature of his adoptive Britain.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Tensions that originated in his childhood in Poland and increased in his adulthood abroad contributed to Conrad's greatest literary achievements. Zdzisław Najder, himself an emigrant from Poland, observes:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Living away from one's natural environment—family, friends, social group, language—even if it results from a conscious decision, usually gives rise to... internal tensions, because it tends to make people less sure of themselves, more vulnerable, less certain of their... position and... value... The Polish szlachta and... intelligentsia were social strata in which reputation... was felt... very important... for a feeling of self-worth. Men strove... to find confirmation of their... self-regard... in the eyes of others... Such a psychological heritage forms both a spur to ambition and a source of constant stress, especially if [one has been inculcated with] the idea of [one]'s public duty...",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Some critics have suggested that when Conrad left Poland, he wanted to break once and for all with his Polish past. In refutation of this, Najder quotes from Conrad's 14 August 1883 letter to family friend Stefan Buszczyński, written nine years after Conrad had left Poland:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "... I always remember what you said when I was leaving [Kraków]: \"Remember\"—you said—\"wherever you may sail, you are sailing towards Poland!\" That I have never forgotten, and never will forget!",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In Marseilles Conrad had an intense social life, often stretching his budget. A trace of these years can be found in the northern Corsica town of Luri, where there is a plaque to a Corsican merchant seaman, Dominique Cervoni, whom Conrad befriended. Cervoni became the inspiration for some of Conrad's characters, such as the title character of the 1904 novel Nostromo. Conrad visited Corsica with his wife in 1921, partly in search of connections with his long-dead friend and fellow merchant seaman.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In late 1877, Conrad's maritime career was interrupted by the refusal of the Russian consul to provide documents needed for him to continue his service. As a result, Conrad fell into debt and, in March 1878, he attempted suicide. He survived, and received further financial aid from his uncle, allowing him to resume his normal life. After nearly four years in France and on French ships, Conrad joined the British merchant marine, enlisting in April 1878 (he had most likely started learning English shortly before).",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "For the next fifteen years, he served under the Red Ensign. He worked on a variety of ships as crew member (steward, apprentice, able seaman) and then as third, second and first mate, until eventually achieving captain's rank. During the 19 years from the time that Conrad had left Kraków, in October 1874, until he signed off the Adowa, in January 1894, he had worked in ships, including long periods in port, for 10 years and almost 8 months. He had spent just over 8 years at sea—9 months of it as a passenger. His sole captaincy took place in 1888–89, when he commanded the barque Otago from Sydney to Mauritius.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "During a brief call in India in 1885–86, 28-year-old Conrad sent five letters to Joseph Spiridion, a Pole eight years his senior whom he had befriended at Cardiff in June 1885, just before sailing for Singapore in the clipper ship Tilkhurst. These letters are Conrad's first preserved texts in English. His English is generally correct but stiff to the point of artificiality; many fragments suggest that his thoughts ran along the lines of Polish syntax and phraseology.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "More importantly, the letters show a marked change in views from those implied in his earlier correspondence of 1881–83. He had abandoned \"hope for the future\" and the conceit of \"sailing [ever] toward Poland\", and his Panslavic ideas. He was left with a painful sense of the hopelessness of the Polish question and an acceptance of England as a possible refuge. While he often adjusted his statements to accord to some extent with the views of his addressees, the theme of hopelessness concerning the prospects for Polish independence often occurs authentically in his correspondence and works before 1914.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The year 1890 marked Conrad's first return to Poland, where he would visit his uncle and other relatives and acquaintances. This visit took place while he was waiting to proceed to the Congo Free State, having been hired by Albert Thys, deputy director of the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. Conrad's association with the Belgian company, on the Congo River, would inspire his novella, Heart of Darkness. During this 1890 period in the Congo, Conrad befriended Roger Casement, who was also working for Thys, operating a trading and transport station in Matadi. In 1903, as British Consul to Boma, Casement was commissioned to investigate abuses in the Congo, and later in Amazonian Peru, and was knighted in 1911 for his advocacy of human rights. Casement later became active in Irish Republicanism after leaving the British consular service.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Conrad left Africa at the end of December 1890, arriving in Brussels by late January of the following year. He rejoined the British merchant marines, as first mate, in November. When he left London on 25 October 1892 aboard the passenger clipper ship Torrens, one of the passengers was William Henry Jacques, a consumptive Cambridge University graduate who died less than a year later on 19 September 1893. According to Conrad's A Personal Record, Jacques was the first reader of the still-unfinished manuscript of Conrad's Almayer's Folly. Jacques encouraged Conrad to continue writing the novel.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Conrad completed his last long-distance voyage as a seaman on 26 July 1893 when the Torrens docked at London and \"J. Conrad Korzemowin\"—per the certificate of discharge—debarked.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "When the Torrens had left Adelaide on 13 March 1893, the passengers had included two young Englishmen returning from Australia and New Zealand: 25-year-old lawyer and future novelist John Galsworthy; and Edward Lancelot Sanderson, who was going to help his father run a boys' preparatory school at Elstree. They were probably the first Englishmen and non-sailors with whom Conrad struck up a friendship and he would remain in touch with both. In one of Galsworthy's first literary attempts, The Doldrums (1895–96), the protagonist—first mate Armand—is modelled after Conrad.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "At Cape Town, where the Torrens remained from 17 to 19 May, Galsworthy left the ship to look at the local mines. Sanderson continued his voyage and seems to have been the first to develop closer ties with Conrad. Later that year, Conrad would visit his relatives in Poland and Ukraine once again.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In the autumn of 1889, Conrad began writing his first novel, Almayer's Folly.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "[T]he son of a writer, praised by his [maternal] uncle [Tadeusz Bobrowski] for the beautiful style of his letters, the man who from the very first page showed a serious, professional approach to his work, presented his start on Almayer's Folly as a casual and non-binding incident... [Y]et he must have felt a pronounced need to write. Every page right from th[e] first one testifies that writing was not something he took up for amusement or to pass time. Just the contrary: it was a serious undertaking, supported by careful, diligent reading of the masters and aimed at shaping his own attitude to art and to reality.... [W]e do not know the sources of his artistic impulses and creative gifts.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Conrad's later letters to literary friends show the attention that he devoted to analysis of style, to individual words and expressions, to the emotional tone of phrases, to the atmosphere created by language. In this, Conrad in his own way followed the example of Gustave Flaubert, notorious for searching days on end for le mot juste—for the right word to render the \"essence of the matter.\" Najder opines:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "\"[W]riting in a foreign language admits a greater temerity in tackling personally sensitive problems, for it leaves uncommitted the most spontaneous, deeper reaches of the psyche, and allows a greater distance in treating matters we would hardly dare approach in the language of our childhood. As a rule it is easier both to swear and to analyze dispassionately in an acquired language.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1894, aged 36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health, partly due to unavailability of ships, and partly because he had become so fascinated with writing that he had decided on a literary career. Almayer's Folly, set on the east coast of Borneo, was published in 1895. Its appearance marked his first use of the pen name \"Joseph Conrad\"; \"Konrad\" was, of course, the third of his Polish given names, but his use of it—in the anglicised version, \"Conrad\"—may also have been an homage to the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz's patriotic narrative poem, Konrad Wallenrod.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Edward Garnett, a young publisher's reader and literary critic who would play one of the chief supporting roles in Conrad's literary career, had—like Unwin's first reader of Almayer's Folly, Wilfrid Hugh Chesson—been impressed by the manuscript, but Garnett had been \"uncertain whether the English was good enough for publication.\" Garnett had shown the novel to his wife, Constance Garnett, later a translator of Russian literature. She had thought Conrad's foreignness a positive merit.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "While Conrad had only limited personal acquaintance with the peoples of Maritime Southeast Asia, the region looms large in his early work. According to Najder, Conrad, the exile and wanderer, was aware of a difficulty that he confessed more than once: the lack of a common cultural background with his Anglophone readers meant he could not compete with English-language authors writing about the English-speaking world. At the same time, the choice of a non-English colonial setting freed him from an embarrassing division of loyalty: Almayer's Folly, and later \"An Outpost of Progress\" (1897, set in a Congo exploited by King Leopold II of Belgium) and Heart of Darkness (1899, likewise set in the Congo), contain bitter reflections on colonialism. The Malay states came theoretically under the suzerainty of the Dutch government; Conrad did not write about the area's British dependencies, which he never visited. He \"was apparently intrigued by... struggles aimed at preserving national independence. The prolific and destructive richness of tropical nature and the dreariness of human life within it accorded well with the pessimistic mood of his early works.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Almayer's Folly, together with its successor, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), laid the foundation for Conrad's reputation as a romantic teller of exotic tales—a misunderstanding of his purpose that was to frustrate him for the rest of his career.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Almost all of Conrad's writings were first published in newspapers and magazines: influential reviews like The Fortnightly Review and the North American Review; avant-garde publications like the Savoy, New Review, and The English Review; popular short-fiction magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Harper's Magazine; women's journals like the Pictorial Review and Romance; mass-circulation dailies like the Daily Mail and the New York Herald; and illustrated newspapers like The Illustrated London News and the Illustrated Buffalo Express. He also wrote for The Outlook, an imperialist weekly magazine, between 1898 and 1906.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Financial success long eluded Conrad, who often requested advances from magazine and book publishers, and loans from acquaintances such as John Galsworthy. Eventually a government grant (\"civil list pension\") of £100 per annum, awarded on 9 August 1910, somewhat relieved his financial worries, and in time collectors began purchasing his manuscripts. Though his talent was early on recognised by English intellectuals, popular success eluded him until the 1913 publication of Chance, which is often considered one of his weaker novels.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Conrad was a reserved man, wary of showing emotion. He scorned sentimentality; his manner of portraying emotion in his books was full of restraint, scepticism and irony. In the words of his uncle Bobrowski, as a young man Conrad was \"extremely sensitive, conceited, reserved, and in addition excitable. In short [...] all the defects of the Nałęcz family.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Conrad suffered throughout life from ill health, physical and mental. A newspaper review of a Conrad biography suggested that the book could have been subtitled Thirty Years of Debt, Gout, Depression and Angst. In 1891 he was hospitalised for several months, suffering from gout, neuralgic pains in his right arm and recurrent attacks of malaria. He also complained of swollen hands \"which made writing difficult\". Taking his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski's advice, he convalesced at a spa in Switzerland. Conrad had a phobia of dentistry, neglecting his teeth until they had to be extracted. In one letter he remarked that every novel he had written had cost him a tooth. Conrad's physical afflictions were, if anything, less vexatious than his mental ones. In his letters he often described symptoms of depression; \"the evidence\", writes Najder, \"is so strong that it is nearly impossible to doubt it.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In March 1878, at the end of his Marseilles period, 20-year-old Conrad attempted suicide, by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver. According to his uncle, who was summoned by a friend, Conrad had fallen into debt. Bobrowski described his subsequent \"study\" of his nephew in an extensive letter to Stefan Buszczyński, his own ideological opponent and a friend of Conrad's late father Apollo. To what extent the suicide attempt had been made in earnest likely will never be known, but it is suggestive of a situational depression.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In 1888 during a stop-over on Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, Conrad developed a couple of romantic interests. One of these would be described in his 1910 story \"A Smile of Fortune\", which contains autobiographical elements (e.g., one of the characters is the same Chief Mate Burns who appears in The Shadow Line). The narrator, a young captain, flirts ambiguously and surreptitiously with Alice Jacobus, daughter of a local merchant living in a house surrounded by a magnificent rose garden. Research has confirmed that in Port Louis at the time there was a 17-year-old Alice Shaw, whose father, a shipping agent, owned the only rose garden in town.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "More is known about Conrad's other, more open flirtation. An old friend, Captain Gabriel Renouf of the French merchant marine, introduced him to the family of his brother-in-law. Renouf's eldest sister was the wife of Louis Edward Schmidt, a senior official in the colony; with them lived two other sisters and two brothers. Though the island had been taken over in 1810 by Britain, many of the inhabitants were descendants of the original French colonists, and Conrad's excellent French and perfect manners opened all local salons to him. He became a frequent guest at the Schmidts', where he often met the Misses Renouf. A couple of days before leaving Port Louis, Conrad asked one of the Renouf brothers for the hand of his 26-year-old sister Eugenie. She was already, however, engaged to marry her pharmacist cousin. After the rebuff, Conrad did not pay a farewell visit but sent a polite letter to Gabriel Renouf, saying he would never return to Mauritius and adding that on the day of the wedding his thoughts would be with them.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "On 24 March 1896 Conrad married an Englishwoman, Jessie George. The couple had two sons, Borys and John. The elder, Borys, proved a disappointment in scholarship and integrity. Jessie was an unsophisticated, working-class girl, sixteen years younger than Conrad. To his friends, she was an inexplicable choice of wife, and the subject of some rather disparaging and unkind remarks. (See Lady Ottoline Morrell's opinion of Jessie in Impressions.) However, according to other biographers such as Frederick Karl, Jessie provided what Conrad needed, namely a \"straightforward, devoted, quite competent\" companion. Similarly, Jones remarks that, despite whatever difficulties the marriage endured, \"there can be no doubt that the relationship sustained Conrad's career as a writer\", which might have been much less successful without her.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The couple rented a long series of successive homes, mostly in the English countryside. Conrad, who suffered frequent depressions, made great efforts to change his mood; the most important step was to move into another house. His frequent changes of home were usually signs of a search for psychological regeneration. Between 1910 and 1919 Conrad's home was Capel House in Orlestone, Kent, which was rented to him by Lord and Lady Oliver. It was here that he wrote The Rescue, Victory, and The Arrow of Gold.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Except for several vacations in France and Italy, a 1914 vacation in his native Poland, and a 1923 visit to the United States, Conrad lived the rest of his life in England.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The 1914 vacation with his wife and sons in Poland, at the urging of Józef Retinger, coincided with the outbreak of World War I. On 28 July 1914, the day war broke out between Austro-Hungary and Serbia, Conrad and the Retingers arrived in Kraków (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), where Conrad visited childhood haunts. As the city lay only a few miles from the Russian border, there was a risk of being stranded in a battle zone. With wife Jessie and younger son John ill, Conrad decided to take refuge in the mountain resort town of Zakopane. They left Kraków on 2 August. A few days after arrival in Zakopane, they moved to the Konstantynówka pension operated by Conrad's cousin Aniela Zagórska; it had been frequented by celebrities including the statesman Józef Piłsudski and Conrad's acquaintance, the young concert pianist Artur Rubinstein.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Zagórska introduced Conrad to Polish writers, intellectuals, and artists who had also taken refuge in Zakopane, including novelist Stefan Żeromski and Tadeusz Nalepiński, a writer friend of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. Conrad aroused interest among the Poles as a famous writer and an exotic compatriot from abroad. He charmed new acquaintances, especially women. However, Marie Curie's physician sister, Bronisława Dłuska, wife of fellow physician and eminent socialist activist Kazimierz Dłuski, openly berated Conrad for having used his great talent for purposes other than bettering the future of his native land.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "But thirty-two-year-old Aniela Zagórska (daughter of the pension keeper), Conrad's niece who would translate his works into Polish in 1923–39, idolised him, kept him company, and provided him with books. He particularly delighted in the stories and novels of the ten-years-older, recently deceased Bolesław Prus (who also had visited Zakopane), read everything by his fellow victim of Poland's 1863 Uprising—\"my beloved Prus\"—that he could get his hands on, and pronounced him \"better than Dickens\"—a favourite English novelist of Conrad's.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Conrad, who was noted by his Polish acquaintances to still be fluent in his native tongue, participated in their impassioned political discussions. He declared presciently, as Józef Piłsudski had earlier in 1914 in Paris, that in the war, for Poland to regain independence, Russia must be beaten by the Central Powers (the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires), and the Central Powers must in turn be beaten by France and Britain.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "After many travails and vicissitudes, at the beginning of November 1914 Conrad managed to bring his family back to England. On his return, he was determined to work on swaying British opinion in favour of restoring Poland's sovereignty.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Jessie Conrad would later write in her memoirs: \"I understood my husband so much better after those months in Poland. So many characteristics that had been strange and unfathomable to me before, took, as it were, their right proportions. I understood that his temperament was that of his countrymen.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Biographer Zdzisław Najder wrote:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Conrad was passionately concerned with politics. [This] is confirmed by several of his works, starting with Almayer's Folly. [...] Nostromo revealed his concern with these matters more fully; it was, of course, a concern quite natural for someone from a country [Poland] where politics was a matter not only of everyday existence but also of life and death. Moreover, Conrad himself came from a social class that claimed exclusive responsibility for state affairs, and from a very politically active family. Norman Douglas sums it up: \"Conrad was first and foremost a Pole and like many Poles a politician and moralist malgré lui [French: \"in spite of himself\"]. These are his fundamentals.\" [What made] Conrad see political problems in terms of a continuous struggle between law and violence, anarchy and order, freedom and autocracy, material interests and the noble idealism of individuals [...] was Conrad's historical awareness. His Polish experience endowed him with the perception, exceptional in the Western European literature of his time, of how winding and constantly changing were the front lines in these struggles.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The most extensive and ambitious political statement that Conrad ever made was his 1905 essay, \"Autocracy and War\", whose starting point was the Russo-Japanese War (he finished the article a month before the Battle of Tsushima Strait). The essay begins with a statement about Russia's incurable weakness and ends with warnings against Prussia, the dangerous aggressor in a future European war. For Russia he predicted a violent outburst in the near future, but Russia's lack of democratic traditions and the backwardness of her masses made it impossible for the revolution to have a salutary effect. Conrad regarded the formation of a representative government in Russia as unfeasible and foresaw a transition from autocracy to dictatorship. He saw western Europe as torn by antagonisms engendered by economic rivalry and commercial selfishness. In vain might a Russian revolution seek advice or help from a materialistic and egoistic western Europe that armed itself in preparation for wars far more brutal than those of the past.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Conrad's distrust of democracy sprang from his doubts whether the propagation of democracy as an aim in itself could solve any problems. He thought that, in view of the weakness of human nature and of the \"criminal\" character of society, democracy offered boundless opportunities for demagogues and charlatans. Conrad kept his distance from partisan politics, and never voted in British national elections.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "He accused social democrats of his time of acting to weaken \"the national sentiment, the preservation of which [was his] concern\"—of attempting to dissolve national identities in an impersonal melting-pot. \"I look at the future from the depth of a very black past and I find that nothing is left for me except fidelity to a cause lost, to an idea without future.\" It was Conrad's hopeless fidelity to the memory of Poland that prevented him from believing in the idea of \"international fraternity\", which he considered, under the circumstances, just a verbal exercise. He resented some socialists' talk of freedom and world brotherhood while keeping silent about his own partitioned and oppressed Poland.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Before that, in the early 1880s, letters to Conrad from his uncle Tadeusz show Conrad apparently having hoped for an improvement in Poland's situation not through a liberation movement but by establishing an alliance with neighbouring Slavic nations. This had been accompanied by a faith in the Panslavic ideology—\"surprising\", Najder writes, \"in a man who was later to emphasize his hostility towards Russia, a conviction that... Poland's [superior] civilization and... historic... traditions would [let] her play a leading role... in the Panslavic community, [and his] doubts about Poland's chances of becoming a fully sovereign nation-state.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Conrad's alienation from partisan politics went together with an abiding sense of the thinking man's burden imposed by his personality, as described in an 1894 letter by Conrad to a relative-by-marriage and fellow author, Marguerite Poradowska (née Gachet, and cousin of Vincent van Gogh's physician, Paul Gachet) of Brussels:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "We must drag the chain and ball of our personality to the end. This is the price one pays for the infernal and divine privilege of thought; so in this life it is only the chosen who are convicts—a glorious band which understands and groans but which treads the earth amidst a multitude of phantoms with maniacal gestures and idiotic grimaces. Which would you rather be: idiot or convict?",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Conrad wrote H. G. Wells that the latter's 1901 book, Anticipations, an ambitious attempt to predict major social trends, \"seems to presuppose... a sort of select circle to which you address yourself, leaving the rest of the world outside the pale. [In addition,] you do not take sufficient account of human imbecility which is cunning and perfidious.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In a 23 October 1922 letter to mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell, in response to the latter's book, The Problem of China, which advocated socialist reforms and an oligarchy of sages who would reshape Chinese society, Conrad explained his own distrust of political panaceas:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "I have never [found] in any man's book or... talk anything... to stand up... against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world.... The only remedy for Chinamen and for the rest of us is [a] change of hearts, but looking at the history of the last 2000 years there is not much reason to expect [it], even if man has taken to flying—a great \"uplift\" no doubt but no great change....",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Leo Robson writes:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Conrad... adopted a broader ironic stance—a sort of blanket incredulity, defined by a character in Under Western Eyes as the negation of all faith, devotion, and action. Through control of tone and narrative detail... Conrad exposes what he considered to be the naïveté of movements like anarchism and socialism, and the self-serving logic of such historical but \"naturalized\" phenomena as capitalism (piracy with good PR), rationalism (an elaborate defense against our innate irrationality), and imperialism (a grandiose front for old-school rape and pillage). To be ironic is to be awake—and alert to the prevailing \"somnolence.\" In Nostromo... the journalist Martin Decoud... ridicul[es] the idea that people \"believe themselves to be influencing the fate of the universe.\" (H. G. Wells recalled Conrad's astonishment that \"I could take social and political issues seriously.\")",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "But, writes Robson, Conrad is no moral nihilist:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "If irony exists to suggest that there's more to things than meets the eye, Conrad further insists that, when we pay close enough attention, the \"more\" can be endless. He doesn't reject what [his character] Marlow [introduced in Youth] calls \"the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation\" in favor of nothing; he rejects them in favor of \"something\", \"some saving truth\", \"some exorcism against the ghost of doubt\"—an intimation of a deeper order, one not easily reduced to words. Authentic, self-aware emotion—feeling that doesn't call itself \"theory\" or \"wisdom\"—becomes a kind of standard-bearer, with \"impressions\" or \"sensations\" the nearest you get to solid proof.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In an August 1901 letter to the editor of The New York Times Saturday Book Review, Conrad wrote: \"Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "On 3 August 1924, Conrad died at his house, Oswalds, in Bishopsbourne, Kent, England, probably of a heart attack. He was interred at Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, under a misspelled version of his original Polish name, as \"Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski\". Inscribed on his gravestone are the lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene which he had chosen as the epigraph to his last complete novel, The Rover:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, doth greatly please",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Conrad's modest funeral took place amid great crowds. His old friend Edward Garnett recalled bitterly:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "To those who attended Conrad's funeral in Canterbury during the Cricket Festival of 1924, and drove through the crowded streets festooned with flags, there was something symbolical in England's hospitality and in the crowd's ignorance of even the existence of this great writer. A few old friends, acquaintances and pressmen stood by his grave.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Another old friend of Conrad's, Cunninghame Graham, wrote Garnett: \"Aubry was saying to me... that had Anatole France died, all Paris would have been at his funeral.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Conrad's wife Jessie died twelve years later, on 6 December 1936, and was interred with him.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In 1996 his grave was designated a Grade II listed structure.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Despite the opinions even of some who knew Conrad personally, such as fellow-novelist Henry James, Conrad—even when only writing elegantly crafted letters to his uncle and acquaintances—was always at heart a writer who sailed, rather than a sailor who wrote. He used his sailing experiences as a backdrop for many of his works, but he also produced works of similar world view, without the nautical motifs. The failure of many critics to appreciate this caused him much frustration.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "He wrote oftener about life at sea and in exotic parts than about life on British land because—unlike, for example, his friend John Galsworthy, author of The Forsyte Saga—he knew little about everyday domestic relations in Britain. When Conrad's The Mirror of the Sea was published in 1906 to critical acclaim, he wrote to his French translator: \"The critics have been vigorously swinging the censer to me.... Behind the concert of flattery, I can hear something like a whisper: 'Keep to the open sea! Don't land!' They want to banish me to the middle of the ocean.\" Writing to his friend Richard Curle, Conrad remarked that \"the public mind fastens on externals\" such as his \"sea life\", oblivious to how authors transform their material \"from particular to general, and appeal to universal emotions by the temperamental handling of personal experience\".",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Nevertheless, Conrad found much sympathetic readership, especially in the United States. H.L. Mencken was one of the earliest and most influential American readers to recognise how Conrad conjured up \"the general out of the particular\". F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing to Mencken, complained about having been omitted from a list of Conrad imitators. Since Fitzgerald, dozens of other American writers have acknowledged their debts to Conrad, including William Faulkner, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Thomas Pynchon.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "An October 1923 visitor to Oswalds, Conrad's home at the time—Cyril Clemens, a cousin of Mark Twain—quoted Conrad as saying: \"In everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's attention.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Conrad the artist famously aspired, in the words of his preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), \"by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel... before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Writing in what to the visual arts was the age of Impressionism, and what to music was the age of impressionist music, Conrad showed himself in many of his works a prose poet of the highest order: for instance, in the evocative Patna and courtroom scenes of Lord Jim; in the scenes of the \"melancholy-mad elephant\" and the \"French gunboat firing into a continent\", in Heart of Darkness; in the doubled protagonists of \"The Secret Sharer\"; and in the verbal and conceptual resonances of Nostromo and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Conrad used his own memories as literary material so often that readers are tempted to treat his life and work as a single whole. His \"view of the world\", or elements of it, is often described by citing at once both his private and public statements, passages from his letters, and citations from his books. Najder warns that this approach produces an incoherent and misleading picture. \"An... uncritical linking of the two spheres, literature and private life, distorts each. Conrad used his own experiences as raw material, but the finished product should not be confused with the experiences themselves.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Many of Conrad's characters were inspired by actual persons he had met, including, in his first novel, Almayer's Folly (completed 1894), William Charles Olmeijer, the spelling of whose surname Conrad probably altered to \"Almayer\" inadvertently. The historic trader Olmeijer, whom Conrad encountered on his four short visits to Berau in Borneo, subsequently haunted Conrad's imagination. Conrad often borrowed the authentic names of actual individuals, e.g., Captain McWhirr (Typhoon), Captain Beard and Mr. Mahon (\"Youth\"), Captain Lingard (Almayer's Folly and elsewhere), and Captain Ellis (The Shadow Line). \"Conrad\", writes J. I. M. Stewart, \"appears to have attached some mysterious significance to such links with actuality.\" Equally curious is \"a great deal of namelessness in Conrad, requiring some minor virtuosity to maintain.\" Thus we never learn the surname of the protagonist of Lord Jim. Conrad also preserves, in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', the authentic name of the ship, the Narcissus, in which he sailed in 1884.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Apart from Conrad's own experiences, a number of episodes in his fiction were suggested by past or contemporary publicly known events or literary works. The first half of the 1900 novel Lord Jim (the Patna episode) was inspired by the real-life 1880 story of the SS Jeddah; the second part, to some extent by the life of James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak. The 1901 short story \"Amy Foster\" was inspired partly by an anecdote in Ford Madox Ford's The Cinque Ports (1900), wherein a shipwrecked sailor from a German merchant ship, unable to communicate in English, and driven away by the local country people, finally found shelter in a pigsty.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "In Nostromo (completed 1904), the theft of a massive consignment of silver was suggested to Conrad by a story he had heard in the Gulf of Mexico and later read about in a \"volume picked up outside a second-hand bookshop.\" The novel's political strand, according to Maya Jasanoff, is related to the creation of the Panama Canal. \"In January 1903\", she writes, \"just as Conrad started writing Nostromo, the US and Colombian secretaries of state signed a treaty granting the United States a one-hundred-year renewable lease on a six-mile strip flanking the canal... While the [news]papers murmured about revolution in Colombia, Conrad opened a fresh section of Nostromo with hints of dissent in Costaguana\", his fictional South American country. He plotted a revolution in the Costaguanan fictional port of Sulaco that mirrored the real-life secessionist movement brewing in Panama. When Conrad finished the novel on 1 September 1904, writes Jasanoff, \"he left Sulaco in the condition of Panama. As Panama had gotten its independence instantly recognized by the United States and its economy bolstered by American investment in the canal, so Sulaco had its independence instantly recognized by the United States, and its economy underwritten by investment in the [fictional] San Tomé [silver] mine.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The Secret Agent (completed 1906) was inspired by the French anarchist Martial Bourdin's 1894 death while apparently attempting to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. Conrad's story \"The Secret Sharer\" (completed 1909) was inspired by an 1880 incident when Sydney Smith, first mate of the Cutty Sark, had killed a seaman and fled from justice, aided by the ship's captain. The plot of Under Western Eyes (completed 1910) is kicked off by the assassination of a brutal Russian government minister, modelled after the real-life 1904 assassination of Russian Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve. The near-novella \"Freya of the Seven Isles\" (completed in March 1911) was inspired by a story told to Conrad by a Malaya old hand and fan of Conrad's, Captain Carlos M. Marris.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "For the natural surroundings of the high seas, the Malay Archipelago and South America, which Conrad described so vividly, he could rely on his own observations. What his brief landfalls could not provide was a thorough understanding of exotic cultures. For this he resorted, like other writers, to literary sources. When writing his Malayan stories, he consulted Alfred Russel Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (1869), James Brooke's journals, and books with titles like Perak and the Malays, My Journal in Malayan Waters, and Life in the Forests of the Far East. When he set about writing his novel Nostromo, set in the fictional South American country of Costaguana, he turned to The War between Peru and Chile; Edward Eastwick, Venezuela: or, Sketches of Life in a South American Republic (1868); and George Frederick Masterman, Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay (1869). As a result of relying on literary sources, in Lord Jim, as J. I. M. Stewart writes, Conrad's \"need to work to some extent from second-hand\" led to \"a certain thinness in Jim's relations with the... peoples... of Patusan...\" This prompted Conrad at some points to alter the nature of Charles Marlow's narrative to \"distanc[e] an uncertain command of the detail of Tuan Jim's empire.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "In keeping with his scepticism and melancholy, Conrad almost invariably gives lethal fates to the characters in his principal novels and stories. Almayer (Almayer's Folly, 1894), abandoned by his beloved daughter, takes to opium, and dies. Peter Willems (An Outcast of the Islands, 1895) is killed by his jealous lover Aïssa. The ineffectual \"Nigger\", James Wait (The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', 1897), dies aboard ship and is buried at sea. Mr. Kurtz (Heart of Darkness, 1899) expires, uttering the words, \"The horror! The horror!\" Tuan Jim (Lord Jim, 1900), having inadvertently precipitated a massacre of his adoptive community, deliberately walks to his death at the hands of the community's leader. In Conrad's 1901 short story, \"Amy Foster\", a Pole transplanted to England, Yanko Goorall (an English transliteration of the Polish Janko Góral, \"Johnny Highlander\"), falls ill and, suffering from a fever, raves in his native language, frightening his wife Amy, who flees; next morning Yanko dies of heart failure, and it transpires that he had simply been asking in Polish for water. Captain Whalley (The End of the Tether, 1902), betrayed by failing eyesight and an unscrupulous partner, drowns himself. Gian' Battista Fidanza, the eponymous respected Italian-immigrant Nostromo (Italian: \"Our Man\") of the novel Nostromo (1904), illicitly obtains a treasure of silver mined in the South American country of \"Costaguana\" and is shot dead due to mistaken identity. Mr. Verloc, The Secret Agent (1906) of divided loyalties, attempts a bombing, to be blamed on terrorists, that accidentally kills his mentally defective brother-in-law Stevie, and Verloc himself is killed by his distraught wife, who drowns herself by jumping overboard from a channel steamer. In Chance (1913), Roderick Anthony, a sailing-ship captain, and benefactor and husband of Flora de Barral, becomes the target of a poisoning attempt by her jealous disgraced financier father who, when detected, swallows the poison himself and dies (some years later, Captain Anthony drowns at sea). In Victory (1915), Lena is shot dead by Jones, who had meant to kill his accomplice Ricardo and later succeeds in doing so, then himself perishes along with another accomplice, after which Lena's protector Axel Heyst sets fire to his bungalow and dies beside Lena's body.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "When a principal character of Conrad's does escape with his life, he sometimes does not fare much better. In Under Western Eyes (1911), Razumov betrays a fellow University of St. Petersburg student, the revolutionist Victor Haldin, who has assassinated a savagely repressive Russian government minister. Haldin is tortured and hanged by the authorities. Later Razumov, sent as a government spy to Geneva, a centre of anti-tsarist intrigue, meets the mother and sister of Haldin, who share Haldin's liberal convictions. Razumov falls in love with the sister and confesses his betrayal of her brother; later, he makes the same avowal to assembled revolutionists, and their professional executioner bursts his eardrums, making him deaf for life. Razumov staggers away, is knocked down by a streetcar, and finally returns as a cripple to Russia.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Conrad was keenly conscious of tragedy in the world and in his works. In 1898, at the start of his writing career, he had written to his Scottish writer-politician friend Cunninghame Graham: \"What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. [A]s soon as you know of your slavery the pain, the anger, the strife—the tragedy begins.\" But in 1922, near the end of his life and career, when another Scottish friend, Richard Curle, sent Conrad proofs of two articles he had written about Conrad, the latter objected to being characterised as a gloomy and tragic writer. \"That reputation... has deprived me of innumerable readers... I absolutely object to being called a tragedian.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Conrad claimed that he \"never kept a diary and never owned a notebook.\" John Galsworthy, who knew him well, described this as \"a statement which surprised no one who knew the resources of his memory and the brooding nature of his creative spirit.\" Nevertheless, after Conrad's death, Richard Curle published a heavily modified version of Conrad's diaries describing his experiences in the Congo; in 1978 a more complete version was published as The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces. The first accurate transcription was published in Robert Hampson's Penguin edition of Heart of Darkness in 1995; Hampson's transcription and annotations were reprinted in the Penguin edition of 2007.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Unlike many authors who make it a point not to discuss work in progress, Conrad often did discuss his current work and even showed it to select friends and fellow authors, such as Edward Garnett, and sometimes modified it in the light of their critiques and suggestions.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Edward Said was struck by the sheer quantity of Conrad's correspondence with friends and fellow writers; by 1966, it \"amount[ed] to eight published volumes\". Said comments: \"[I]t seemed to me that if Conrad wrote of himself, of the problem of self-definition, with such sustained urgency, some of what he wrote must have had meaning for his fiction. [I]t [was] difficult to believe that a man would be so uneconomical as to pour himself out in letter after letter and then not use and reformulate his insights and discoveries in his fiction.\" Said found especially close parallels between Conrad's letters and his shorter fiction. \"Conrad... believed... that artistic distinction was more tellingly demonstrated in a shorter rather than a longer work.... He believed that his [own] life was like a series of short episodes... because he was himself so many different people...: he was a Pole and an Englishman, a sailor and a writer.\" Another scholar, Najder, writes:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Throughout almost his entire life Conrad was an outsider and felt himself to be one. An outsider in exile; an outsider during his visits to his family in the Ukraine; an outsider—because of his experiences and bereavement—in [Kraków] and Lwów; an outsider in Marseilles; an outsider, nationally and culturally, on British ships; an outsider as an English writer.... Conrad called himself (to Graham) a \"bloody foreigner.\" At the same time... [h]e regarded \"the national spirit\" as the only truly permanent and reliable element of communal life.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Conrad borrowed from other, Polish- and French-language authors, to an extent sometimes skirting plagiarism. When the Polish translation of his 1915 novel Victory appeared in 1931, readers noted striking similarities to Stefan Żeromski's kitschy novel, The History of a Sin (Dzieje grzechu, 1908), including their endings. Comparative-literature scholar Yves Hervouet has demonstrated in the text of Victory a whole mosaic of influences, borrowings, similarities and allusions. He further lists hundreds of concrete borrowings from other, mostly French authors in nearly all of Conrad's works, from Almayer's Folly (1895) to his unfinished Suspense. Conrad seems to have used eminent writers' texts as raw material of the same kind as the content of his own memory. Materials borrowed from other authors often functioned as allusions. Moreover, he had a phenomenal memory for texts and remembered details, \"but [writes Najder] it was not a memory strictly categorized according to sources, marshalled into homogeneous entities; it was, rather, an enormous receptacle of images and pieces from which he would draw.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Continues Najder: \"[H]e can never be accused of outright plagiarism. Even when lifting sentences and scenes, Conrad changed their character, inserted them within novel structures. He did not imitate, but (as Hervouet says) 'continued' his masters. He was right in saying: 'I don't resemble anybody.' Ian Watt put it succinctly: 'In a sense, Conrad is the least derivative of writers; he wrote very little that could possibly be mistaken for the work of anyone else.' Conrad's acquaintance George Bernard Shaw says it well: \"[A] man can no more be completely original [...] than a tree can grow out of air.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Conrad, like other artists, faced constraints arising from the need to propitiate his audience and confirm their own favourable self-regard. This may account for his describing the admirable crew of the Judea in his 1898 story \"Youth\" as \"Liverpool hard cases\", whereas the crew of the Judea's actual 1882 prototype, the Palestine, had included not a single Liverpudlian, and half the crew had been non-Britons; and for Conrad's transforming the real-life 1880 criminally negligent British captain J. L. Clark, of the SS Jeddah, in his 1900 novel Lord Jim, into the captain of the fictitious Patna—\"a sort of renegade New South Wales German\" so monstrous in physical appearance as to suggest \"a trained baby elephant\". Similarly, in his letters Conrad—during most of his literary career, struggling for sheer financial survival—often adjusted his views to the predilections of his correspondents. Historians have also noted that Conrad's works which were set in European colonies and intended to critique the effects of colonialism were set in Dutch and Belgian colonies, instead of the British Empire.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "The singularity of the universe depicted in Conrad's novels, especially compared to those of near-contemporaries like his friend and frequent benefactor John Galsworthy, is such as to open him to criticism similar to that later applied to Graham Greene. But where \"Greeneland\" has been characterised as a recurring and recognisable atmosphere independent of setting, Conrad is at pains to create a sense of place, be it aboard ship or in a remote village; often he chose to have his characters play out their destinies in isolated or confined circumstances. In the view of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, it was not until the first volumes of Anthony Powell's sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, were published in the 1950s, that an English novelist achieved the same command of atmosphere and precision of language with consistency, a view supported by later critics like A. N. Wilson; Powell acknowledged his debt to Conrad. Leo Gurko, too, remarks, as \"one of Conrad's special qualities, his abnormal awareness of place, an awareness magnified to almost a new dimension in art, an ecological dimension defining the relationship between earth and man.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "T. E. Lawrence, one of many writers whom Conrad befriended, offered some perceptive observations about Conrad's writing:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "He's absolutely the most haunting thing in prose that ever was: I wish I knew how every paragraph he writes (...they are all paragraphs: he seldom writes a single sentence...) goes on sounding in waves, like the note of a tenor bell, after it stops. It's not built in the rhythm of ordinary prose, but on something existing only in his head, and as he can never say what it is he wants to say, all his things end in a kind of hunger, a suggestion of something he can't say or do or think. So his books always look bigger than they are. He's as much a giant of the subjective as Kipling is of the objective. Do they hate one another?",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "The Irish novelist-poet-critic Colm Tóibín captures something similar:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Joseph Conrad's heroes were often alone, and close to hostility and danger. Sometimes, when Conrad's imagination was at its most fertile and his command of English at its most precise, the danger came darkly from within the self. At other times, however, it came from what could not be named. Conrad sought then to evoke rather than delineate, using something close to the language of prayer. While his imagination was content at times with the tiny, vivid, perfectly observed detail, it was also nourished by the need to suggest and symbolize. Like a poet, he often left the space in between strangely, alluringly vacant.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "His own vague terms—words like \"ineffable\", \"infinite\", \"mysterious\", \"unknowable\"—were as close as he could come to a sense of our fate in the world or the essence of the universe, a sense that reached beyond the time he described and beyond his characters' circumstances. This idea of \"beyond\" satisfied something in his imagination. He worked as though between the intricate systems of a ship and the vague horizon of a vast sea.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "This irreconcilable distance between what was precise and what was shimmering made him much more than a novelist of adventure, a chronicler of the issues that haunted his time, or a writer who dramatized moral questions. This left him open to interpretation—and indeed to attack [by critics such as the novelists V.S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe].",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "In a letter of 14 December 1897 to his Scottish friend, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, Conrad wrote that science tells us, \"Understand that thou art nothing, less than a shadow, more insignificant than a drop of water in the ocean, more fleeting than the illusion of a dream.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "In a letter of 20 December 1897 to Cunninghame Graham, Conrad metaphorically described the universe as a huge machine:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold!—it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider—but it goes on knitting. You come and say: \"this is all right; it's only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this—for instance—celestial oil and the machine shall embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold.\" Will it? Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident—and it has happened. You can't interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can't even smash it. In virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that made it spring into existence it is what it is—and it is indestructible! It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions—and nothing matters.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Conrad wrote Cunninghame Graham on 31 January 1898:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow....",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "In this world—as I have known it—we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt....",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that... is always but a vain and fleeting appearance....",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains—but a clod of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Leo Robson suggests that",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "What [Conrad] really learned as a sailor was not something empirical—an assembly of \"places and events\"—but the vindication of a perspective he had developed in childhood, an impartial, unillusioned view of the world as a place of mystery and contingency, horror and splendor, where, as he put it in a letter to the London Times, the only indisputable truth is \"our ignorance.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "According to Robson,",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "[Conrad's] treatment of knowledge as contingent and provisional commands a range of comparisons, from Rashomon to [the views of philosopher] Richard Rorty; reference points for Conrad's fragmentary method [of presenting information about characters and events] include Picasso and T.S. Eliot—who took the epigraph of \"The Hollow Men\" from Heart of Darkness.... Even Henry James's late period, that other harbinger of the modernist novel, had not yet begun when Conrad invented Marlow, and James's earlier experiments in perspective (The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew) don't go nearly as far as Lord Jim.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Conrad spoke his native Polish and the French language fluently from childhood and only acquired English in his twenties. He would probably have spoken some Ukrainian as a child; he certainly had to have some knowledge of German and Russian. His son Borys records that, though Conrad had insisted that he spoke only a few words of German, when they reached the Austrian frontier in the family's attempt to leave Poland in 1914, Conrad spoke German \"at considerable length and extreme fluency\". Russia, Prussia, and Austria had divided up Poland among them, and he was officially a Russian subject until his naturalization as a British subject. As a result, up to this point, his official documents were in Russian. His knowledge of Russian was good enough that his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski wrote him (22 May 1893) advising that, when Conrad came to visit, he should \"telegraph for horses, but in Russian, for Oratów doesn't receive or accept messages in an 'alien' language.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Conrad chose, however, to write his fiction in English. He says in his preface to A Personal Record that writing in English was for him \"natural\", and that the idea of his having made a deliberate choice between English and French, as some had suggested, was in error. He explained that, though he had been familiar with French from childhood, \"I would have been afraid to attempt expression in a language so perfectly 'crystallized'.\" In 1915, as Jo Davidson sculpted his bust, Conrad answered his question: \"Ah… to write French you have to know it. English is so plastic—if you haven't got a word you need you can make it, but to write French you have to be an artist like Anatole France.\" These statements, as so often in Conrad's \"autobiographical\" writings, are subtly disingenuous. In 1897 Conrad was visited by a fellow Pole, the philosopher Wincenty Lutosławski, who asked Conrad, \"Why don't you write in Polish?\" Lutosławski recalled Conrad explaining: \"I value our beautiful Polish literature too much to bring into it my clumsy efforts. But for the English my gifts are sufficient and secure my daily bread.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Conrad wrote in A Personal Record that English was \"the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions—of my very dreams!\" In 1878 Conrad's four-year experience in the French merchant marine had been cut short when the French discovered he did not have a permit from the Imperial Russian consul to sail with the French. This, and some typically disastrous Conradian investments, had left him destitute and had precipitated a suicide attempt. With the concurrence of his mentor-uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, who had been summoned to Marseilles, Conrad decided to seek employment with the British merchant marine, which did not require Russia's permission. Thus began Conrad's sixteen years' seafarer's acquaintance with the British and with the English language.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "Had Conrad remained in the Francophone sphere or had he returned to Poland, the son of the Polish poet, playwright, and translator Apollo Korzeniowski—from childhood exposed to Polish and foreign literature, and ambitious to himself become a writer—he might have ended up writing in French or Polish instead of English. Certainly his Uncle Tadeusz thought Conrad might write in Polish; in an 1881 letter he advised his 23-year-old nephew:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "As, thank God, you do not forget your Polish... and your writing is not bad, I repeat what I have... written and said before—you would do well to write... for Wędrowiec [The Wanderer] in Warsaw. We have few travelers, and even fewer genuine correspondents: the words of an eyewitness would be of great interest and in time would bring you... money. It would be an exercise in your native tongue—that thread which binds you to your country and countrymen—and finally a tribute to the memory of your father who always wanted to and did serve his country by his pen.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "In the opinion of some biographers, Conrad's third language, English, remained under the influence of his first two languages—Polish and French. This makes his English seem unusual. Najder writes that:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "[H]e was a man of three cultures: Polish, French, and English. Brought up in a Polish family and cultural environment... he learned French as a child, and at the age of less than seventeen went to France, to serve... four years in the French merchant marine. At school he must have learned German, but French remained the language he spoke with greatest fluency (and no foreign accent) until the end of his life. He was well versed in French history and literature, and French novelists were his artistic models. But he wrote all his books in English—the tongue he started to learn at the age of twenty. He was thus an English writer who grew up in other linguistic and cultural environments. His work can be seen as located in the borderland of auto-translation.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "Inevitably for a trilingual Polish–French–English-speaker, Conrad's writings occasionally show linguistic spillover: \"Franglais\" or \"Poglish\"—the inadvertent use of French or Polish vocabulary, grammar, or syntax in his English writings. In one instance, Najder uses \"several slips in vocabulary, typical for Conrad (Gallicisms) and grammar (usually Polonisms)\" as part of internal evidence against Conrad's sometime literary collaborator Ford Madox Ford's claim to have written a certain instalment of Conrad's novel Nostromo, for publication in T. P.'s Weekly, on behalf of an ill Conrad.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "The impracticality of working with a language which has long ceased to be one's principal language of daily use is illustrated by Conrad's 1921 attempt at translating into English the Polish physicist, columnist, story-writer, and comedy-writer Bruno Winawer's short play, The Book of Job. Najder writes:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "[T]he [play's] language is easy, colloquial, slightly individualized. Particularly Herup and a snobbish Jew, \"Bolo\" Bendziner, have their characteristic ways of speaking. Conrad, who had had little contact with everyday spoken Polish, simplified the dialogue, left out Herup's scientific expressions, and missed many amusing nuances. The action in the original is quite clearly set in contemporary Warsaw, somewhere between elegant society and the demimonde; this specific cultural setting is lost in the translation. Conrad left out many accents of topical satire in the presentation of the dramatis personae and ignored not only the ungrammatical speech (which might have escaped him) of some characters but even the Jewishness of two of them, Bolo and Mosan.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "As a practical matter, by the time Conrad set about writing fiction, he had little choice but to write in English. Poles who accused Conrad of cultural apostasy because he wrote in English instead of Polish missed the point—as do Anglophones who see, in Conrad's default choice of English as his artistic medium, a testimonial to some sort of innate superiority of the English language.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "According to Conrad's close friend and literary assistant Richard Curle, the fact of Conrad writing in English was \"obviously misleading\" because Conrad \"is no more completely English in his art than he is in his nationality\". Conrad, according to Curle, \"could never have written in any other language save the English language....for he would have been dumb in any other language but the English.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "Conrad always retained a strong emotional attachment to his native language. He asked his visiting Polish niece Karola Zagórska, \"Will you forgive me that my sons don't speak Polish?\" In June 1924, shortly before his death, he apparently expressed a desire that his son John marry a Polish girl and learn Polish, and toyed with the idea of returning for good to now independent Poland.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "Conrad bridled at being referred to as a Russian or \"Slavonic\" writer. The only Russian writer he admired was Ivan Turgenev. \"The critics\", he wrote an acquaintance on 31 January 1924, six months before his death, \"detected in me a new note and as, just when I began to write, they had discovered the existence of Russian authors, they stuck that label on me under the name of Slavonism. What I venture to say is that it would have been more just to charge me at most with Polonism.\" However, though Conrad protested that Dostoyevsky was \"too Russian for me\" and that Russian literature generally was \"repugnant to me hereditarily and individually\", Under Western Eyes is viewed as Conrad's response to the themes explored in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "Conrad had an awareness that, in any language, individual expressions – words, phrases, sentences – are fraught with connotations. He once wrote: \"No English word has clean edges.\" All expressions, he thought, carried so many connotations as to be little more than \"instruments for exciting blurred emotions.\" This might help elucidate the impressionistic quality of many passages in his writings. It also explains why he chose to write his literary works not in Polish or French but in English, with which for decades he had had the greatest contact.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "In 1975 the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe published an essay, \"An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'\", which provoked controversy by calling Conrad a \"thoroughgoing racist\". Achebe's view was that Heart of Darkness cannot be considered a great work of art because it is \"a novel which celebrates... dehumanisation, which depersonalises a portion of the human race.\" Referring to Conrad as a \"talented, tormented man\", Achebe notes that Conrad (via the protagonist, Charles Marlow) reduces and degrades Africans to \"limbs\", \"ankles\", \"glistening white eyeballs\", etc., while simultaneously (and fearfully) suspecting a common kinship between himself and these natives—leading Marlow to sneer the word \"ugly.\" Achebe also cited Conrad's description of an encounter with an African: \"A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days.\" Achebe's essay, a landmark in postcolonial discourse, provoked debate, and the questions it raised have been addressed in most subsequent literary criticism of Conrad.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "Achebe's critics argue that he fails to distinguish Marlow's view from Conrad's, which results in very clumsy interpretations of the novella. In their view, Conrad portrays Africans sympathetically and their plight tragically, and refers sarcastically to, and condemns outright, the supposedly noble aims of European colonists, thereby demonstrating his skepticism about the moral superiority of white men. Ending a passage that describes the condition of chained, emaciated slaves, the novelist remarks: \"After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings.\" Some observers assert that Conrad, whose native country had been conquered by imperial powers, empathised by default with other subjugated peoples. Jeffrey Meyers notes that Conrad, like his acquaintance Roger Casement, \"was one of the first men to question the Western notion of progress, a dominant idea in Europe from the Renaissance to the Great War, to attack the hypocritical justification of colonialism and to reveal... the savage degradation of the white man in Africa.\" Likewise, E.D. Morel, who led international opposition to King Leopold II's rule in the Congo, saw Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a condemnation of colonial brutality and referred to the novella as \"the most powerful thing written on the subject.\" More recently, Nidesh Lawtoo complicated the race debate by showing that Conrad's images of \"frenzy\" depict rituals of \"possession trance\" that are equally central to Achebe's Things Fall Apart.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "Conrad scholar Peter Firchow writes that \"nowhere in the novel does Conrad or any of his narrators, personified or otherwise, claim superiority on the part of Europeans on the grounds of alleged genetic or biological difference.\" If Conrad or his novel is racist, it is only in a weak sense, since Heart of Darkness acknowledges racial distinctions \"but does not suggest an essential superiority\" of any group. Achebe's reading of Heart of Darkness can be (and has been) challenged by a reading of Conrad's other African story, \"An Outpost of Progress\", which has an omniscient narrator, rather than the embodied narrator, Marlow. Some younger scholars, such as Masood Ashraf Raja, have also suggested that if we read Conrad beyond Heart of Darkness, especially his Malay novels, racism can be further complicated by foregrounding Conrad's positive representation of Muslims.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "In 1998 H.S. Zins wrote in Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "Conrad made English literature more mature and reflective because he called attention to the sheer horror of political realities overlooked by English citizens and politicians. The case of Poland, his oppressed homeland, was one such issue. The colonial exploitation of Africans was another. His condemnation of imperialism and colonialism, combined with sympathy for its persecuted and suffering victims, was drawn from his Polish background, his own personal sufferings, and the experience of a persecuted people living under foreign occupation. Personal memories created in him a great sensitivity for human degradation and a sense of moral responsibility.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "Adam Hochschild makes a similar point:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "What gave [Conrad] such a rare ability to see the arrogance and theft at the heart of imperialism?... Much of it surely had to do with the fact that he himself, as a Pole, knew what it was like to live in conquered territory.... [F]or the first few years of his life, tens of millions of peasants in the Russian empire were the equivalent of slave laborers: serfs. Conrad's poet father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a Polish nationalist and an opponent of serfdom... [The] boy [Konrad] grew up among exiled prison veterans, talk of serfdom, and the news of relatives killed in uprisings [and he] was ready to distrust imperial conquerors who claimed they had the right to rule other peoples.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Conrad's experience in the Belgian-run Congo made him one of the fiercest critics of the \"white man's mission.\" It was also, writes Najder, Conrad's most daring and last \"attempt to become a homo socialis, a cog in the mechanism of society. By accepting the job in the trading company, he joined, for once in his life, an organized, large-scale group activity on land.... It is not accidental that the Congo expedition remained an isolated event in Conrad's life. Until his death he remained a recluse in the social sense and never became involved with any institution or clearly defined group of people.\"",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "Conrad was a Russian subject, having been born in the Russian part of what had once been the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. After his father's death, Conrad's uncle Bobrowski had attempted to secure Austrian citizenship for him—to no avail, probably because Conrad had not received permission from Russian authorities to remain abroad permanently and had not been released from being a Russian subject. Conrad could not return to Ukraine, in the Russian Empire—he would have been liable to many years' military service and, as the son of political exiles, to harassment.",
"title": "Citizenship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "In a letter of 9 August 1877, Conrad's uncle Bobrowski broached two important subjects: the desirability of Conrad's naturalisation abroad (tantamount to release from being a Russian subject) and Conrad's plans to join the British merchant marine. \"[D]o you speak English?... I never wished you to become naturalized in France, mainly because of the compulsory military service... I thought, however, of your getting naturalized in Switzerland...\" In his next letter, Bobrowski supported Conrad's idea of seeking citizenship of the United States or of \"one of the more important Southern [American] Republics\".",
"title": "Citizenship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "Eventually Conrad would make his home in England. On 2 July 1886 he applied for British nationality, which was granted on 19 August 1886. Yet, in spite of having become a subject of Queen Victoria, Conrad had not ceased to be a subject of Tsar Alexander III. To achieve his freedom from that subjection, he had to make many visits to the Russian Embassy in London and politely reiterate his request. He would later recall the Embassy's home at Belgrave Square in his novel The Secret Agent. Finally, on 2 April 1889, the Russian Ministry of Home Affairs released \"the son of a Polish man of letters, captain of the British merchant marine\" from the status of Russian subject.",
"title": "Citizenship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "An anchor-shaped monument to Conrad at Gdynia, on Poland's Baltic Seacoast, features a quotation from him in Polish: \"Nic tak nie nęci, nie rozczarowuje i nie zniewala, jak życie na morzu\" (\"[T]here is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea\" – Lord Jim, chapter 2, paragraph 1).",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "In Circular Quay, Sydney, Australia, a plaque in a \"writers walk\" commemorates Conrad's visits to Australia between 1879 and 1892. The plaque notes that \"Many of his works reflect his 'affection for that young continent.'\"",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "In San Francisco in 1979, a small triangular square at Columbus Avenue and Beach Street, near Fisherman's Wharf, was dedicated as \"Joseph Conrad Square\" after Conrad. The square's dedication was timed to coincide with release of Francis Ford Coppola's Heart of Darkness-inspired film, Apocalypse Now. Conrad does not appear to have ever visited San Francisco.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "In the latter part of World War II, the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Danae was rechristened ORP Conrad and served as part of the Polish Navy.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "Notwithstanding the undoubted sufferings that Conrad endured on many of his voyages, sentimentality and canny marketing place him at the best lodgings in several of his destinations. Hotels across the Far East still lay claim to him as an honoured guest, with, however, no evidence to back their claims: Singapore's Raffles Hotel continues to claim he stayed there though he lodged, in fact, at the Sailors' Home nearby. His visit to Bangkok also remains in that city's collective memory, and is recorded in the official history of The Oriental Hotel (where he never, in fact, stayed, lodging aboard his ship, the Otago) along with that of a less well-behaved guest, Somerset Maugham, who pilloried the hotel in a short story in revenge for attempts to eject him.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 149,
"text": "A plaque commemorating \"Joseph Conrad–Korzeniowski\" has been installed near Singapore's Fullerton Hotel.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 150,
"text": "Conrad is also reported to have stayed at Hong Kong's Peninsula Hotel—at a port that, in fact, he never visited. Later literary admirers, notably Graham Greene, followed closely in his footsteps, sometimes requesting the same room and perpetuating myths that have no basis in fact. No Caribbean resort is yet known to have claimed Conrad's patronage, although he is believed to have stayed at a Fort-de-France pension upon arrival in Martinique on his first voyage, in 1875, when he travelled as a passenger on the Mont Blanc.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 151,
"text": "In April 2013, a monument to Conrad was unveiled in the Russian town of Vologda, where he and his parents lived in exile in 1862–63. The monument was removed, with unclear explanation, in June 2016.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 152,
"text": "After the publication of Chance in 1913, Conrad was the subject of more discussion and praise than any other English writer of the time. He had a genius for companionship, and his circle of friends, which he had begun assembling even prior to his first publications, included authors and other leading lights in the arts, such as Henry James, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, John Galsworthy, Galsworthy's wife Ada Galsworthy (translator of French literature), Edward Garnett, Garnett's wife Constance Garnett (translator of Russian literature), Stephen Crane, Hugh Walpole, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells (whom Conrad dubbed \"the historian of the ages to come\"), Arnold Bennett, Norman Douglas, Jacob Epstein, T. E. Lawrence, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Maurice Ravel, Valery Larbaud, Saint-John Perse, Edith Wharton, James Huneker, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, Józef Retinger (later a founder of the European Movement, which led to the European Union, and author of Conrad and His Contemporaries). In the early 1900s Conrad composed a short series of novels in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 153,
"text": "In 1919 and 1922 Conrad's growing renown and prestige among writers and critics in continental Europe fostered his hopes for a Nobel Prize in Literature. It was apparently the French and Swedes—not the English—who favoured Conrad's candidacy.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 154,
"text": "In April 1924 Conrad, who possessed a hereditary Polish status of nobility and coat-of-arms (Nałęcz), declined a (non-hereditary) British knighthood offered by Labour Party Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. Conrad kept a distance from official structures—he never voted in British national elections—and seems to have been averse to public honours generally; he had already refused honorary degrees from Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Yale universities.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 155,
"text": "In the Polish People's Republic, translations of Conrad's works were openly published, except for Under Western Eyes, which in the 1980s was published as an underground \"bibuła\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 156,
"text": "Conrad's narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including T. S. Eliot, Maria Dąbrowska, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Gerald Basil Edwards, Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, André Malraux, George Orwell, Graham Greene, William Golding, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Gabriel García Márquez, Peter Matthiessen, John le Carré, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie. Many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's works.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 157,
"text": "A striking portrait of Conrad, aged about 46, was drawn by the historian and poet Henry Newbolt, who met him about 1903:",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 158,
"text": "One thing struck me at once—the extraordinary difference between his expression in profile and when looked at full face. [W]hile the profile was aquiline and commanding, in the front view the broad brow, wide-apart eyes and full lips produced the effect of an intellectual calm and even at times of a dreaming philosophy. Then [a]s we sat in our little half-circle round the fire, and talked on anything and everything, I saw a third Conrad emerge—an artistic self, sensitive and restless to the last degree. The more he talked the more quickly he consumed his cigarettes... And presently, when I asked him why he was leaving London after... only two days, he replied that... the crowd in the streets... terrified him. \"Terrified? By that dull stream of obliterated faces?\" He leaned forward with both hands raised and clenched. \"Yes, terrified: I see their personalities all leaping out at me like tigers!\" He acted the tiger well enough almost to terrify his hearers: but the moment after he was talking again wisely and soberly as if he were an average Englishman with not an irritable nerve in his body.",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 159,
"text": "On 12 October 1912, American music critic James Huneker visited Conrad and later recalled being received by \"a man of the world, neither sailor nor novelist, just a simple-mannered gentleman, whose welcome was sincere, whose glance was veiled, at times far-away, whose ways were French, Polish, anything but 'literary,' bluff or English.\"",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 160,
"text": "After respective separate visits to Conrad in August and September 1913, two British aristocrats, the socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell and the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell—who were lovers at the time—recorded their impressions of the novelist. In her diary, Morrell wrote:",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 161,
"text": "I found Conrad himself standing at the door of the house ready to receive me.... [His] appearance was really that of a Polish nobleman. His manner was perfect, almost too elaborate; so nervous and sympathetic that every fibre of him seemed electric... He talked English with a strong accent, as if he tasted his words in his mouth before pronouncing them; but he talked extremely well, though he had always the talk and manner of a foreigner.... He was dressed very carefully in a blue double-breasted jacket. He talked... apparently with great freedom about his life—more ease and freedom indeed than an Englishman would have allowed himself. He spoke of the horrors of the Congo, from the moral and physical shock of which he said he had never recovered... [His wife Jessie] seemed a nice and good-looking fat creature, an excellent cook, ... a good and reposeful mattress for this hypersensitive, nerve-wracked man, who did not ask from his wife high intelligence, only an assuagement of life's vibrations.... He made me feel so natural and very much myself, that I was almost afraid of losing the thrill and wonder of being there, although I was vibrating with intense excitement inside .... His eyes under their pent-house lids revealed the suffering and the intensity of his experiences; when he spoke of his work, there came over them a sort of misty, sensuous, dreamy look, but they seemed to hold deep down the ghosts of old adventures and experiences—once or twice there was something in them one almost suspected of being wicked.... But then I believe whatever strange wickedness would tempt this super-subtle Pole, he would be held in restraint by an equally delicate sense of honour.... In his talk he led me along many paths of his life, but I felt that he did not wish to explore the jungle of emotions that lay dense on either side, and that his apparent frankness had a great reserve.",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 162,
"text": "A month later, Bertrand Russell visited Conrad at Capel House in Orlestone, and the same day on the train wrote down his impressions:",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 163,
"text": "It was wonderful—I loved him & I think he liked me. He talked a great deal about his work & life & aims, & about other writers.... Then we went for a little walk, & somehow grew very intimate. I plucked up courage to tell him what I find in his work—the boring down into things to get to the very bottom below the apparent facts. He seemed to feel I had understood him; then I stopped & we just looked into each other's eyes for some time, & then he said he had grown to wish he could live on the surface and write differently, that he had grown frightened. His eyes at the moment expressed the inward pain & terror that one feels him always fighting.... Then he talked a lot about Poland, & showed me an album of family photographs of the [18]60's—spoke about how dream-like all that seems, & how he sometimes feels he ought not to have had any children, because they have no roots or traditions or relations.",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 164,
"text": "Russell's Autobiography, published over half a century later in 1968, confirms his original experience:",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 165,
"text": "My first impression was one of surprise. He spoke English with a very strong foreign accent, and nothing in his demeanour in any way suggested the sea. He was an aristocratic Polish gentleman to his fingertips.... At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other... I have known. We looked into each other's eyes, half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region. The emotion was as intense as passionate love, and at the same time all-embracing. I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs.",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 166,
"text": "It was not only Anglophones who remarked Conrad's strong foreign accent when speaking English. After French poet Paul Valéry and French composer Maurice Ravel made Conrad's acquaintance in December 1922, Valéry wrote in 1924 of having been astonished at Conrad's \"horrible\" accent in English.",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 167,
"text": "The subsequent friendship and correspondence between Conrad and Russell lasted, with long intervals, to the end of Conrad's life. In one letter, Conrad avowed his \"deep admiring affection, which, if you were never to see me again and forget my existence tomorrow will be unalterably yours usque ad finem.\" Conrad in his correspondence often used the Latin expression meaning \"to the very end\", which he seems to have adopted from his faithful guardian, mentor and benefactor, his maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski.",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 168,
"text": "Conrad looked with less optimism than Russell on the possibilities of scientific and philosophic knowledge. In a 1913 letter to acquaintances who had invited Conrad to join their society, he reiterated his belief that it was impossible to understand the essence of either reality or life: both science and art penetrate no further than the outer shapes.",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 169,
"text": "Najder describes Conrad as \"[a]n alienated émigré... haunted by a sense of the unreality of other people – a feeling natural to someone living outside the established structures of family, social milieu, and country\".",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 170,
"text": "Throughout almost his entire life Conrad was an outsider and felt himself to be one. An outsider in exile; an outsider during his visits to his family in... Poland; an outsider—because of his experiences and bereavement—in [Kraków] and Lwów; an outsider in Marseilles; an outsider, nationally and culturally, on British ships; an outsider as an English writer.",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 171,
"text": "Conrad's sense of loneliness throughout his life in exile found memorable expression in the 1901 short story \"Amy Foster\".",
"title": "Impressions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 172,
"text": "A number of works in various genres and media have been based on, or inspired by, Conrad's writings, including:",
"title": "Adaptations"
}
]
| Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language; though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable and amoral world. Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events. Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche. | 2001-10-16T18:52:05Z | 2023-12-27T19:46:11Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Conrad |
15,824 | John Updike | John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead), Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and the novella Rabbit Remembered), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", critics recognized his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output – a book a year on average. Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity".
His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans, its emphasis on Christian theology, and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail. His work has attracted significant critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered one of the great American writers of his time. Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice that describes the physical world extravagantly while remaining squarely in the realist tradition". He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due".
Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace (née Hoyer) and Wesley Russell Updike, and was raised at his childhood home in the nearby small town of Shillington. The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His mother's attempts to become a published writer impressed the young Updike. "One of my earliest memories", he later recalled, "is of seeing her at her desk ... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in—and come back in."
These early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania, would influence the environment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories. Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and received a full scholarship to Harvard College, where he was the roommate of Christopher Lasch during their first year. Updike had already received recognition for his writing as a teenager by winning a Scholastic Art & Writing Award, and at Harvard he soon became well known among his classmates as a talented and prolific contributor to The Harvard Lampoon, of which he was president. He studied with dramatist Robert Chapman, the director of Harvard's Loeb Drama Center. He graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Upon graduation, Updike attended the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford with the ambition of becoming a cartoonist. After returning to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. This was the beginning of his professional writing career.
Updike stayed at The New Yorker as a full staff writer for only two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine. In New York, Updike wrote the poems and stories that came to fill his early books like The Carpentered Hen (1958) and The Same Door (1959). These works were influenced by Updike's early engagement with The New Yorker. This early work also featured the influence of J. D. Salinger ("A&P"); John Cheever ("Snowing in Greenwich Village"); and the Modernists Marcel Proust, Henry Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.
During this time, Updike underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of religious faith, he began reading Søren Kierkegaard and the theologian Karl Barth. Both deeply influenced his own religious beliefs, which in turn figured prominently in his fiction. He believed in Christianity for the remainder of his life. Updike said, "As to critics, it seems to be my fate to disappoint my theological friends by not being Christian enough, while I'm too Christian for Harold Bloom's blessing. So be it."
Later, Updike and his family relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. Many commentators, including a columnist in the local Ipswich Chronicle, asserted that the fictional town of Tarbox in Couples was based on Ipswich. Updike denied the suggestion in a letter to the paper. Impressions of Updike's day-to-day life in Ipswich during the 1960s and 1970s are included in a letter to the same paper published soon after Updike's death and written by a friend and contemporary. In Ipswich, Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (1960), on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and The Centaur (1963), two of his most acclaimed and famous works; the latter won the National Book Award.
Rabbit, Run featured Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a former high school basketball star and middle-class paragon who would become Updike's most enduring and critically acclaimed character. Updike wrote three additional novels about him. Rabbit, Run was featured in Time's All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.
Updike's career and reputation were nurtured and expanded by his long association with The New Yorker, which published him frequently throughout his career, despite the fact that he had departed the magazine's employment after only two years. Updike's memoir indicates that he stayed in his "corner of New England to give its domestic news" with a focus on the American home from the point of view of a male writer. Updike's contract with the magazine gave it right of first offer for his short-story manuscripts, but William Shawn, The New Yorker's editor from 1952 to 1987, rejected several as too explicit.
The Maple short stories, collected in Too Far To Go (1979), reflected the ebb and flow of Updike's first marriage; "Separating" (1974) and "Here Come the Maples" (1976) related to his divorce. These stories also reflect the role of alcohol in 1970s America. They were the basis for the television movie also called Too Far To Go, broadcast by NBC in 1979.
Updike's short stories were collected in several volumes published by Alfred A. Knopf over five decades. In 2013, the Library of America issued a two-volume boxed edition of 186 stories under the title The Collected Stories.
In 1971, Updike published a sequel to Rabbit, Run called Rabbit Redux, his response to the 1960s; Rabbit reflected much of Updike's resentment and hostility towards the social and political changes that beset the United States during that time.
Updike's early Olinger period was set in the Pennsylvania of his youth; it ended around 1965 with the lyrical Of the Farm.
After his early novels, Updike became most famous for his chronicling infidelity, adultery, and marital unrest, especially in suburban America; and for his controversial depiction of the confusion and freedom inherent in this breakdown of social mores. He once wrote that it was "a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me". The most prominent of Updike's novels of this vein is Couples (1968), a novel about adultery in a small fictional Massachusetts town called Tarbox. It garnered Updike an appearance on the cover of Time magazine with the headline "The Adulterous Society". Both the magazine article and, to an extent, the novel struck a chord of national concern over whether American society was abandoning all social standards of conduct in sexual matters.
The Coup (1978), a lauded novel about an African dictatorship inspired by a visit he made to Africa, found Updike working in new territory.
In 1980, he published another novel featuring Harry Angstrom, Rabbit Is Rich, which won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—all three major American literary prizes. The novel found "Rabbit the fat and happy owner of a Toyota dealership". Updike found it difficult to end the book, because he was "having so much fun" in the imaginary county Rabbit and his family inhabited.
After writing Rabbit Is Rich, Updike published The Witches of Eastwick (1984), a playful novel about witches living in Rhode Island. He described it as an attempt to "make things right with my, what shall we call them, feminist detractors". One of Updike's most popular novels, it was adapted as a film and included on Harold Bloom's list of canonical 20th-century literature (in The Western Canon). In 2008 Updike published The Widows of Eastwick, a return to the witches in their old age. It was his last published novel.
In 1986, he published the unconventional novel Roger's Version, the second volume of the so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy, about an attempt to prove God's existence using a computer program. Author and critic Martin Amis called it a "near-masterpiece". The novel S. (1989), uncharacteristically featuring a female protagonist, concluded Updike's reworking of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.
Updike enjoyed working in series; in addition to the Rabbit novels and the Maples stories, a recurrent Updike alter ego is the moderately well-known, unprolific Jewish novelist and eventual Nobel laureate Henry Bech, chronicled in three comic short-story cycles: Bech, a Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1981) and Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998). These stories were compiled as The Complete Henry Bech (2001) by Everyman's Library. Bech is a comical and self-conscious antithesis of Updike's own literary persona: Jewish, a World War II veteran, reclusive, and unprolific to a fault.
In 1990, he published the last Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Over 500 pages long, the novel is among Updike's most celebrated. In 2000, Updike included the novella Rabbit Remembered in his collection Licks of Love, drawing the Rabbit saga to a close. His Pulitzers for the last two Rabbit novels make Updike one of only four writers to have won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, the others being William Faulkner, Booth Tarkington, and Colson Whitehead.
In 1995, Everyman's Library collected and canonized the four novels as the omnibus Rabbit Angstrom; Updike wrote an introduction in which he described Rabbit as "a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference was often slight." Updike later called Rabbit "a brother to me, and a good friend. He opened me up as a writer."
After the publication of Rabbit at Rest, Updike spent the rest of the 1990s and early 2000s publishing novels in a wide range of genres; the work of this period was frequently experimental in nature. These styles included the historical fiction of Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), the magical realism of Brazil (1994), the science fiction of Toward the End of Time (1997), the postmodernism of Gertrude and Claudius (2000), and the experimental fiction of Seek My Face (2002).
In the midst of these, he wrote what was for him a more conventional novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), a historical saga spanning several generations and exploring themes of religion and cinema in America. It is considered the most successful novel of Updike's late career. Some critics have predicted that posterity may consider the novel a "late masterpiece overlooked or praised by rote in its day, only to be rediscovered by another generation", while others, though appreciating the English mastery in the book, thought it overly dense with minute detail and swamped by its scenic depictions and spiritual malaise. In Villages (2004), Updike returned to the familiar territory of infidelities in New England. His 22nd novel, Terrorist (2006), the story of a fervent young extremist Muslim in New Jersey, garnered media attention but little critical praise.
In 2003, Updike published The Early Stories, a large collection of his short fiction spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. More than 800 pages long, with over one hundred stories, it has been called "a richly episodic and lyrical Bildungsroman ... in which Updike traces the trajectory from adolescence, college, married life, fatherhood, separation and divorce". It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2004. This lengthy volume nevertheless excluded several stories found in his short-story collections of the same period.
Updike worked in a wide array of genres, including fiction, poetry (most of it compiled in Collected Poems: 1953–1993, 1993), essays (collected in nine separate volumes), a play (Buchanan Dying, 1974), and a memoir (Self-Consciousness, 1989).
Updike's array of awards includes two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, two National Book Awards, three National Book Critics Circle awards, the 1989 National Medal of Arts, the 2003 National Humanities Medal, and the Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement. The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Updike to present the 2008 Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. government's highest humanities honor; Updike's lecture was titled "The Clarity of Things: What Is American about American Art".
At the end of his life, Updike was working on a novel about St. Paul and early Christianity. Upon his death, The New Yorker published an appreciation by Adam Gopnik of Updike's lifetime association with the magazine, calling him "one of the greatest of all modern writers, the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing".
Biographer Adam Begley wrote that Updike "transmuted the minutiae of his life" in prose, which enriched his readers at the cost of being "willing to sacrifice the happiness of people around him for his art".
In 1953, while a student at Harvard, Updike married Mary Entwistle Pennington, an art student at Radcliffe College and daughter of a prominent Unitarian minister. She accompanied him to Oxford, England, where she attended art school and their first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1955. The couple had three more children together: David (born 1957), Michael (born 1959), and Miranda (born 1960).
Updike was serially unfaithful, and eventually left the marriage in 1974 for Martha Ruggles Bernhard. In 1977, Updike and Bernhard married. In 1982, his first wife married an MIT academic. Updike and Bernhard lived for more than 30 years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Updike had three stepsons through Bernhard: John Bernhard, Jason Bernhard, and Frederic Bernhard. He died of lung cancer at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76. He is survived by seven grandchildren and seven step-grandchildren.
Updike published eight volumes of poetry over his career, including his first book The Carpentered Hen (1958), and one of his last, the posthumous Endpoint (2009). The New Yorker published excerpts of Endpoint in its March 16, 2009 issue. Much of Updike's poetical output was recollected in Knopf's Collected Poems (1993). He wrote that "I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form." The poet Thomas M. Disch noted that because Updike was such a well-known novelist, his poetry "could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible"; Disch saw Updike's light verse instead as a poetry of "epigrammatical lucidity". His poetry has been praised for its engagement with "a variety of forms and topics", its "wit and precision", and for its depiction of topics familiar to American readers.
British poet Gavin Ewart praised Updike for the metaphysical quality of his poetry and for his ability "to make the ordinary seem strange", and called him one of the few modern novelists capable of writing good poetry. Reading Endpoint aloud, the critic Charles McGrath claimed that he found "another, deeper music" in Updike's poetry, finding that Updike's wordplay "smooths and elides itself" and has many subtle "sound effects". John Keenan, who praised the collection Endpoint as "beautiful and poignant", noted that his poetry's engagement with "the everyday world in a technically accomplished manner seems to count against him".
Updike was also a critic of literature and art, one frequently cited as one of the best American critics of his generation. In the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose, he listed his personal rules for literary criticism:
1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never ... try to put the author "in his place," making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
He reviewed "nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th-century authors", typically in The New Yorker, always trying to make his reviews "animated". He also championed young writers, comparing them to his own literary heroes including Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust. Good reviews from Updike were often seen as a significant achievement in terms of literary reputation and even sales; some of his positive reviews helped jump-start the careers of such younger writers as Erica Jong, Thomas Mallon and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Bad reviews by Updike sometimes caused controversy, as when in late 2008 he gave a "damning" review of Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy.
Updike was praised for his literary criticism's conventional simplicity and profundity, for being an aestheticist critic who saw literature on its own terms, and for his longtime commitment to the practice of literary criticism.
Much of Updike's art criticism appeared in The New York Review of Books, where he often wrote about American art. His art criticism involved an aestheticism like that of his literary criticism.
Updike's 2008 Jefferson Lecture, "The Clarity of Things: What's American About American Art?", dealt with the uniqueness of American art from the 18th century to the 20th. In the lecture he argued that American art, until the expressionist movement of the 20th century in which America declared its artistic "independence", is characterized by an insecurity not found in the artistic tradition of Europe.
In Updike's own words:
Two centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things, William Carlos Williams wrote in introducing his long poem Paterson that "for the poet there are no ideas but in things." No ideas but in things. The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.
He is certainly one of the great American novelists of the 20th century.
—Martin Amis
Updike is considered one of the greatest American fiction writers of his generation. He was widely praised as America's "last true man of letters", with an immense and far-reaching influence on many writers. The excellence of his prose style is acknowledged even by critics skeptical of other aspects of Updike's work.
Several scholars have called attention to the importance of place, and especially of southeast Pennsylvania, in Updike's life and work. Bob Batchelor has described "Updike's Pennsylvania sensibility" as one with profound reaches that transcend time and place, such that in his writing, he used "Pennsylvania as a character" that went beyond geographic or political boundaries. SA Zylstra has compared Updike's Pennsylvania to Faulkner's Mississippi: "As with the Mississippi of Faulkner's novels, the world of Updike's novels is fictional (as are such towns as Olinger and Brewer), while at the same time it is recognizable as a particular American region." Sanford Pinsker observes that "Updike always felt a bit out of place" in places like "Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for most of his life. In his heart—and, more important, in his imagination—Updike remained a staunchly Pennsylvania boy." Similarly, Sylvie Mathé maintains that "Updike's most memorable legacy appears to be his homage to Pennsylvania."
Critics emphasize his "inimitable prose style" and "rich description and language", often favorably compared to Proust and Nabokov. Some critics consider the fluency of his prose to be a fault, questioning the intellectual depth and thematic seriousness of his work given the polish of his language and the perceived lightness of his themes, while others criticized Updike for misogynistic depictions of women and sexual relationships.
Other critics argue that Updike's "dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader". On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful prose style, with "shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life".
Updike's character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the protagonist of the series of novels widely considered his magnum opus, has been said to have "entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures", along with Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and others. A 2002 list by Book magazine of the 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900 listed Rabbit in the top five. The Rabbit novels, the Henry Bech stories, and the Maples stories have been canonized by Everyman's Library.
After Updike's death, Harvard's Houghton Library acquired his papers, manuscripts, and letters, naming the collection the John Updike Archive. 2009 also saw the founding of the John Updike Society, a group of scholars dedicated to "awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike's literary works". The Society will begin publishing The John Updike Review, a journal of critical scholarship in the field of Updike studies. The John Updike Society First Biennial Conference took place in 2010 at Alvernia University.
Eulogizing Updike in January 2009, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote that Updike's "literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean", and that Updike's death marked "the end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half".
McEwan said the Rabbit series is Updike's "masterpiece and will surely be his monument", and concluded:
Updike is a master of effortless motion—between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike. This is at the heart of the tetralogy's achievement. Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, "and not chop them down to what you think is the right size."
Jonathan Raban, highlighting many of the virtues that have been ascribed to Updike's prose, called Rabbit at Rest "one of the very few modern novels in English ... that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce, and not feel the draft ... It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy and richness."
The novelist Philip Roth, considered one of Updike's chief literary rivals, wrote, "John Updike is our time's greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne."
The noted critic James Wood called Updike "a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey". In a review of Licks of Love (2001), Wood concluded that Updike's "prose trusses things in very pretty ribbons" but that there often exists in his work a "hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic worldview". Wood both praised and criticized Updike's language for having "an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract". According to Wood, Updike is capable of writing "the perfect sentence" and his style is characterized by a "delicate deferral" of the sentence. Of the beauty of Updike's language and his faith in the power of language that floats above reality, Wood wrote:
For some time now Updike's language has seemed to encode an almost theological optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures, Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books—here extended a further instance—suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us—'life's gallant, battered ongoingness ', indeed—and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.
In direct contrast to Wood's evaluation, the Oxford critic Thomas Karshan asserted that Updike is "intensely intellectual", with a style that constitutes his "manner of thought" not merely "a set of dainty curlicues". Karshan calls Updike an inheritor of the "traditional role of the epic writer". According to Karshan, "Updike's writing picks up one voice, joins its cadence, and moves on to another, like Rabbit himself, driving south through radio zones on his flight away from his wife and child."
Disagreeing with Wood's critique of Updike's alleged over-stylization, Karshan evaluates Updike's language as convincingly naturalistic:
Updike's sentences at their frequent best are not a complacent expression of faith. Rather, like Proust's sentences in Updike's description, they "seek an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith." Updike aspires to "this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence towards what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs." Their hesitancy and self-qualification arise as they meet obstacles, readjust and pass on. If life is bountiful in New England, it is also evasive and easily missed. In the stories Updike tells, marriages and homes are made only to be broken. His descriptiveness embodies a promiscuous love for everything in the world. But love is precarious, Updike is always saying, since it thrives on obstructions and makes them if it cannot find them.
Harold Bloom once called Updike "a minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable stylist ... He specializes in the easier pleasures." Bloom also edited an important collection of critical essays on Updike in 1987, in which he concluded that Updike possessed a major style and was capable of writing beautiful sentences which are "beyond praise"; nevertheless, Bloom went on, "the American sublime will never touch his pages".
On The Dick Cavett Show in 1981, the novelist and short-story writer John Cheever was asked why he did not write book reviews and what he would say if given the chance to review Rabbit Is Rich. He replied:
The reason I didn't review the book is that it perhaps would have taken me three weeks. My appreciation of it is that diverse and that complicated ... John is perhaps the only contemporary writer who I know now who gives me the sense of the fact that life is—the life that we perform is in an environment that enjoys a grandeur that escapes us. Rabbit is very much possessed of a paradise lost, of a paradise known fleetingly perhaps through erotic love and a paradise that he pursues through his children. It's the vastness of John's scope that I would have described if I could through a review.
The Fiction Circus, an online and multimedia literary magazine, called Updike one of the "four Great American Novelists" of his time along with Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, each jokingly represented as a sign of the Zodiac. Furthermore, Updike was seen as the "best prose writer in the world", like Nabokov before him. But in contrast to many literati and establishment obituaries, the Circus asserted that nobody "thought of Updike as a vital writer".
Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker evaluated Updike as "the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing ... He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisite urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him."
The critic James Wolcott, in a review of Updike's last novel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008), noted that Updike's penchant for observing America's decline is coupled with an affirmation of America's ultimate merits: "Updike elegises entropy American-style with a resigned, paternal, disappointed affection that distinguishes his fiction from that of grimmer declinists: Don DeLillo, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth. America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm."
Gore Vidal, in a controversial essay in the Times Literary Supplement, professed to have "never taken Updike seriously as a writer". He criticizes his political and aesthetic worldview for its "blandness and acceptance of authority in any form". He concludes that Updike "describes to no purpose". In reference to Updike's wide establishment acclaim, Vidal mockingly called him "our good child" and excoriated his alleged political conservatism. Vidal ultimately concluded, "Updike's work is more and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up."
Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, called Updike "one of the most elegant and coolly observant writers of his generation".
The short-story writer Lorrie Moore, who once described Updike as "American literature's greatest short story writer ... and arguably our greatest writer", reviewed Updike's body of short stories in The New York Review, praising their intricate detail and rich imagery: "his eye and his prose never falter, even when the world fails to send its more socially complicated revelations directly his story's way". In her work on Updike, Biljana Dojčinović has argued that his short story collection The Afterlife and Other Stories is a pivotal work that demonstrates a change in his writing on feminism.
In November 2008, the editors of the UK's Literary Review magazine awarded Updike their Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award, which celebrates "crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature".
All in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.
—Rabbit Angstrom.
The principal themes in Updike's work are religion, sex, and America as well as death. Often he would combine them, frequently in his favored terrain of "the American small town, Protestant middle class", of which he once said, "I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."
For example, the decline of religion in America is chronicled in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) alongside the history of cinema, and Rabbit Angstrom contemplates the merits of sex with the wife of his friend Reverend Jack Eccles while the latter is giving his sermon in Rabbit, Run (1960).
Critics have often noted that Updike imbued language itself with a kind of faith in its efficacy, and that his tendency to construct narratives spanning many years and books—the Rabbit series, the Henry Bech series, Eastwick, the Maples stories—demonstrates a similar faith in the transcendent power of fiction and language. Updike's novels often act as dialectical theological debates between the book itself and the reader, the novel endowed with theological beliefs meant to challenge the reader as the plot runs its course. Rabbit Angstrom himself acts as a Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith.
Describing his purpose in writing prose, Updike himself, in the introduction to his Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2004), wrote that his aim was always "to give the mundane its beautiful due". Elsewhere he famously said, "When I write, I aim my mind not towards New York City but towards a vague spot east of Kansas." Some have suggested that the "best statement of Updike's aesthetic comes in his early memoir 'The Dogwood Tree'" (1962): "Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. And in fact there is a color, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm."
Sex in Updike's work is noted for its ubiquity and the reverence with which he described it:
His contemporaries invade the ground with wild Dionysian yelps, mocking both the taboos that would make it forbidden and the lust that drives men to it. Updike can be honest about it, and his descriptions of the sight, taste and texture of women's bodies can be perfect little madrigals.
The critic Edward Champion notes that Updike's prose heavily favors "external sexual imagery" rife with "explicit anatomical detail" rather than descriptions of "internal emotion" in descriptions of sex. In Champion's interview with Updike on The Bat Segundo Show, Updike replied that he perhaps favored such imagery to concretize and make sex "real" in his prose. Another sexual theme commonly addressed in Updike is adultery, especially in a suburban, middle class setting, most famously in Couples (1968). The Updikean narrator is often "a man guilty of infidelity and abandonment of his family".
Similarly, Updike wrote about America with a certain nostalgia, reverence, and recognition and celebration of America's broad diversity. ZZ Packer wrote that in Updike, "there seemed a strange ability to harken both America the Beautiful as well as America the Plain Jane, and the lovely Protestant backbone in his fiction and essays, when he decided to show it off, was as progressive and enlightened as it was unapologetic."
The Rabbit novels in particular can be viewed, according to Julian Barnes, as "a distraction from, and a glittering confirmation of, the vast bustling ordinariness of American life". But as Updike celebrated ordinary America, he also alluded to its decline: at times, he was "so clearly disturbed by the downward spin of America". Adam Gopnik concludes that "Updike's great subject was the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with the materials produced by mass culture. He documented how the death of a credible religious belief has been offset by sex and adultery and movies and sports and Toyotas and family love and family obligation. For Updike, this effort was blessed, and very nearly successful."
Updike's novels about America almost always contain references to political events of the time. In this sense, they are artifacts of their historical eras, showing how national leaders shape and define their times. The lives of ordinary citizens take place against this wider background.
Updike often wrote about death, his characters providing a "mosaic of reactions" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation. In The Poorhouse Fair (1959), the elderly John Hook intones, "There is no goodness without belief ... And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved, to take into the next", demonstrating a religious, metaphysical faith present in much of Updike's work.
For Rabbit Angstrom, with his constant musings on mortality, his near-witnessing of his daughter's death, and his often shaky faith, death is more frightening and less obvious in its ramifications. At the end of Rabbit at Rest (1990), though, Rabbit demonstrates a kind of certainty, telling his son Nelson on his deathbed, "... But enough. Maybe. Enough." In The Centaur (1963), George Caldwell has no religious faith and is afraid of his cancer. Death can also be a sort of unseen terror; it "occurs offstage but reverberates for survivors as an absent presence".
Updike himself also experienced a "crisis over the afterlife", and indeed
many of his heroes shared the same sort of existential fears the author acknowledged he had suffered as a young man: Henry Bech's concern that he was 'a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust,' or Colonel Ellelloû's lament that 'we will be forgotten, all of us forgotten.' Their fear of death threatens to make everything they do feel meaningless, and it also sends them running after God—looking for some reassurance that there is something beyond the familiar, everyday world with 'its signals and buildings and cars and bricks.'
Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem "Perfection Wasted" (1990):
And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic ...
See also #External links for links to archives of his essays and reviews in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. | [
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"text": "John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead), Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.",
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"text": "Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His most famous work is his \"Rabbit\" series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and the novella Rabbit Remembered), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry \"Rabbit\" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were awarded the Pulitzer Prize.",
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"text": "Describing his subject as \"the American small town, Protestant middle class\", critics recognized his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output – a book a year on average. Updike populated his fiction with characters who \"frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity\".",
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{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans, its emphasis on Christian theology, and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail. His work has attracted significant critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered one of the great American writers of his time. Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of \"a wry, intelligent authorial voice that describes the physical world extravagantly while remaining squarely in the realist tradition\". He described his style as an attempt \"to give the mundane its beautiful due\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace (née Hoyer) and Wesley Russell Updike, and was raised at his childhood home in the nearby small town of Shillington. The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His mother's attempts to become a published writer impressed the young Updike. \"One of my earliest memories\", he later recalled, \"is of seeing her at her desk ... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in—and come back in.\"",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "These early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania, would influence the environment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories. Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and received a full scholarship to Harvard College, where he was the roommate of Christopher Lasch during their first year. Updike had already received recognition for his writing as a teenager by winning a Scholastic Art & Writing Award, and at Harvard he soon became well known among his classmates as a talented and prolific contributor to The Harvard Lampoon, of which he was president. He studied with dramatist Robert Chapman, the director of Harvard's Loeb Drama Center. He graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Upon graduation, Updike attended the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford with the ambition of becoming a cartoonist. After returning to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. This was the beginning of his professional writing career.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Updike stayed at The New Yorker as a full staff writer for only two years, writing \"Talk of the Town\" columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine. In New York, Updike wrote the poems and stories that came to fill his early books like The Carpentered Hen (1958) and The Same Door (1959). These works were influenced by Updike's early engagement with The New Yorker. This early work also featured the influence of J. D. Salinger (\"A&P\"); John Cheever (\"Snowing in Greenwich Village\"); and the Modernists Marcel Proust, Henry Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "During this time, Updike underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of religious faith, he began reading Søren Kierkegaard and the theologian Karl Barth. Both deeply influenced his own religious beliefs, which in turn figured prominently in his fiction. He believed in Christianity for the remainder of his life. Updike said, \"As to critics, it seems to be my fate to disappoint my theological friends by not being Christian enough, while I'm too Christian for Harold Bloom's blessing. So be it.\"",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Later, Updike and his family relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. Many commentators, including a columnist in the local Ipswich Chronicle, asserted that the fictional town of Tarbox in Couples was based on Ipswich. Updike denied the suggestion in a letter to the paper. Impressions of Updike's day-to-day life in Ipswich during the 1960s and 1970s are included in a letter to the same paper published soon after Updike's death and written by a friend and contemporary. In Ipswich, Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (1960), on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and The Centaur (1963), two of his most acclaimed and famous works; the latter won the National Book Award.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Rabbit, Run featured Harry \"Rabbit\" Angstrom, a former high school basketball star and middle-class paragon who would become Updike's most enduring and critically acclaimed character. Updike wrote three additional novels about him. Rabbit, Run was featured in Time's All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Updike's career and reputation were nurtured and expanded by his long association with The New Yorker, which published him frequently throughout his career, despite the fact that he had departed the magazine's employment after only two years. Updike's memoir indicates that he stayed in his \"corner of New England to give its domestic news\" with a focus on the American home from the point of view of a male writer. Updike's contract with the magazine gave it right of first offer for his short-story manuscripts, but William Shawn, The New Yorker's editor from 1952 to 1987, rejected several as too explicit.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Maple short stories, collected in Too Far To Go (1979), reflected the ebb and flow of Updike's first marriage; \"Separating\" (1974) and \"Here Come the Maples\" (1976) related to his divorce. These stories also reflect the role of alcohol in 1970s America. They were the basis for the television movie also called Too Far To Go, broadcast by NBC in 1979.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Updike's short stories were collected in several volumes published by Alfred A. Knopf over five decades. In 2013, the Library of America issued a two-volume boxed edition of 186 stories under the title The Collected Stories.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1971, Updike published a sequel to Rabbit, Run called Rabbit Redux, his response to the 1960s; Rabbit reflected much of Updike's resentment and hostility towards the social and political changes that beset the United States during that time.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Updike's early Olinger period was set in the Pennsylvania of his youth; it ended around 1965 with the lyrical Of the Farm.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "After his early novels, Updike became most famous for his chronicling infidelity, adultery, and marital unrest, especially in suburban America; and for his controversial depiction of the confusion and freedom inherent in this breakdown of social mores. He once wrote that it was \"a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me\". The most prominent of Updike's novels of this vein is Couples (1968), a novel about adultery in a small fictional Massachusetts town called Tarbox. It garnered Updike an appearance on the cover of Time magazine with the headline \"The Adulterous Society\". Both the magazine article and, to an extent, the novel struck a chord of national concern over whether American society was abandoning all social standards of conduct in sexual matters.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Coup (1978), a lauded novel about an African dictatorship inspired by a visit he made to Africa, found Updike working in new territory.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1980, he published another novel featuring Harry Angstrom, Rabbit Is Rich, which won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—all three major American literary prizes. The novel found \"Rabbit the fat and happy owner of a Toyota dealership\". Updike found it difficult to end the book, because he was \"having so much fun\" in the imaginary county Rabbit and his family inhabited.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "After writing Rabbit Is Rich, Updike published The Witches of Eastwick (1984), a playful novel about witches living in Rhode Island. He described it as an attempt to \"make things right with my, what shall we call them, feminist detractors\". One of Updike's most popular novels, it was adapted as a film and included on Harold Bloom's list of canonical 20th-century literature (in The Western Canon). In 2008 Updike published The Widows of Eastwick, a return to the witches in their old age. It was his last published novel.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 1986, he published the unconventional novel Roger's Version, the second volume of the so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy, about an attempt to prove God's existence using a computer program. Author and critic Martin Amis called it a \"near-masterpiece\". The novel S. (1989), uncharacteristically featuring a female protagonist, concluded Updike's reworking of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Updike enjoyed working in series; in addition to the Rabbit novels and the Maples stories, a recurrent Updike alter ego is the moderately well-known, unprolific Jewish novelist and eventual Nobel laureate Henry Bech, chronicled in three comic short-story cycles: Bech, a Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1981) and Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998). These stories were compiled as The Complete Henry Bech (2001) by Everyman's Library. Bech is a comical and self-conscious antithesis of Updike's own literary persona: Jewish, a World War II veteran, reclusive, and unprolific to a fault.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1990, he published the last Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Over 500 pages long, the novel is among Updike's most celebrated. In 2000, Updike included the novella Rabbit Remembered in his collection Licks of Love, drawing the Rabbit saga to a close. His Pulitzers for the last two Rabbit novels make Updike one of only four writers to have won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, the others being William Faulkner, Booth Tarkington, and Colson Whitehead.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 1995, Everyman's Library collected and canonized the four novels as the omnibus Rabbit Angstrom; Updike wrote an introduction in which he described Rabbit as \"a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference was often slight.\" Updike later called Rabbit \"a brother to me, and a good friend. He opened me up as a writer.\"",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "After the publication of Rabbit at Rest, Updike spent the rest of the 1990s and early 2000s publishing novels in a wide range of genres; the work of this period was frequently experimental in nature. These styles included the historical fiction of Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), the magical realism of Brazil (1994), the science fiction of Toward the End of Time (1997), the postmodernism of Gertrude and Claudius (2000), and the experimental fiction of Seek My Face (2002).",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In the midst of these, he wrote what was for him a more conventional novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), a historical saga spanning several generations and exploring themes of religion and cinema in America. It is considered the most successful novel of Updike's late career. Some critics have predicted that posterity may consider the novel a \"late masterpiece overlooked or praised by rote in its day, only to be rediscovered by another generation\", while others, though appreciating the English mastery in the book, thought it overly dense with minute detail and swamped by its scenic depictions and spiritual malaise. In Villages (2004), Updike returned to the familiar territory of infidelities in New England. His 22nd novel, Terrorist (2006), the story of a fervent young extremist Muslim in New Jersey, garnered media attention but little critical praise.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 2003, Updike published The Early Stories, a large collection of his short fiction spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. More than 800 pages long, with over one hundred stories, it has been called \"a richly episodic and lyrical Bildungsroman ... in which Updike traces the trajectory from adolescence, college, married life, fatherhood, separation and divorce\". It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2004. This lengthy volume nevertheless excluded several stories found in his short-story collections of the same period.",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Updike worked in a wide array of genres, including fiction, poetry (most of it compiled in Collected Poems: 1953–1993, 1993), essays (collected in nine separate volumes), a play (Buchanan Dying, 1974), and a memoir (Self-Consciousness, 1989).",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Updike's array of awards includes two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, two National Book Awards, three National Book Critics Circle awards, the 1989 National Medal of Arts, the 2003 National Humanities Medal, and the Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement. The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Updike to present the 2008 Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. government's highest humanities honor; Updike's lecture was titled \"The Clarity of Things: What Is American about American Art\".",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "At the end of his life, Updike was working on a novel about St. Paul and early Christianity. Upon his death, The New Yorker published an appreciation by Adam Gopnik of Updike's lifetime association with the magazine, calling him \"one of the greatest of all modern writers, the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing\".",
"title": "Career as a writer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Biographer Adam Begley wrote that Updike \"transmuted the minutiae of his life\" in prose, which enriched his readers at the cost of being \"willing to sacrifice the happiness of people around him for his art\".",
"title": "Personal life and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 1953, while a student at Harvard, Updike married Mary Entwistle Pennington, an art student at Radcliffe College and daughter of a prominent Unitarian minister. She accompanied him to Oxford, England, where she attended art school and their first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1955. The couple had three more children together: David (born 1957), Michael (born 1959), and Miranda (born 1960).",
"title": "Personal life and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Updike was serially unfaithful, and eventually left the marriage in 1974 for Martha Ruggles Bernhard. In 1977, Updike and Bernhard married. In 1982, his first wife married an MIT academic. Updike and Bernhard lived for more than 30 years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Updike had three stepsons through Bernhard: John Bernhard, Jason Bernhard, and Frederic Bernhard. He died of lung cancer at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76. He is survived by seven grandchildren and seven step-grandchildren.",
"title": "Personal life and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Updike published eight volumes of poetry over his career, including his first book The Carpentered Hen (1958), and one of his last, the posthumous Endpoint (2009). The New Yorker published excerpts of Endpoint in its March 16, 2009 issue. Much of Updike's poetical output was recollected in Knopf's Collected Poems (1993). He wrote that \"I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form.\" The poet Thomas M. Disch noted that because Updike was such a well-known novelist, his poetry \"could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible\"; Disch saw Updike's light verse instead as a poetry of \"epigrammatical lucidity\". His poetry has been praised for its engagement with \"a variety of forms and topics\", its \"wit and precision\", and for its depiction of topics familiar to American readers.",
"title": "Poetry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "British poet Gavin Ewart praised Updike for the metaphysical quality of his poetry and for his ability \"to make the ordinary seem strange\", and called him one of the few modern novelists capable of writing good poetry. Reading Endpoint aloud, the critic Charles McGrath claimed that he found \"another, deeper music\" in Updike's poetry, finding that Updike's wordplay \"smooths and elides itself\" and has many subtle \"sound effects\". John Keenan, who praised the collection Endpoint as \"beautiful and poignant\", noted that his poetry's engagement with \"the everyday world in a technically accomplished manner seems to count against him\".",
"title": "Poetry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Updike was also a critic of literature and art, one frequently cited as one of the best American critics of his generation. In the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose, he listed his personal rules for literary criticism:",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never ... try to put the author \"in his place,\" making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "He reviewed \"nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th-century authors\", typically in The New Yorker, always trying to make his reviews \"animated\". He also championed young writers, comparing them to his own literary heroes including Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust. Good reviews from Updike were often seen as a significant achievement in terms of literary reputation and even sales; some of his positive reviews helped jump-start the careers of such younger writers as Erica Jong, Thomas Mallon and Jonathan Safran Foer.",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Bad reviews by Updike sometimes caused controversy, as when in late 2008 he gave a \"damning\" review of Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy.",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Updike was praised for his literary criticism's conventional simplicity and profundity, for being an aestheticist critic who saw literature on its own terms, and for his longtime commitment to the practice of literary criticism.",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Much of Updike's art criticism appeared in The New York Review of Books, where he often wrote about American art. His art criticism involved an aestheticism like that of his literary criticism.",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Updike's 2008 Jefferson Lecture, \"The Clarity of Things: What's American About American Art?\", dealt with the uniqueness of American art from the 18th century to the 20th. In the lecture he argued that American art, until the expressionist movement of the 20th century in which America declared its artistic \"independence\", is characterized by an insecurity not found in the artistic tradition of Europe.",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In Updike's own words:",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Two centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things, William Carlos Williams wrote in introducing his long poem Paterson that \"for the poet there are no ideas but in things.\" No ideas but in things. The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.",
"title": "Literary criticism and art criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "He is certainly one of the great American novelists of the 20th century.",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "—Martin Amis",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Updike is considered one of the greatest American fiction writers of his generation. He was widely praised as America's \"last true man of letters\", with an immense and far-reaching influence on many writers. The excellence of his prose style is acknowledged even by critics skeptical of other aspects of Updike's work.",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Several scholars have called attention to the importance of place, and especially of southeast Pennsylvania, in Updike's life and work. Bob Batchelor has described \"Updike's Pennsylvania sensibility\" as one with profound reaches that transcend time and place, such that in his writing, he used \"Pennsylvania as a character\" that went beyond geographic or political boundaries. SA Zylstra has compared Updike's Pennsylvania to Faulkner's Mississippi: \"As with the Mississippi of Faulkner's novels, the world of Updike's novels is fictional (as are such towns as Olinger and Brewer), while at the same time it is recognizable as a particular American region.\" Sanford Pinsker observes that \"Updike always felt a bit out of place\" in places like \"Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for most of his life. In his heart—and, more important, in his imagination—Updike remained a staunchly Pennsylvania boy.\" Similarly, Sylvie Mathé maintains that \"Updike's most memorable legacy appears to be his homage to Pennsylvania.\"",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Critics emphasize his \"inimitable prose style\" and \"rich description and language\", often favorably compared to Proust and Nabokov. Some critics consider the fluency of his prose to be a fault, questioning the intellectual depth and thematic seriousness of his work given the polish of his language and the perceived lightness of his themes, while others criticized Updike for misogynistic depictions of women and sexual relationships.",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Other critics argue that Updike's \"dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader\". On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful prose style, with \"shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life\".",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Updike's character Harry \"Rabbit\" Angstrom, the protagonist of the series of novels widely considered his magnum opus, has been said to have \"entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures\", along with Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and others. A 2002 list by Book magazine of the 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900 listed Rabbit in the top five. The Rabbit novels, the Henry Bech stories, and the Maples stories have been canonized by Everyman's Library.",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "After Updike's death, Harvard's Houghton Library acquired his papers, manuscripts, and letters, naming the collection the John Updike Archive. 2009 also saw the founding of the John Updike Society, a group of scholars dedicated to \"awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike's literary works\". The Society will begin publishing The John Updike Review, a journal of critical scholarship in the field of Updike studies. The John Updike Society First Biennial Conference took place in 2010 at Alvernia University.",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Eulogizing Updike in January 2009, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote that Updike's \"literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean\", and that Updike's death marked \"the end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half\".",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "McEwan said the Rabbit series is Updike's \"masterpiece and will surely be his monument\", and concluded:",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Updike is a master of effortless motion—between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike. This is at the heart of the tetralogy's achievement. Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, \"and not chop them down to what you think is the right size.\"",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Jonathan Raban, highlighting many of the virtues that have been ascribed to Updike's prose, called Rabbit at Rest \"one of the very few modern novels in English ... that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce, and not feel the draft ... It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy and richness.\"",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The novelist Philip Roth, considered one of Updike's chief literary rivals, wrote, \"John Updike is our time's greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne.\"",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The noted critic James Wood called Updike \"a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey\". In a review of Licks of Love (2001), Wood concluded that Updike's \"prose trusses things in very pretty ribbons\" but that there often exists in his work a \"hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic worldview\". Wood both praised and criticized Updike's language for having \"an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract\". According to Wood, Updike is capable of writing \"the perfect sentence\" and his style is characterized by a \"delicate deferral\" of the sentence. Of the beauty of Updike's language and his faith in the power of language that floats above reality, Wood wrote:",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "For some time now Updike's language has seemed to encode an almost theological optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures, Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books—here extended a further instance—suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us—'life's gallant, battered ongoingness ', indeed—and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In direct contrast to Wood's evaluation, the Oxford critic Thomas Karshan asserted that Updike is \"intensely intellectual\", with a style that constitutes his \"manner of thought\" not merely \"a set of dainty curlicues\". Karshan calls Updike an inheritor of the \"traditional role of the epic writer\". According to Karshan, \"Updike's writing picks up one voice, joins its cadence, and moves on to another, like Rabbit himself, driving south through radio zones on his flight away from his wife and child.\"",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Disagreeing with Wood's critique of Updike's alleged over-stylization, Karshan evaluates Updike's language as convincingly naturalistic:",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Updike's sentences at their frequent best are not a complacent expression of faith. Rather, like Proust's sentences in Updike's description, they \"seek an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith.\" Updike aspires to \"this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence towards what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs.\" Their hesitancy and self-qualification arise as they meet obstacles, readjust and pass on. If life is bountiful in New England, it is also evasive and easily missed. In the stories Updike tells, marriages and homes are made only to be broken. His descriptiveness embodies a promiscuous love for everything in the world. But love is precarious, Updike is always saying, since it thrives on obstructions and makes them if it cannot find them.",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Harold Bloom once called Updike \"a minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable stylist ... He specializes in the easier pleasures.\" Bloom also edited an important collection of critical essays on Updike in 1987, in which he concluded that Updike possessed a major style and was capable of writing beautiful sentences which are \"beyond praise\"; nevertheless, Bloom went on, \"the American sublime will never touch his pages\".",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "On The Dick Cavett Show in 1981, the novelist and short-story writer John Cheever was asked why he did not write book reviews and what he would say if given the chance to review Rabbit Is Rich. He replied:",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The reason I didn't review the book is that it perhaps would have taken me three weeks. My appreciation of it is that diverse and that complicated ... John is perhaps the only contemporary writer who I know now who gives me the sense of the fact that life is—the life that we perform is in an environment that enjoys a grandeur that escapes us. Rabbit is very much possessed of a paradise lost, of a paradise known fleetingly perhaps through erotic love and a paradise that he pursues through his children. It's the vastness of John's scope that I would have described if I could through a review.",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The Fiction Circus, an online and multimedia literary magazine, called Updike one of the \"four Great American Novelists\" of his time along with Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, each jokingly represented as a sign of the Zodiac. Furthermore, Updike was seen as the \"best prose writer in the world\", like Nabokov before him. But in contrast to many literati and establishment obituaries, the Circus asserted that nobody \"thought of Updike as a vital writer\".",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker evaluated Updike as \"the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing ... He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisite urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him.\"",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The critic James Wolcott, in a review of Updike's last novel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008), noted that Updike's penchant for observing America's decline is coupled with an affirmation of America's ultimate merits: \"Updike elegises entropy American-style with a resigned, paternal, disappointed affection that distinguishes his fiction from that of grimmer declinists: Don DeLillo, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth. America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm.\"",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Gore Vidal, in a controversial essay in the Times Literary Supplement, professed to have \"never taken Updike seriously as a writer\". He criticizes his political and aesthetic worldview for its \"blandness and acceptance of authority in any form\". He concludes that Updike \"describes to no purpose\". In reference to Updike's wide establishment acclaim, Vidal mockingly called him \"our good child\" and excoriated his alleged political conservatism. Vidal ultimately concluded, \"Updike's work is more and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up.\"",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, called Updike \"one of the most elegant and coolly observant writers of his generation\".",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The short-story writer Lorrie Moore, who once described Updike as \"American literature's greatest short story writer ... and arguably our greatest writer\", reviewed Updike's body of short stories in The New York Review, praising their intricate detail and rich imagery: \"his eye and his prose never falter, even when the world fails to send its more socially complicated revelations directly his story's way\". In her work on Updike, Biljana Dojčinović has argued that his short story collection The Afterlife and Other Stories is a pivotal work that demonstrates a change in his writing on feminism.",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In November 2008, the editors of the UK's Literary Review magazine awarded Updike their Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award, which celebrates \"crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature\".",
"title": "Critical reputation and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "All in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "—Rabbit Angstrom.",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The principal themes in Updike's work are religion, sex, and America as well as death. Often he would combine them, frequently in his favored terrain of \"the American small town, Protestant middle class\", of which he once said, \"I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.\"",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "For example, the decline of religion in America is chronicled in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) alongside the history of cinema, and Rabbit Angstrom contemplates the merits of sex with the wife of his friend Reverend Jack Eccles while the latter is giving his sermon in Rabbit, Run (1960).",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Critics have often noted that Updike imbued language itself with a kind of faith in its efficacy, and that his tendency to construct narratives spanning many years and books—the Rabbit series, the Henry Bech series, Eastwick, the Maples stories—demonstrates a similar faith in the transcendent power of fiction and language. Updike's novels often act as dialectical theological debates between the book itself and the reader, the novel endowed with theological beliefs meant to challenge the reader as the plot runs its course. Rabbit Angstrom himself acts as a Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith.",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Describing his purpose in writing prose, Updike himself, in the introduction to his Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2004), wrote that his aim was always \"to give the mundane its beautiful due\". Elsewhere he famously said, \"When I write, I aim my mind not towards New York City but towards a vague spot east of Kansas.\" Some have suggested that the \"best statement of Updike's aesthetic comes in his early memoir 'The Dogwood Tree'\" (1962): \"Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. And in fact there is a color, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm.\"",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Sex in Updike's work is noted for its ubiquity and the reverence with which he described it:",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "His contemporaries invade the ground with wild Dionysian yelps, mocking both the taboos that would make it forbidden and the lust that drives men to it. Updike can be honest about it, and his descriptions of the sight, taste and texture of women's bodies can be perfect little madrigals.",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The critic Edward Champion notes that Updike's prose heavily favors \"external sexual imagery\" rife with \"explicit anatomical detail\" rather than descriptions of \"internal emotion\" in descriptions of sex. In Champion's interview with Updike on The Bat Segundo Show, Updike replied that he perhaps favored such imagery to concretize and make sex \"real\" in his prose. Another sexual theme commonly addressed in Updike is adultery, especially in a suburban, middle class setting, most famously in Couples (1968). The Updikean narrator is often \"a man guilty of infidelity and abandonment of his family\".",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Similarly, Updike wrote about America with a certain nostalgia, reverence, and recognition and celebration of America's broad diversity. ZZ Packer wrote that in Updike, \"there seemed a strange ability to harken both America the Beautiful as well as America the Plain Jane, and the lovely Protestant backbone in his fiction and essays, when he decided to show it off, was as progressive and enlightened as it was unapologetic.\"",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The Rabbit novels in particular can be viewed, according to Julian Barnes, as \"a distraction from, and a glittering confirmation of, the vast bustling ordinariness of American life\". But as Updike celebrated ordinary America, he also alluded to its decline: at times, he was \"so clearly disturbed by the downward spin of America\". Adam Gopnik concludes that \"Updike's great subject was the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with the materials produced by mass culture. He documented how the death of a credible religious belief has been offset by sex and adultery and movies and sports and Toyotas and family love and family obligation. For Updike, this effort was blessed, and very nearly successful.\"",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Updike's novels about America almost always contain references to political events of the time. In this sense, they are artifacts of their historical eras, showing how national leaders shape and define their times. The lives of ordinary citizens take place against this wider background.",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Updike often wrote about death, his characters providing a \"mosaic of reactions\" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation. In The Poorhouse Fair (1959), the elderly John Hook intones, \"There is no goodness without belief ... And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved, to take into the next\", demonstrating a religious, metaphysical faith present in much of Updike's work.",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "For Rabbit Angstrom, with his constant musings on mortality, his near-witnessing of his daughter's death, and his often shaky faith, death is more frightening and less obvious in its ramifications. At the end of Rabbit at Rest (1990), though, Rabbit demonstrates a kind of certainty, telling his son Nelson on his deathbed, \"... But enough. Maybe. Enough.\" In The Centaur (1963), George Caldwell has no religious faith and is afraid of his cancer. Death can also be a sort of unseen terror; it \"occurs offstage but reverberates for survivors as an absent presence\".",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Updike himself also experienced a \"crisis over the afterlife\", and indeed",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "many of his heroes shared the same sort of existential fears the author acknowledged he had suffered as a young man: Henry Bech's concern that he was 'a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust,' or Colonel Ellelloû's lament that 'we will be forgotten, all of us forgotten.' Their fear of death threatens to make everything they do feel meaningless, and it also sends them running after God—looking for some reassurance that there is something beyond the familiar, everyday world with 'its signals and buildings and cars and bricks.'",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem \"Perfection Wasted\" (1990):",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic ...",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "See also #External links for links to archives of his essays and reviews in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "",
"title": "Awards"
}
]
| John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His most famous work is his "Rabbit" series, which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", critics recognized his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output – a book a year on average. Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity". His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans, its emphasis on Christian theology, and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail. His work has attracted significant critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered one of the great American writers of his time. Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice that describes the physical world extravagantly while remaining squarely in the realist tradition". He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due". | 2001-08-13T04:09:57Z | 2023-12-24T21:24:25Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Updike |
15,825 | John Steinbeck | John Ernst Steinbeck (/ˈstaɪnbɛk/; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". He has been called "a giant of American letters."
During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. By the 75th anniversary of its publishing date, it had sold 14 million copies.
Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.
Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German, English, and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck (1828–1913), Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, was a founder of Mount Hope, a short-lived messianic farming colony in Palestine that disbanded after Arab attackers killed his brother and raped his brother's wife and mother-in-law. He arrived in the United States in 1858, shortening the family name to Steinbeck. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, Germany, is still named "Großsteinbeck".
His father, John Ernst Steinbeck (1862–1935), served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton (1867–1934), a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion for reading and writing. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church, although Steinbeck later became agnostic. Steinbeck lived in a small rural valley (no more than a frontier settlement) set in some of the world's most fertile soil, about 25 miles from the Pacific Coast. Both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches including the Post Ranch in Big Sur. He later labored with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. There he learned of the harsher aspects of the migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in Of Mice and Men. He explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms. While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had considerable mechanical aptitude and fondness for repairing things he owned.
Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went on to study English literature at Stanford University near Palo Alto, leaving without a degree in 1925. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to publish his work, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife. They married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money by manufacturing plaster mannequins.
When their money ran out six months later due to a slow market, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks outside the Monterey city limits. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crabs that he gathered from the sea, and fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When those sources failed, Steinbeck and his wife accepted welfare, and on rare occasions, stole bacon from the local produce market. Whatever food they had, they shared with their friends. Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row.
In 1930, Steinbeck met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and mentor to Steinbeck during the following decade, teaching him a great deal about philosophy and biology. Ricketts, usually very quiet, yet likable, with an inner self-sufficiency and an encyclopedic knowledge of diverse subjects, became a focus of Steinbeck's attention. Ricketts had taken a college class from Warder Clyde Allee, a biologist and ecological theorist, who would go on to write a classic early textbook on ecology. Ricketts became a proponent of ecological thinking, in which man was only one part of a great chain of being, caught in a web of life too large for him to control or understand. Meanwhile, Ricketts operated a biological lab on the coast of Monterey, selling biological samples of small animals, fish, rays, starfish, turtles, and other marine forms to schools and colleges.
Between 1930 and 1936, Steinbeck and Ricketts became close friends. Steinbeck's wife began working at the lab as secretary-bookkeeper. Steinbeck helped on an informal basis. They formed a common bond based on their love of music and art, and John learned biology and Ricketts' ecological philosophy. When Steinbeck became emotionally upset, Ricketts sometimes played music for him.
Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, published in 1929, is loosely based on the life and death of privateer Henry Morgan. It centers on Morgan's assault and sacking of Panamá Viejo, sometimes referred to as the "Cup of Gold", and on the women, brighter than the sun, who were said to be found there. In 1930, Steinbeck wrote a werewolf murder mystery, Murder at Full Moon, that has never been published because Steinbeck considered it unworthy of publication.
Between 1930 and 1933, Steinbeck produced three shorter works. The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932, consists of twelve interconnected stories about a valley near Monterey, which was discovered by a Spanish corporal while chasing runaway Indian slaves. In 1933 Steinbeck published The Red Pony, a 100-page, four-chapter story weaving in memories of Steinbeck's childhood. To a God Unknown, named after a Vedic hymn, follows the life of a homesteader and his family in California, depicting a character with a primal and pagan worship of the land he works.
Before his novel Tortilla Flat (1935), Steinbeck was an obscure writer "with little success". Although he had not achieved the status of a well-known writer, he never doubted that he would achieve greatness.
Steinbeck achieved his first critical success with Tortilla Flat, a novel set in post-war Monterey, California, that won the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. It portrays the adventures of a group of classless and usually homeless young men in Monterey after World War I, just before U.S. prohibition. They are portrayed in ironic comparison to mythic knights on a quest and reject nearly all the standard mores of American society in enjoyment of a dissolute life devoted to wine, lust, camaraderie and petty theft. In presenting the 1962 Nobel Prize to Steinbeck, the Swedish Academy cited "spicy and comic tales about a gang of paisanos, asocial individuals who, in their wild revels, are almost caricatures of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. It has been said that in the United States this book came as a welcome antidote to the gloom of the then prevailing depression." Tortilla Flat was adapted as a 1942 film of the same name, starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield, a friend of Steinbeck. With some of the proceeds, he built a summer ranch-home in Los Gatos.
Steinbeck began to write a series of "California novels" and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression. These included In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. He also wrote an article series called The Harvest Gypsies for the San Francisco News about the plight of the migrant worker.
Of Mice and Men was a drama about the dreams of two migrant agricultural laborers in California. It was critically acclaimed and Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize citation called it a "little masterpiece". Its stage production was a hit, starring Wallace Ford as George and Broderick Crawford as George's companion, the mentally childlike, but physically powerful itinerant farmhand Lennie. Steinbeck refused to travel from his home in California to attend any performance of the play during its New York run, telling director George S. Kaufman that the play as it existed in his own mind was "perfect" and that anything presented on stage would only be a disappointment. Steinbeck wrote two more stage plays (The Moon Is Down and Burning Bright).
Of Mice and Men was also adapted as a 1939 Hollywood film, with Lon Chaney Jr. as Lennie (he had filled the role in the Los Angeles stage production) and Burgess Meredith as George. Meredith and Steinbeck became close friends for the next two decades. Another film based on the novella was made in 1992 starring Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie.
Steinbeck followed this wave of success with The Grapes of Wrath (1939), based on newspaper articles about migrant agricultural workers that he had written in San Francisco. It is commonly considered his greatest work. According to The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month, it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. Later that year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted as a film directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad; Fonda was nominated for the best actor Academy Award. Grapes was controversial. Steinbeck's New Deal political views, negative portrayal of aspects of capitalism, and sympathy for the plight of workers, led to a backlash against the author, especially close to home. Claiming the book both was obscene and misrepresented conditions in the county, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries in August 1939. This ban lasted until January 1941.
Of the controversy, Steinbeck wrote, "The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy."
The film versions of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men (by two different movie studios) were in production simultaneously, allowing Steinbeck to spend a full day on the set of The Grapes of Wrath and the next day on the set of Of Mice and Men.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast to give himself time off from his writing and to collect biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Their coauthored book, Sea of Cortez (December 1941), about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which was part travelogue and part natural history, published just as the U.S. entered World War II, never found an audience and did not sell well. However, in 1951, Steinbeck republished the narrative portion of the book as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, under his name only (though Ricketts had written some of it). This work remains in print today.
Although Carol accompanied Steinbeck on the trip, their marriage was beginning to suffer, and ended a year later, in 1941, even as Steinbeck worked on the manuscript for the book. In 1942, after his divorce from Carol he married Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger.
Ricketts was Steinbeck's model for the character of "Doc" in Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954), "Friend Ed" in Burning Bright, and characters in In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Ecological themes recur in Steinbeck's novels of the period.
Steinbeck's close relations with Ricketts ended in 1941 when Steinbeck moved away from Pacific Grove and divorced his wife Carol. Ricketts' biographer Eric Enno Tamm opined that, except for East of Eden (1952), Steinbeck's writing declined after Ricketts' untimely death in 1948.
Steinbeck's novel The Moon Is Down (1942), about the Socrates-inspired spirit of resistance in an occupied village in Northern Europe, was made into a film almost immediately. It was presumed that the unnamed country of the novel was Norway and the occupiers the Germans. In 1945, Steinbeck received the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.
In 1943, Steinbeck served as a World War II war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and worked with the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA). It was at that time he became friends with Will Lang Jr. of Time/Life magazine. During the war, Steinbeck accompanied the commando raids of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s Beach Jumpers program, which launched small-unit diversion operations against German-held islands in the Mediterranean. At one point, he accompanied Fairbanks on an invasion of an island off the coast of Italy and used a Thompson submachine gun to help capture Italian and German prisoners. Some of his writings from this period were incorporated in the documentary Once There Was a War (1958).
Steinbeck returned from the war with a number of wounds from shrapnel and some psychological trauma. He treated himself, as ever, by writing. He wrote Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Lifeboat (1944), and with screenwriter Jack Wagner, A Medal for Benny (1945), about paisanos from Tortilla Flat going to war. He later requested that his name be removed from the credits of Lifeboat, because he believed the final version of the film had racist undertones. In 1944, suffering from homesickness for his Pacific Grove/Monterey life of the 1930s, he wrote Cannery Row (1945), which became so famous that in 1958 Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, the setting of the book, was renamed Cannery Row.
After the war, he wrote The Pearl (1947), knowing it would be filmed eventually. The story first appeared in the December 1945 issue of Woman's Home Companion magazine as "The Pearl of the World". It was illustrated by John Alan Maxwell. The novel is an imaginative telling of a story which Steinbeck had heard in La Paz in 1940, as related in The Log From the Sea of Cortez, which he described in Chapter 11 as being "so much like a parable that it almost can't be". Steinbeck traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico for the filming with Wagner who helped with the script; on this trip he would be inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a film script (Viva Zapata!) directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn.
In 1947, Steinbeck made his first trip to the Soviet Union with photographer Robert Capa. They visited Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Batumi and Stalingrad, some of the first Americans to visit many parts of the USSR since the communist revolution. Steinbeck's 1948 book about their experiences, A Russian Journal, was illustrated with Capa's photos. In 1948, the year the book was published, Steinbeck was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1952 Steinbeck's longest novel, East of Eden, was published. According to his third wife, Elaine, he considered it his magnum opus, his greatest novel. Also in 1952, John Steinbeck appeared as the on-screen narrator of 20th Century Fox's film, O. Henry's Full House. Although Steinbeck later admitted he was uncomfortable before the camera, he provided interesting introductions to several filmed adaptations of short stories by the legendary writer O. Henry. About the same time, Steinbeck recorded readings of several of his short stories for Columbia Records; the recordings provide a record of Steinbeck's deep, resonant voice.
Following the success of Viva Zapata!, Steinbeck collaborated with Kazan on the 1955 film East of Eden, James Dean's movie debut.
From March to October 1959, Steinbeck and his third wife Elaine rented a cottage in the hamlet of Discove, Redlynch, near Bruton in Somerset, England, while Steinbeck researched his retelling of the Arthurian legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Glastonbury Tor was visible from the cottage, and Steinbeck also visited the nearby hillfort of Cadbury Castle, the supposed site of King Arthur's court of Camelot. The unfinished manuscript was published after his death in 1976, as The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. The Steinbecks recounted the time spent in Somerset as the happiest of their life together.
Travels with Charley: In Search of America is a travelogue of his 1960 road trip with his poodle Charley. Steinbeck bemoans his lost youth and roots, while dispensing both criticism and praise for the United States. According to Steinbeck's son Thom, Steinbeck made the journey because he knew he was dying and wanted to see the country one last time.
Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), examines moral decline in the United States. The protagonist Ethan grows discontented with his own moral decline and that of those around him. The book has a very different tone from Steinbeck's amoral and ecological stance in earlier works such as Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. It was not a critical success. Many reviewers recognized the importance of the novel, but were disappointed that it was not another Grapes of Wrath. In the Nobel Prize presentation speech the next year, however, the Swedish Academy cited it most favorably: "Here he attained the same standard which he set in The Grapes of Wrath. Again he holds his position as an independent expounder of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American, be it good or bad."
Apparently taken aback by the critical reception of this novel, and the critical outcry when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, Steinbeck published no more fiction in the remaining six years before his death.
In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature for his "realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception". The selection was heavily criticized, and described as "one of the Academy's biggest mistakes" in one Swedish newspaper. The reaction of American literary critics was also harsh. The New York Times asked why the Nobel committee gave the award to an author whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising", noting that "[T]he international character of the award and the weight attached to it raise questions about the mechanics of selection and how close the Nobel committee is to the main currents of American writing. ... [W]e think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer ... whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age". Steinbeck, when asked on the day of the announcement if he deserved the Nobel, replied: "Frankly, no." Biographer Jackson Benson notes, "[T]his honor was one of the few in the world that one could not buy nor gain by political maneuver. It was precisely because the committee made its judgment ... on its own criteria, rather than plugging into 'the main currents of American writing' as defined by the critical establishment, that the award had value." In his acceptance speech later in the year in Stockholm, he said:
the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
Fifty years later, in 2012, the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a "compromise choice" among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean Anouilh and Danish author Karen Blixen. The declassified documents showed that he was chosen as the best of a bad lot. "There aren't any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation," wrote committee member Henry Olsson. Although the committee believed Steinbeck's best work was behind him by 1962, committee member Anders Österling believed the release of his novel The Winter of Our Discontent showed that "after some signs of slowing down in recent years, [Steinbeck has] regained his position as a social truth-teller [and is an] authentic realist fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway."
Although modest about his own talent as a writer, Steinbeck talked openly of his own admiration of certain writers. In 1953, he wrote that he considered cartoonist Al Capp, creator of the satirical Li'l Abner, "possibly the best writer in the world today". At his own first Nobel Prize press conference he was asked his favorite authors and works and replied: "Hemingway's short stories and nearly everything Faulkner wrote."
In September 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Steinbeck the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In 1967, at the behest of Newsday magazine, Steinbeck went to Vietnam to report on the war. He thought of the Vietnam War as a heroic venture and was considered a hawk for his position on the war. His sons served in Vietnam before his death, and Steinbeck visited one son in the battlefield. At one point he was allowed to man a machine-gun watch position at night at a firebase while his son and other members of his platoon slept.
Steinbeck and his first wife, Carol Henning, married in January 1930 in Los Angeles. By 1940, their marriage was beginning to suffer, and it ended a year later. In 1942, after his divorce from Carol, Steinbeck married Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger. With his second wife Steinbeck had two sons, Thomas ("Thom") Myles Steinbeck (1944–2016) and John Steinbeck IV (1946–1991).
In May 1948, Steinbeck returned to California on an emergency trip to be with his friend Ed Ricketts, who had been seriously injured when a train struck his car. Ricketts died hours before Steinbeck arrived. Upon returning home, Steinbeck was confronted by Gwyn, who asked for a divorce, which became final in October. Steinbeck spent the year after Ricketts' death in deep depression.
In June 1949, Steinbeck met stage manager Elaine Scott at a restaurant in Carmel, California. Steinbeck and Scott eventually began a relationship, and in December 1950 they married, within a week of Scott's finalizing her own divorce from actor Zachary Scott. This third marriage for Steinbeck lasted until his death in 1968.
Steinbeck was an acquaintance of modernist poet Robinson Jeffers, a Californian neighbor. In a letter to Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck wrote: "Robinson Jeffers and his wife came in to call the other day. He looks a little older but that is all. And she is just the same."
In 1962, Steinbeck began acting as friend and mentor to the young writer and naturalist Jack Rudloe, who was trying to establish his own biological supply company, now Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida. Their correspondence continued until Steinbeck's death.
In February 1966, Steinbeck and his wife traveled to Israel. He visited in Tel Aviv the site of Mount Hope, a farm community established by his grandfather, whose brother, Friedrich Großsteinbeck, had been murdered by Arab marauders in 1858 during the Outrages at Jaffa.
John Steinbeck died in New York City on December 20, 1968, during the 1968 flu pandemic of heart disease and congestive heart failure. He was 66, and had been a lifelong smoker. An autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries.
In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and interred on March 4, 1969 at the Hamilton family gravesite in Salinas, with those of his parents and maternal grandparents. His third wife, Elaine, was buried in the plot in 2004. He had written to his doctor that he felt deeply "in his flesh" that he would not survive his physical death, and that the biological end of his life was the final end to it.
Steinbeck's incomplete novel based on the King Arthur legends of Malory and others, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was published in 1976.
Many of Steinbeck's works are required reading in American high schools. In England, Of Mice and Men was one of the key texts used by the examining body AQA for its English Literature GCSE until its removal from the reformed specification that was first examined in June 2018. The text is still widely studied by GCSE students in Wales and Northern Ireland, although calls have been made for its removal in Northern Ireland due to concerns about the use of racial slurs in the text. A study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature in the United States found that Of Mice and Men was one of the ten most frequently read books in public high schools. Steinbeck's works have also been banned. The Grapes of Wrath was banned in August 1939 by the Kern County Board of Supervisors from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries. It was burned in Salinas on two occasions. In 2003, a school board in Mississippi banned it on the grounds of profanity. According to the American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with Of Mice and Men ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States.
Steinbeck grew up in California's Salinas Valley, a culturally diverse place with a rich migratory and immigrant history. This upbringing imparted a regionalistic flavor to his writing, giving many of his works a distinct sense of place. Salinas, Monterey and parts of the San Joaquin Valley were the setting for many of his stories. The area is now sometimes referred to as "Steinbeck Country". Most of his early work dealt with subjects familiar to him from his formative years. An exception was his first novel, Cup of Gold, which concerns the pirate/privateer Henry Morgan, whose adventures had captured Steinbeck's imagination as a child.
In his subsequent novels, Steinbeck found a more authentic voice by drawing upon direct memories of his life in California. His childhood friend, Max Wagner, a brother of Jack Wagner and who later became a film actor, served as inspiration for The Red Pony. Later he used actual American conditions and events in the first half of the 20th century, which he had experienced first-hand as a reporter. Steinbeck often populated his stories with struggling characters; his works examined the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
His later work reflected his wide range of interests, including marine biology, politics, religion, history and mythology. One of his last published works was Travels with Charley, a travelogue of a road trip he took in 1960 to rediscover America.
Steinbeck's boyhood home, a turreted Victorian building in downtown Salinas, has been preserved and restored by the Valley Guild, a nonprofit organization. Fixed menu lunches are served Monday through Saturday, and the house is open for tours on Sunday afternoons during the summer.
The National Steinbeck Center is two blocks away at 1 Main Street. Dana Gioia (chair of the National Endowment for the Arts) told an audience at the center, "This is really the best modern literary shrine in the country, and I've seen them all." Its "Steinbeckiana" includes "Rocinante", the camper-truck in which Steinbeck made the cross-country trip described in Travels with Charley.
His father's cottage on Eleventh Street in Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck wrote some of his earliest books, also survives.
In Monterey, Ed Ricketts' laboratory survives (though it is not yet open to the public) and at the corner which Steinbeck describes in Cannery Row, also the store which once belonged to Lee Chong, and the adjacent vacant lot frequented by the hobos of Cannery Row. The site of the Hovden Sardine Cannery next to Doc's laboratory is now occupied by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. In 1958 the street that Steinbeck described as "Cannery Row" in the novel, once named Ocean View Avenue, was renamed Cannery Row in honor of the novel. The town of Monterey has commemorated Steinbeck's work with an avenue of flags depicting characters from Cannery Row, historical plaques, and sculptured busts depicting Steinbeck and Ricketts.
On February 27, 1979 (the 77th anniversary of the writer's birth), the United States Postal Service issued a stamp featuring Steinbeck, starting the Postal Service's Literary Arts series honoring American writers.
Steinbeck was inducted in to the DeMolay International Hall of Fame in 1995.
On December 5, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Steinbeck into the California Hall of Fame, located at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. His son, author Thomas Steinbeck, accepted the award on his behalf.
Monterey Bay Roller Derby was founded in 2010. Their team names over the years have referenced Steinbeck, including Beasts of Eden, Cannery Rollers, Steinwreckers and Babes of Wrath. Their juniors league was known as the Dread Ponies.
To commemorate the 112th anniversary of Steinbeck's birthday on February 27, 2014, Google displayed an interactive doodle utilizing animation which included illustrations portraying scenes and quotes from several novels by the author.
Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts appear as fictionalized characters in the 2016 novel, Monterey Bay about the founding of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, by Lindsay Hatton (Penguin Press).
In February 2016, Caltrans installed signage to identify a five-mile segment of U.S. Route 101 in Salinas as the John Steinbeck Highway, in accordance with a 2014 state legislative resolution.
In 2019 the Sag Harbor town board approved the creation of the John Steinbeck Waterfront Park across from the iconic town windmill. The structures on the parcel were demolished and park benches installed near the beach. The Beebe windmill replica already had a plaque memorializing the author who wrote from a small hut overlooking the cove during his sojourn in the literary haven.
Steinbeck was affiliated to the St. Paul's Episcopal Church and he stayed attached throughout his life to Episcopalianism. Especially in his works of fiction, Steinbeck was highly conscious of religion and incorporated it into his style and themes. The shaping of his characters often drew on the Bible and the theology of Anglicanism, combining elements of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.
Steinbeck distanced himself from religious views when he left Salinas for Stanford. However, the work he produced still reflected the language of his childhood at Salinas, and his beliefs remained a powerful influence within his fiction and non-fiction work. William Ray considered his Episcopal views are prominently displayed in The Grapes of Wrath, in which themes of conversion and self-sacrifice play a major part in the characters Casy and Tom who achieve spiritual transcendence through conversion.
Steinbeck's contacts with leftist authors, journalists, and labor union figures may have influenced his writing. He joined the League of American Writers, a Communist organization, in 1935. Steinbeck was mentored by radical writers Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter. Through Francis Whitaker, a member of the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club for writers, Steinbeck met with strike organizers from the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union. In 1939, he signed a letter with some other writers in support of the Soviet invasion of Finland and the Soviet-established puppet government.
Documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2012 indicate that Steinbeck offered his services to the Agency in 1952, while planning a European tour, and the Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, was eager to take him up on the offer. What work, if any, Steinbeck may have performed for the CIA during the Cold War is unknown. Documents released by the Security Service of Ukraine following the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 indicate that the Soviet KGB suspected him of being an American agent when he visited locations within the USSR, including Kyiv, in 1947. Consequently, they watched Steinbeck closely and solicited information about him from their informers.
Steinbeck was a close associate of playwright Arthur Miller. In June 1957, Steinbeck took a personal and professional risk by supporting him when Miller refused to name names in the House Un-American Activities Committee trials. Steinbeck called the period one of the "strangest and most frightening times a government and people have ever faced".
In 1963, Steinbeck visited the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic at the behest of John Kennedy. During his visit he sat for a rare portrait by painter Martiros Saryan and visited Geghard Monastery. He also met with Armenian poet Hovhannes Shiraz in Yerevan. Steinbeck’s letter of thanks for Shiraz's hospitality is now displayed at the Shiraz house museum in Gyumri. Footage of this visit filmed by Rafael Aramyan was sold in 2013 by his granddaughter.
In 1967, when he was sent to Vietnam to report on the war, his sympathetic portrayal of the United States Army led the New York Post to denounce him for betraying his leftist past. Steinbeck's biographer, Jay Parini, says Steinbeck's friendship with President Lyndon B. Johnson influenced his views on Vietnam. Steinbeck may also have been concerned about the safety of his son serving in Vietnam.
Along with Albert Einstein, Steinbeck was one of the sponsors of the Peoples' World Convention (PWC), also known as Peoples' World Constituent Assembly (PWCA), which took place in 1950-51 at Palais Electoral, Geneva, Switzerland.
Steinbeck complained publicly about government harassment. Thomas Steinbeck, the author's eldest son, said that J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI at the time, could find no basis for prosecuting Steinbeck and therefore used his power to encourage the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to audit Steinbeck's taxes every single year of his life, just to annoy him. According to Thomas, a true artist is one who "without a thought for self, stands up against the stones of condemnation, and speaks for those who are given no real voice in the halls of justice, or the halls of government. By doing so, these people will naturally become the enemies of the political status quo."
In a 1942 letter to United States Attorney General Francis Biddle, John Steinbeck wrote: "Do you suppose you could ask Edgar's boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I am an enemy alien. It is getting tiresome." The FBI denied that Steinbeck was under investigation.
In 1936, Steinbeck published the first of what came to be known as his Dustbowl trilogy, which included Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. This first novel tells the story of a fruit pickers' strike in California which is both aided and damaged by the help of "the Party", generally taken to be the Communist Party, although this is never spelled out in the book.
Of Mice and Men is a tragedy that was written as a play in 1937. The story is about two traveling ranch workers, George and Lennie, trying to earn enough money to buy their own farm/ranch. As it is set in 1930s America, it provides an insight into The Great Depression, encompassing themes of racism, loneliness, prejudice against the mentally ill, and the struggle for personal independence. Along with The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and The Pearl, Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck's best known works. It was made into a movie three times, in 1939 starring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney Jr., and Betty Field, in 1982 starring Randy Quaid, Robert Blake and Ted Neeley, and in 1992 starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.
The Grapes of Wrath is set in the Great Depression and describes a family of sharecroppers, the Joads, who were driven from their land due to the dust storms of the Dust Bowl. The title is a reference to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Some critics found it too sympathetic to the workers' plight and too critical of capitalism, but it found a large audience of its own. It won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction (novels) and was adapted as a film starring Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell and directed by John Ford.
Steinbeck deals with the nature of good and evil in this Salinas Valley saga. The story follows two families: the Hamiltons – based on Steinbeck's own maternal ancestry – and the Trasks, reprising stories about the Biblical Adam and his progeny. His paternal ancestry is also reflected in the story. The book was published in 1952. Portions of the novel were made into a 1955 movie directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean.
In 1960, Steinbeck bought a pickup truck and had it modified with a custom-built camper top – which was rare at the time – and drove across the United States with his faithful "blue" standard poodle, Charley. Steinbeck nicknamed his truck Rocinante after Don Quixote's "noble steed". In this sometimes comical, sometimes melancholic book, Steinbeck describes what he sees from Maine to Montana to California, and from there to Texas and Louisiana and back to his home on Long Island. The restored camper truck is on exhibit in the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.
John Steinbeck Bibliography | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Ernst Steinbeck (/ˈstaɪnbɛk/; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature \"for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception\". He has been called \"a giant of American letters.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. By the 75th anniversary of its publishing date, it had sold 14 million copies.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German, English, and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck (1828–1913), Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, was a founder of Mount Hope, a short-lived messianic farming colony in Palestine that disbanded after Arab attackers killed his brother and raped his brother's wife and mother-in-law. He arrived in the United States in 1858, shortening the family name to Steinbeck. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, Germany, is still named \"Großsteinbeck\".",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "His father, John Ernst Steinbeck (1862–1935), served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton (1867–1934), a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion for reading and writing. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church, although Steinbeck later became agnostic. Steinbeck lived in a small rural valley (no more than a frontier settlement) set in some of the world's most fertile soil, about 25 miles from the Pacific Coast. Both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches including the Post Ranch in Big Sur. He later labored with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. There he learned of the harsher aspects of the migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in Of Mice and Men. He explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms. While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had considerable mechanical aptitude and fondness for repairing things he owned.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went on to study English literature at Stanford University near Palo Alto, leaving without a degree in 1925. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to publish his work, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife. They married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money by manufacturing plaster mannequins.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "When their money ran out six months later due to a slow market, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks outside the Monterey city limits. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crabs that he gathered from the sea, and fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When those sources failed, Steinbeck and his wife accepted welfare, and on rare occasions, stole bacon from the local produce market. Whatever food they had, they shared with their friends. Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1930, Steinbeck met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and mentor to Steinbeck during the following decade, teaching him a great deal about philosophy and biology. Ricketts, usually very quiet, yet likable, with an inner self-sufficiency and an encyclopedic knowledge of diverse subjects, became a focus of Steinbeck's attention. Ricketts had taken a college class from Warder Clyde Allee, a biologist and ecological theorist, who would go on to write a classic early textbook on ecology. Ricketts became a proponent of ecological thinking, in which man was only one part of a great chain of being, caught in a web of life too large for him to control or understand. Meanwhile, Ricketts operated a biological lab on the coast of Monterey, selling biological samples of small animals, fish, rays, starfish, turtles, and other marine forms to schools and colleges.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Between 1930 and 1936, Steinbeck and Ricketts became close friends. Steinbeck's wife began working at the lab as secretary-bookkeeper. Steinbeck helped on an informal basis. They formed a common bond based on their love of music and art, and John learned biology and Ricketts' ecological philosophy. When Steinbeck became emotionally upset, Ricketts sometimes played music for him.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, published in 1929, is loosely based on the life and death of privateer Henry Morgan. It centers on Morgan's assault and sacking of Panamá Viejo, sometimes referred to as the \"Cup of Gold\", and on the women, brighter than the sun, who were said to be found there. In 1930, Steinbeck wrote a werewolf murder mystery, Murder at Full Moon, that has never been published because Steinbeck considered it unworthy of publication.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Between 1930 and 1933, Steinbeck produced three shorter works. The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932, consists of twelve interconnected stories about a valley near Monterey, which was discovered by a Spanish corporal while chasing runaway Indian slaves. In 1933 Steinbeck published The Red Pony, a 100-page, four-chapter story weaving in memories of Steinbeck's childhood. To a God Unknown, named after a Vedic hymn, follows the life of a homesteader and his family in California, depicting a character with a primal and pagan worship of the land he works.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Before his novel Tortilla Flat (1935), Steinbeck was an obscure writer \"with little success\". Although he had not achieved the status of a well-known writer, he never doubted that he would achieve greatness.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Steinbeck achieved his first critical success with Tortilla Flat, a novel set in post-war Monterey, California, that won the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. It portrays the adventures of a group of classless and usually homeless young men in Monterey after World War I, just before U.S. prohibition. They are portrayed in ironic comparison to mythic knights on a quest and reject nearly all the standard mores of American society in enjoyment of a dissolute life devoted to wine, lust, camaraderie and petty theft. In presenting the 1962 Nobel Prize to Steinbeck, the Swedish Academy cited \"spicy and comic tales about a gang of paisanos, asocial individuals who, in their wild revels, are almost caricatures of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. It has been said that in the United States this book came as a welcome antidote to the gloom of the then prevailing depression.\" Tortilla Flat was adapted as a 1942 film of the same name, starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield, a friend of Steinbeck. With some of the proceeds, he built a summer ranch-home in Los Gatos.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Steinbeck began to write a series of \"California novels\" and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression. These included In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. He also wrote an article series called The Harvest Gypsies for the San Francisco News about the plight of the migrant worker.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Of Mice and Men was a drama about the dreams of two migrant agricultural laborers in California. It was critically acclaimed and Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize citation called it a \"little masterpiece\". Its stage production was a hit, starring Wallace Ford as George and Broderick Crawford as George's companion, the mentally childlike, but physically powerful itinerant farmhand Lennie. Steinbeck refused to travel from his home in California to attend any performance of the play during its New York run, telling director George S. Kaufman that the play as it existed in his own mind was \"perfect\" and that anything presented on stage would only be a disappointment. Steinbeck wrote two more stage plays (The Moon Is Down and Burning Bright).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Of Mice and Men was also adapted as a 1939 Hollywood film, with Lon Chaney Jr. as Lennie (he had filled the role in the Los Angeles stage production) and Burgess Meredith as George. Meredith and Steinbeck became close friends for the next two decades. Another film based on the novella was made in 1992 starring Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Steinbeck followed this wave of success with The Grapes of Wrath (1939), based on newspaper articles about migrant agricultural workers that he had written in San Francisco. It is commonly considered his greatest work. According to The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month, it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. Later that year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted as a film directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad; Fonda was nominated for the best actor Academy Award. Grapes was controversial. Steinbeck's New Deal political views, negative portrayal of aspects of capitalism, and sympathy for the plight of workers, led to a backlash against the author, especially close to home. Claiming the book both was obscene and misrepresented conditions in the county, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries in August 1939. This ban lasted until January 1941.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Of the controversy, Steinbeck wrote, \"The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The film versions of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men (by two different movie studios) were in production simultaneously, allowing Steinbeck to spend a full day on the set of The Grapes of Wrath and the next day on the set of Of Mice and Men.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast to give himself time off from his writing and to collect biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Their coauthored book, Sea of Cortez (December 1941), about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which was part travelogue and part natural history, published just as the U.S. entered World War II, never found an audience and did not sell well. However, in 1951, Steinbeck republished the narrative portion of the book as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, under his name only (though Ricketts had written some of it). This work remains in print today.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Although Carol accompanied Steinbeck on the trip, their marriage was beginning to suffer, and ended a year later, in 1941, even as Steinbeck worked on the manuscript for the book. In 1942, after his divorce from Carol he married Gwyndolyn \"Gwyn\" Conger.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Ricketts was Steinbeck's model for the character of \"Doc\" in Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954), \"Friend Ed\" in Burning Bright, and characters in In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Ecological themes recur in Steinbeck's novels of the period.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Steinbeck's close relations with Ricketts ended in 1941 when Steinbeck moved away from Pacific Grove and divorced his wife Carol. Ricketts' biographer Eric Enno Tamm opined that, except for East of Eden (1952), Steinbeck's writing declined after Ricketts' untimely death in 1948.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Steinbeck's novel The Moon Is Down (1942), about the Socrates-inspired spirit of resistance in an occupied village in Northern Europe, was made into a film almost immediately. It was presumed that the unnamed country of the novel was Norway and the occupiers the Germans. In 1945, Steinbeck received the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1943, Steinbeck served as a World War II war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and worked with the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA). It was at that time he became friends with Will Lang Jr. of Time/Life magazine. During the war, Steinbeck accompanied the commando raids of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s Beach Jumpers program, which launched small-unit diversion operations against German-held islands in the Mediterranean. At one point, he accompanied Fairbanks on an invasion of an island off the coast of Italy and used a Thompson submachine gun to help capture Italian and German prisoners. Some of his writings from this period were incorporated in the documentary Once There Was a War (1958).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Steinbeck returned from the war with a number of wounds from shrapnel and some psychological trauma. He treated himself, as ever, by writing. He wrote Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Lifeboat (1944), and with screenwriter Jack Wagner, A Medal for Benny (1945), about paisanos from Tortilla Flat going to war. He later requested that his name be removed from the credits of Lifeboat, because he believed the final version of the film had racist undertones. In 1944, suffering from homesickness for his Pacific Grove/Monterey life of the 1930s, he wrote Cannery Row (1945), which became so famous that in 1958 Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, the setting of the book, was renamed Cannery Row.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "After the war, he wrote The Pearl (1947), knowing it would be filmed eventually. The story first appeared in the December 1945 issue of Woman's Home Companion magazine as \"The Pearl of the World\". It was illustrated by John Alan Maxwell. The novel is an imaginative telling of a story which Steinbeck had heard in La Paz in 1940, as related in The Log From the Sea of Cortez, which he described in Chapter 11 as being \"so much like a parable that it almost can't be\". Steinbeck traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico for the filming with Wagner who helped with the script; on this trip he would be inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a film script (Viva Zapata!) directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 1947, Steinbeck made his first trip to the Soviet Union with photographer Robert Capa. They visited Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Batumi and Stalingrad, some of the first Americans to visit many parts of the USSR since the communist revolution. Steinbeck's 1948 book about their experiences, A Russian Journal, was illustrated with Capa's photos. In 1948, the year the book was published, Steinbeck was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In 1952 Steinbeck's longest novel, East of Eden, was published. According to his third wife, Elaine, he considered it his magnum opus, his greatest novel. Also in 1952, John Steinbeck appeared as the on-screen narrator of 20th Century Fox's film, O. Henry's Full House. Although Steinbeck later admitted he was uncomfortable before the camera, he provided interesting introductions to several filmed adaptations of short stories by the legendary writer O. Henry. About the same time, Steinbeck recorded readings of several of his short stories for Columbia Records; the recordings provide a record of Steinbeck's deep, resonant voice.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Following the success of Viva Zapata!, Steinbeck collaborated with Kazan on the 1955 film East of Eden, James Dean's movie debut.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "From March to October 1959, Steinbeck and his third wife Elaine rented a cottage in the hamlet of Discove, Redlynch, near Bruton in Somerset, England, while Steinbeck researched his retelling of the Arthurian legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Glastonbury Tor was visible from the cottage, and Steinbeck also visited the nearby hillfort of Cadbury Castle, the supposed site of King Arthur's court of Camelot. The unfinished manuscript was published after his death in 1976, as The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. The Steinbecks recounted the time spent in Somerset as the happiest of their life together.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Travels with Charley: In Search of America is a travelogue of his 1960 road trip with his poodle Charley. Steinbeck bemoans his lost youth and roots, while dispensing both criticism and praise for the United States. According to Steinbeck's son Thom, Steinbeck made the journey because he knew he was dying and wanted to see the country one last time.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), examines moral decline in the United States. The protagonist Ethan grows discontented with his own moral decline and that of those around him. The book has a very different tone from Steinbeck's amoral and ecological stance in earlier works such as Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. It was not a critical success. Many reviewers recognized the importance of the novel, but were disappointed that it was not another Grapes of Wrath. In the Nobel Prize presentation speech the next year, however, the Swedish Academy cited it most favorably: \"Here he attained the same standard which he set in The Grapes of Wrath. Again he holds his position as an independent expounder of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American, be it good or bad.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Apparently taken aback by the critical reception of this novel, and the critical outcry when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, Steinbeck published no more fiction in the remaining six years before his death.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature for his \"realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception\". The selection was heavily criticized, and described as \"one of the Academy's biggest mistakes\" in one Swedish newspaper. The reaction of American literary critics was also harsh. The New York Times asked why the Nobel committee gave the award to an author whose \"limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising\", noting that \"[T]he international character of the award and the weight attached to it raise questions about the mechanics of selection and how close the Nobel committee is to the main currents of American writing. ... [W]e think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer ... whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age\". Steinbeck, when asked on the day of the announcement if he deserved the Nobel, replied: \"Frankly, no.\" Biographer Jackson Benson notes, \"[T]his honor was one of the few in the world that one could not buy nor gain by political maneuver. It was precisely because the committee made its judgment ... on its own criteria, rather than plugging into 'the main currents of American writing' as defined by the critical establishment, that the award had value.\" In his acceptance speech later in the year in Stockholm, he said:",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Fifty years later, in 2012, the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a \"compromise choice\" among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean Anouilh and Danish author Karen Blixen. The declassified documents showed that he was chosen as the best of a bad lot. \"There aren't any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation,\" wrote committee member Henry Olsson. Although the committee believed Steinbeck's best work was behind him by 1962, committee member Anders Österling believed the release of his novel The Winter of Our Discontent showed that \"after some signs of slowing down in recent years, [Steinbeck has] regained his position as a social truth-teller [and is an] authentic realist fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Although modest about his own talent as a writer, Steinbeck talked openly of his own admiration of certain writers. In 1953, he wrote that he considered cartoonist Al Capp, creator of the satirical Li'l Abner, \"possibly the best writer in the world today\". At his own first Nobel Prize press conference he was asked his favorite authors and works and replied: \"Hemingway's short stories and nearly everything Faulkner wrote.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In September 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Steinbeck the Presidential Medal of Freedom.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In 1967, at the behest of Newsday magazine, Steinbeck went to Vietnam to report on the war. He thought of the Vietnam War as a heroic venture and was considered a hawk for his position on the war. His sons served in Vietnam before his death, and Steinbeck visited one son in the battlefield. At one point he was allowed to man a machine-gun watch position at night at a firebase while his son and other members of his platoon slept.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Steinbeck and his first wife, Carol Henning, married in January 1930 in Los Angeles. By 1940, their marriage was beginning to suffer, and it ended a year later. In 1942, after his divorce from Carol, Steinbeck married Gwyndolyn \"Gwyn\" Conger. With his second wife Steinbeck had two sons, Thomas (\"Thom\") Myles Steinbeck (1944–2016) and John Steinbeck IV (1946–1991).",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In May 1948, Steinbeck returned to California on an emergency trip to be with his friend Ed Ricketts, who had been seriously injured when a train struck his car. Ricketts died hours before Steinbeck arrived. Upon returning home, Steinbeck was confronted by Gwyn, who asked for a divorce, which became final in October. Steinbeck spent the year after Ricketts' death in deep depression.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In June 1949, Steinbeck met stage manager Elaine Scott at a restaurant in Carmel, California. Steinbeck and Scott eventually began a relationship, and in December 1950 they married, within a week of Scott's finalizing her own divorce from actor Zachary Scott. This third marriage for Steinbeck lasted until his death in 1968.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Steinbeck was an acquaintance of modernist poet Robinson Jeffers, a Californian neighbor. In a letter to Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck wrote: \"Robinson Jeffers and his wife came in to call the other day. He looks a little older but that is all. And she is just the same.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In 1962, Steinbeck began acting as friend and mentor to the young writer and naturalist Jack Rudloe, who was trying to establish his own biological supply company, now Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida. Their correspondence continued until Steinbeck's death.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In February 1966, Steinbeck and his wife traveled to Israel. He visited in Tel Aviv the site of Mount Hope, a farm community established by his grandfather, whose brother, Friedrich Großsteinbeck, had been murdered by Arab marauders in 1858 during the Outrages at Jaffa.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "John Steinbeck died in New York City on December 20, 1968, during the 1968 flu pandemic of heart disease and congestive heart failure. He was 66, and had been a lifelong smoker. An autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and interred on March 4, 1969 at the Hamilton family gravesite in Salinas, with those of his parents and maternal grandparents. His third wife, Elaine, was buried in the plot in 2004. He had written to his doctor that he felt deeply \"in his flesh\" that he would not survive his physical death, and that the biological end of his life was the final end to it.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Steinbeck's incomplete novel based on the King Arthur legends of Malory and others, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was published in 1976.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Many of Steinbeck's works are required reading in American high schools. In England, Of Mice and Men was one of the key texts used by the examining body AQA for its English Literature GCSE until its removal from the reformed specification that was first examined in June 2018. The text is still widely studied by GCSE students in Wales and Northern Ireland, although calls have been made for its removal in Northern Ireland due to concerns about the use of racial slurs in the text. A study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature in the United States found that Of Mice and Men was one of the ten most frequently read books in public high schools. Steinbeck's works have also been banned. The Grapes of Wrath was banned in August 1939 by the Kern County Board of Supervisors from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries. It was burned in Salinas on two occasions. In 2003, a school board in Mississippi banned it on the grounds of profanity. According to the American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with Of Mice and Men ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Steinbeck grew up in California's Salinas Valley, a culturally diverse place with a rich migratory and immigrant history. This upbringing imparted a regionalistic flavor to his writing, giving many of his works a distinct sense of place. Salinas, Monterey and parts of the San Joaquin Valley were the setting for many of his stories. The area is now sometimes referred to as \"Steinbeck Country\". Most of his early work dealt with subjects familiar to him from his formative years. An exception was his first novel, Cup of Gold, which concerns the pirate/privateer Henry Morgan, whose adventures had captured Steinbeck's imagination as a child.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In his subsequent novels, Steinbeck found a more authentic voice by drawing upon direct memories of his life in California. His childhood friend, Max Wagner, a brother of Jack Wagner and who later became a film actor, served as inspiration for The Red Pony. Later he used actual American conditions and events in the first half of the 20th century, which he had experienced first-hand as a reporter. Steinbeck often populated his stories with struggling characters; his works examined the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "His later work reflected his wide range of interests, including marine biology, politics, religion, history and mythology. One of his last published works was Travels with Charley, a travelogue of a road trip he took in 1960 to rediscover America.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Steinbeck's boyhood home, a turreted Victorian building in downtown Salinas, has been preserved and restored by the Valley Guild, a nonprofit organization. Fixed menu lunches are served Monday through Saturday, and the house is open for tours on Sunday afternoons during the summer.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The National Steinbeck Center is two blocks away at 1 Main Street. Dana Gioia (chair of the National Endowment for the Arts) told an audience at the center, \"This is really the best modern literary shrine in the country, and I've seen them all.\" Its \"Steinbeckiana\" includes \"Rocinante\", the camper-truck in which Steinbeck made the cross-country trip described in Travels with Charley.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "His father's cottage on Eleventh Street in Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck wrote some of his earliest books, also survives.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In Monterey, Ed Ricketts' laboratory survives (though it is not yet open to the public) and at the corner which Steinbeck describes in Cannery Row, also the store which once belonged to Lee Chong, and the adjacent vacant lot frequented by the hobos of Cannery Row. The site of the Hovden Sardine Cannery next to Doc's laboratory is now occupied by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. In 1958 the street that Steinbeck described as \"Cannery Row\" in the novel, once named Ocean View Avenue, was renamed Cannery Row in honor of the novel. The town of Monterey has commemorated Steinbeck's work with an avenue of flags depicting characters from Cannery Row, historical plaques, and sculptured busts depicting Steinbeck and Ricketts.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "On February 27, 1979 (the 77th anniversary of the writer's birth), the United States Postal Service issued a stamp featuring Steinbeck, starting the Postal Service's Literary Arts series honoring American writers.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Steinbeck was inducted in to the DeMolay International Hall of Fame in 1995.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "On December 5, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Steinbeck into the California Hall of Fame, located at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. His son, author Thomas Steinbeck, accepted the award on his behalf.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Monterey Bay Roller Derby was founded in 2010. Their team names over the years have referenced Steinbeck, including Beasts of Eden, Cannery Rollers, Steinwreckers and Babes of Wrath. Their juniors league was known as the Dread Ponies.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "To commemorate the 112th anniversary of Steinbeck's birthday on February 27, 2014, Google displayed an interactive doodle utilizing animation which included illustrations portraying scenes and quotes from several novels by the author.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts appear as fictionalized characters in the 2016 novel, Monterey Bay about the founding of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, by Lindsay Hatton (Penguin Press).",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In February 2016, Caltrans installed signage to identify a five-mile segment of U.S. Route 101 in Salinas as the John Steinbeck Highway, in accordance with a 2014 state legislative resolution.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In 2019 the Sag Harbor town board approved the creation of the John Steinbeck Waterfront Park across from the iconic town windmill. The structures on the parcel were demolished and park benches installed near the beach. The Beebe windmill replica already had a plaque memorializing the author who wrote from a small hut overlooking the cove during his sojourn in the literary haven.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Steinbeck was affiliated to the St. Paul's Episcopal Church and he stayed attached throughout his life to Episcopalianism. Especially in his works of fiction, Steinbeck was highly conscious of religion and incorporated it into his style and themes. The shaping of his characters often drew on the Bible and the theology of Anglicanism, combining elements of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Steinbeck distanced himself from religious views when he left Salinas for Stanford. However, the work he produced still reflected the language of his childhood at Salinas, and his beliefs remained a powerful influence within his fiction and non-fiction work. William Ray considered his Episcopal views are prominently displayed in The Grapes of Wrath, in which themes of conversion and self-sacrifice play a major part in the characters Casy and Tom who achieve spiritual transcendence through conversion.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Steinbeck's contacts with leftist authors, journalists, and labor union figures may have influenced his writing. He joined the League of American Writers, a Communist organization, in 1935. Steinbeck was mentored by radical writers Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter. Through Francis Whitaker, a member of the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club for writers, Steinbeck met with strike organizers from the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union. In 1939, he signed a letter with some other writers in support of the Soviet invasion of Finland and the Soviet-established puppet government.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2012 indicate that Steinbeck offered his services to the Agency in 1952, while planning a European tour, and the Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, was eager to take him up on the offer. What work, if any, Steinbeck may have performed for the CIA during the Cold War is unknown. Documents released by the Security Service of Ukraine following the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 indicate that the Soviet KGB suspected him of being an American agent when he visited locations within the USSR, including Kyiv, in 1947. Consequently, they watched Steinbeck closely and solicited information about him from their informers.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Steinbeck was a close associate of playwright Arthur Miller. In June 1957, Steinbeck took a personal and professional risk by supporting him when Miller refused to name names in the House Un-American Activities Committee trials. Steinbeck called the period one of the \"strangest and most frightening times a government and people have ever faced\".",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In 1963, Steinbeck visited the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic at the behest of John Kennedy. During his visit he sat for a rare portrait by painter Martiros Saryan and visited Geghard Monastery. He also met with Armenian poet Hovhannes Shiraz in Yerevan. Steinbeck’s letter of thanks for Shiraz's hospitality is now displayed at the Shiraz house museum in Gyumri. Footage of this visit filmed by Rafael Aramyan was sold in 2013 by his granddaughter.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In 1967, when he was sent to Vietnam to report on the war, his sympathetic portrayal of the United States Army led the New York Post to denounce him for betraying his leftist past. Steinbeck's biographer, Jay Parini, says Steinbeck's friendship with President Lyndon B. Johnson influenced his views on Vietnam. Steinbeck may also have been concerned about the safety of his son serving in Vietnam.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Along with Albert Einstein, Steinbeck was one of the sponsors of the Peoples' World Convention (PWC), also known as Peoples' World Constituent Assembly (PWCA), which took place in 1950-51 at Palais Electoral, Geneva, Switzerland.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Steinbeck complained publicly about government harassment. Thomas Steinbeck, the author's eldest son, said that J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI at the time, could find no basis for prosecuting Steinbeck and therefore used his power to encourage the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to audit Steinbeck's taxes every single year of his life, just to annoy him. According to Thomas, a true artist is one who \"without a thought for self, stands up against the stones of condemnation, and speaks for those who are given no real voice in the halls of justice, or the halls of government. By doing so, these people will naturally become the enemies of the political status quo.\"",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In a 1942 letter to United States Attorney General Francis Biddle, John Steinbeck wrote: \"Do you suppose you could ask Edgar's boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I am an enemy alien. It is getting tiresome.\" The FBI denied that Steinbeck was under investigation.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In 1936, Steinbeck published the first of what came to be known as his Dustbowl trilogy, which included Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. This first novel tells the story of a fruit pickers' strike in California which is both aided and damaged by the help of \"the Party\", generally taken to be the Communist Party, although this is never spelled out in the book.",
"title": "Major works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Of Mice and Men is a tragedy that was written as a play in 1937. The story is about two traveling ranch workers, George and Lennie, trying to earn enough money to buy their own farm/ranch. As it is set in 1930s America, it provides an insight into The Great Depression, encompassing themes of racism, loneliness, prejudice against the mentally ill, and the struggle for personal independence. Along with The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and The Pearl, Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck's best known works. It was made into a movie three times, in 1939 starring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney Jr., and Betty Field, in 1982 starring Randy Quaid, Robert Blake and Ted Neeley, and in 1992 starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.",
"title": "Major works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The Grapes of Wrath is set in the Great Depression and describes a family of sharecroppers, the Joads, who were driven from their land due to the dust storms of the Dust Bowl. The title is a reference to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Some critics found it too sympathetic to the workers' plight and too critical of capitalism, but it found a large audience of its own. It won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction (novels) and was adapted as a film starring Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell and directed by John Ford.",
"title": "Major works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Steinbeck deals with the nature of good and evil in this Salinas Valley saga. The story follows two families: the Hamiltons – based on Steinbeck's own maternal ancestry – and the Trasks, reprising stories about the Biblical Adam and his progeny. His paternal ancestry is also reflected in the story. The book was published in 1952. Portions of the novel were made into a 1955 movie directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean.",
"title": "Major works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In 1960, Steinbeck bought a pickup truck and had it modified with a custom-built camper top – which was rare at the time – and drove across the United States with his faithful \"blue\" standard poodle, Charley. Steinbeck nicknamed his truck Rocinante after Don Quixote's \"noble steed\". In this sometimes comical, sometimes melancholic book, Steinbeck describes what he sees from Maine to Montana to California, and from there to Texas and Louisiana and back to his home on Long Island. The restored camper truck is on exhibit in the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.",
"title": "Major works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "John Steinbeck Bibliography",
"title": "Bibliography"
}
]
| John Ernst Steinbeck was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". He has been called "a giant of American letters." During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. By the 75th anniversary of its publishing date, it had sold 14 million copies. Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists. | 2001-06-19T18:09:07Z | 2023-12-31T05:17:56Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck |
15,826 | Joshua Reynolds | Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA FRS FRSA (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an English painter who specialised in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting, which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts and was knighted by George III in 1769.
Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, on 16 July 1723, as the third son of the Reverend Samuel Reynolds (1681–1745), master of the Plympton Free Grammar School in the town. His father had been a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, but did not send any of his sons to the university. One of his sisters, seven years his senior, was Mary Palmer (1716–1794), author of Devonshire Dialogue, whose fondness for drawing is said to have had much influence on Joshua as a boy. In 1740, she provided £60, half of the premium paid to Thomas Hudson the portrait-painter, for Joshua's pupillage, and nine years she later advanced money for his expenses in Italy. His other siblings included Frances Reynolds and Elizabeth Johnson.
As a boy, he also came under the influence of Zachariah Mudge, whose Platonistic philosophy stayed with him all his life. Reynolds made extracts in his commonplace book from Theophrastus, Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Antonius, Ovid, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Aphra Behn and copied passages on art theory by Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy, and André Félibien. The work that came to have the most influence on Reynolds was Jonathan Richardson's An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715). Reynolds' annotated copy was lost for nearly two hundred years until it appeared in a Cambridge bookshop, inscribed with the signature "J. Reynolds Pictor". It is now in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Having shown an early interest in art, Reynolds was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable London portrait painter Thomas Hudson, who like Reynolds had been born in Devon. Hudson had a collection of Old Master drawings, including some by Guercino, of which Reynolds made copies. Although apprenticed to Hudson for a period of four years, Reynolds remained with him only until the summer of 1743. Having left Hudson, Reynolds worked for some time as a portrait-painter in Plymouth Dock (now Devonport). He returned to London before the end of 1744, but following his father's death in late 1745 he shared a house in Plymouth Dock with his sisters.
In 1749, Reynolds met Commodore Augustus Keppel, who invited him to join HMS Centurion, of which he had command, on a voyage to the Mediterranean. While with the ship he visited Lisbon, Cadiz, Algiers and Minorca. From Minorca he travelled to Livorno in Italy, and then to Rome, where he spent two years, studying the Old Masters and acquiring a taste for the "Grand Style". Lord Edgcumbe, who had known Reynolds as a boy and introduced him to Keppel, suggested he should study with Pompeo Batoni, the leading painter in Rome, but Reynolds replied that he had nothing to learn from him. While in Rome he suffered a severe cold, which left him partially deaf, and, as a result, he began to carry the small ear trumpet with which he is often pictured.
Reynolds travelled homeward overland via Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Paris. He was accompanied by Giuseppe Marchi, then aged about 17. Apart from a brief interlude in 1770, Marchi remained in Reynolds' employment as a studio assistant for the rest of the artist's career. Following his arrival in England in October 1752, Reynolds spent three months in Devon before establishing himself in London the following year and remaining there for the rest of his life. He took rooms in St Martin's Lane, before moving to Great Newport Street; his sister Frances acted as his housekeeper. He achieved success rapidly, and was extremely prolific. Lord Edgecumbe recommended the Duke of Devonshire and Duke of Grafton to sit for him, and other peers followed, including the Duke of Cumberland, third son of George II, in whose portrait, according to Nicholas Penny "bulk is brilliantly converted into power". In 1760, Reynolds moved into a large house, with space to show his works and accommodate his assistants, on the west side of Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square).
Alongside ambitious full-length portraits, Reynolds painted large numbers of smaller works. In the late 1750s, at the height of the social season, he received five or six sitters a day, each for an hour. By 1761, Reynolds could command a fee of 80 guineas for a full-length portrait; in 1764, he was paid 100 guineas for a portrait of Lord Burghersh.
The clothing of Reynolds' sitters was usually painted by either one of his pupils, his studio assistant Giuseppe Marchi, or the specialist drapery painter Peter Toms. James Northcote, his pupil, wrote of this arrangement that "the imitation of particular stuffs is not the work of genius, but is to be acquired easily by practice, and this was what his pupils could do by care and time more than he himself chose to bestow; but his own slight and masterly work was still the best." Lay figures were used to model the clothes.
Reynolds often adapted the poses of his subjects from the works of earlier artists, a practice mocked by Nathaniel Hone in a painting called The Conjuror submitted to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1775, and now in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. It shows a figure representing, though not resembling, Reynolds, seated in front of a cascade of prints from which Reynolds had borrowed with varying degrees of subtlety.
Although not known principally for his landscapes, Reynolds did paint in this genre. He had an excellent vantage from his house, Wick House, on Richmond Hill, and painted the view in about 1780.
Reynolds also was recognised for his portraits of children. He emphasised the innocence and natural grace of children when depicting them. His 1788 portrait, Age of Innocence, is his best known character study of a child. The subject of the painting is not known, although suggestions include Theophila Gwatkin, his great-niece, and Lady Anne Spencer, the youngest daughter of the fourth Duke of Marlborough.
Reynolds worked long hours in his studio, rarely taking a holiday. He was gregarious and keenly intellectual, with many friends from London's intelligentsia, numbered among whom were Dr Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Giuseppe Baretti, Henry Thrale, David Garrick, and artist Angelica Kauffman. Johnson said in 1778: "Reynolds is too much under [Charles James] Fox and Burke at present. He is under the Fox star and the Irish constellation (meaning Burke). He is always under some planet".
Because of his popularity as a portrait painter, Reynolds enjoyed constant interaction with the wealthy and famous men and women of the day, and it was he who brought together the figures of "The Club". It was founded in 1764 and met in a suite of rooms on the first floor of the Turks Head at 9 Gerrard Street, now marked by a plaque. Original members included Burke, Bennet Langton, Topham Beauclerk, Goldsmith, Anthony Chamier, Thomas Hawkins, and Nugent, to be joined by Garrick, Boswell, and Sheridan. In ten years the membership had risen to 35. The Club met every Monday evening for supper and conversation and continued into the early hours of Tuesday morning. In later years, it met fortnightly during Parliamentary sessions. When in 1783 the landlord of the Turks Head died and the property was sold, The Club moved to Sackville Street.
Reynolds was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society of Arts, helped found the Society of Artists of Great Britain, and in 1768 became the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, a position he was to hold until his death. In 1769, he was knighted by George III, only the second English artist to be so honoured. His Discourses, a series of lectures delivered at the academy between 1769 and 1790, are remembered for their sensitivity and perception. In one lecture, he expressed the opinion that "invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory." William Jackson in his contemporary essays said of Reynolds 'there is much ingenuity and originality in all his academic discourses, replete with classical knowledge of his art, acute remarks on the works of others, and general taste and discernment'.
Reynolds and the Royal Academy received a mixed reception. Critics included William Blake who published the vitriolic Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses in 1808. J. M. W. Turner and James Northcote were fervent acolytes: Turner requested he be laid to rest at Reynolds' side, and Northcote, who spent four years as Reynolds' pupil, wrote to his family: "I know him thoroughly, and all his faults, I am sure, and yet almost worship him." In 2018, the Royal Academy of Arts celebrated its 250th anniversary from its opening in 1768. This became an impetus for galleries and museums across the UK to celebrate "the making, debating and exhibiting art at the Royal Academy". Waddesdon manor was amongst the historic houses that supported Sir Joshua Reynolds's influence at the academy, acknowledging how:
[He] transformed British painting with portraits and subject pictures that engaged their audience's knowledge, imagination, memory and emotions... As an eloquent teacher and art theorist, he used his role at the head of the Royal Academy to raise the status of art and artists of Britain.
In the Battle of Ushant against the French in 1778, Lord Keppel commanded the Channel Fleet and the outcome resulted in no clear winner; Keppel ordered the attack be renewed and was obeyed except by Sir Hugh Palliser, who commanded the rear, and the French escaped bombardment. A dispute between Keppel and Palliser arose and Palliser brought charges of misconduct and neglect of duty against Keppel and the Admiralty decided to court-martial him. On 11 February 1779, Keppel was acquitted of all charges and became a national hero. One of Keppel's lawyers commissioned Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland to paint a portrait of Keppel, but Keppel redirected it to Reynolds. Reynolds alluded to Keppel's trial in the portrait by painting his hand on his sword, reflecting the presiding officer's words at the court-martial: "In delivering to you your sword, I am to congratulate you on its being restored to you with so much honour".
On 10 August 1784, Allan Ramsay died and the office of Principal Painter in Ordinary to King George III became vacant. Thomas Gainsborough felt that he had a good chance of securing it, but Reynolds felt he deserved it and threatened to resign the presidency of the Royal Academy if he did not receive it. Reynolds noted in his pocket book: "Sept. 1, 2½, to attend at the Lord Chancellor's Office to be sworn in painter to the King". It did not make Reynolds happy, however, as he wrote to Boswell: "If I had known what a shabby miserable place it is, I would not have asked for it; besides as things have turned out I think a certain person is not worth speaking to, nor speaking of", presumably meaning the king. Reynolds wrote to Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St Asaph, a few weeks later: "Your Lordship congratulation on my succeeding Mr. Ramsay I take very kindly, but it is a most miserable office, it is reduced from two hundred to thirty-eight pounds per annum, the Kings Rat catcher I believe is a better place, and I am to be paid only a fourth part of what I have from other people, so that the Portraits of their Majesties are not likely to be better done now, than they used to be, I should be ruined if I was to paint them myself".
In 1787, Reynolds painted the portrait of Lord Heathfield, who became a national hero for the successful defence of Gibraltar in the Great Siege from 1779 to 1783 against the combined forces of France and Spain. Heathfield is depicted against a background of clouds and cannon smoke, wearing the uniform of the 15th Light Dragoons and clasping the key of the Rock, its chain wrapped twice around his right hand. John Constable said in the 1830s that it was "almost a history of the defence of Gibraltar". Desmond Shawe-Taylor has claimed that the portrait may have a religious meaning, Heathfield holding the key similar to St. Peter (Jesus' "rock") possessing the keys to Heaven, Heathfield "the rock upon which Britannia builds her military interests".
In 1789, Reynolds lost the sight of his left eye, which forced him into retirement. In 1791 James Boswell dedicated his Life of Samuel Johnson to Reynolds. Reynolds agreed with Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and, writing in early 1791, expressed his belief that the ancien régime of France had fallen due to spending too much time tending, as he puts it,
to the splendor of the foliage, to the neglect of the stirring the earth about the roots. They cultivated only those arts which could add splendor to the nation, to the neglect of those which supported it – They neglected Trade & substantial Manufacture ... but does it follow that a total revolution is necessary that because we have given ourselves up too much to the ornaments of life, we will now have none at all.
When attending a dinner at Holland House, Fox's niece Caroline was sat next to Reynolds and "burst out into glorification of the Revolution – and was grievously chilled and checked by her neighbour's cautious and unsympathetic tone".
On 4 June 1791, at a dinner at the Freemasons' Tavern to mark the king's birthday, Reynolds drank to the toasts "GOD save the KING!" and "May our glorious Constitution under which the arts flourish, be immortal!", in what was reported by the Public Advertiser as "a fervour truly patriotick". Reynolds "filled the chair with a most convivial glee". He returned to town from Burke's house in Beaconsfield and Edmond Malone wrote that "we left his carriage at the Inn at Hayes, and walked five miles on the road, in a warm day, without his complaining of any fatigue".
Later that month Reynolds suffered from a swelling over his left eye and had to be purged by a surgeon. In October he was too ill to take the president's chair and in November, Frances Burney recorded that
I had long languished to see that kindly zealous friend, but his ill health had intimidated me from making the attempt": "He had a bandage over one eye, and the other shaded with a green half-bonnet. He seemed serious even to sadness, though extremely kind. 'I am very glad,' he said, in a meek voice and dejected accent, 'to see you again, and I wish I could see you better! but I have only one eye now, and hardly that.' I was really quite touched.
On 5 November, Reynolds, fearing he might not have an opportunity to write a will, wrote a memorandum intended to be his last will and testament, with Edmund Burke, Edmond Malone, and Philip Metcalfe named as executors. On 10 November, Reynolds wrote to Benjamin West to resign the presidency, but the General Assembly agreed he should be re-elected, with Sir William Chambers and West to deputise for him.
Doctors Richard Warren and Sir George Baker believed Reynolds' illness to be psychological and they bled his neck "with a view of drawing the humour from his eyes" but the effect, in the view of his niece, was that it seemed "as if the 'principle of life' were gone" from Reynolds. On New Year's Day 1792 Reynolds became "seized with sickness", and from that time onwards could not keep food down. Reynolds died on 23 February 1792 at his house at 47 Leicester Fields in London between eight and nine in the evening.
Burke was present on the night Reynolds died, and was moved within hours to write a eulogy of Reynolds, starting with the following sentiments: "Sir Joshua Reynolds was on very many accounts one of the most memorable men of his Time. He was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant Arts to the other Glories of his Country. In Taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and Harmony of colouring, he was equal to the great masters of the renowned Ages." Burke's tribute was well received and one journalist called it "the eulogium of Apelles pronounced by Pericles".
Reynolds was buried at St Paul's Cathedral. In 1903, a statue, by Alfred Drury, was erected in his honour in the Annenberg Courtyard of Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy. Around the statue are fountains and lights, installed in 2000, arranged in the pattern of a star chart at midnight on the night of Reynolds' birth. The planets are marked by granite discs, and the Moon by a water recess.
In appearance Reynolds was not striking. Slightly built, he was about 5'6" tall with dark brown curls, a florid complexion and features that James Boswell thought were "rather too largely and strongly limned." He had a broad face and a cleft chin, and the bridge of his nose was slightly dented; his skin was scarred by smallpox and his upper lip disfigured as a result of falling from a horse as a young man. Edmond Malone asserted however that "his appearance at first sight impressed the spectator with the idea of a well-born and well-bred English gentleman."
In his mature years he suffered from deafness, as recorded by Frances Burney, although this did not impede his lively social life.
Renowned for his placidity, Reynolds often claimed that he "hated nobody". This may be self-idealisation. It is well known that he disliked George Romney, whom he referred to only as "the man in Cavendish Square" and whom he successfully prevented from becoming a member of the Royal Academy. He did not like Gainsborough, yet appreciated his achievements in the obituary he wrote of his rival. (Rump; Kidson). It is said that when he taught in one of his "discourses" that a painter should not amass too much of the colour blue in the foreground of an image, Gainsborough was prompted to paint his famous "Blue Boy".
Never quite losing his Devonshire accent, Reynolds was not only an amiable and original conversationalist, but a friendly and generous host, so that Frances Burney recorded in her diary that he had "a suavity of disposition that set everybody at their ease in his society", and William Makepeace Thackeray believed "of all the polite men of that age, Joshua Reynolds was the finest gentleman". Dr Johnson commented on the "inoffensiveness" of his nature; Edmund Burke noted his "strong turn for humor". Thomas Bernard, who later became Bishop of Killaloe, wrote in his closing verses on Reynolds stating:
Thou say'st not only skill is gained But genius too may be attained By studious imitation; Thy temper mild, thy genius fine I'll copy till I make them mine By constant application.
Some people, such as Hester Lynch Piozzi, construed Reynolds' equable calm as cool and unfeeling.
It is to this lukewarm temperament that Frederick W. Hilles, Bodman Professor of English Literature at Yale attributes Reynolds' never having married. In the editorial notes of his compendium Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hilles theorises that "as a corollary one might say that he [Reynolds] was somewhat lacking in a capacity for love", and cites Boswell's notary papers: "He said the reason he would never marry was that every woman whom he liked had grown indifferent to him, and he had been glad he did not marry her." Reynolds' own sister, Frances, who lived with him as housekeeper, took her own negative opinion further still, thinking him "a gloomy tyrant". The presence of family compensated Reynolds for the absence of a wife; he wrote on one occasion to his friend Bennet Langton, that both his sister and niece were away from home "so that I am quite a bachelor". Reynolds did not marry, and had no known children.
Biographer Ian McIntyre discusses the possibility of Reynolds having enjoyed sexual relations with certain clients, such as Nelly O'Brien (or "My Lady O'Brien", as he playfully dubbed her) and Kitty Fisher, who visited his house for more sittings than were strictly necessary. Dan Cruickshank in his book London's Sinful Secret summarised Reynolds as having visited and re-visited various reputed red light districts in London after his return from Italy as a possible contributor to his medical condition and appearance due to commonly contracted disease in those areas of London.
In 2010, the Wallace Collection launched the Reynolds Research Project. With the support of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and in partnership with the National Gallery and in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, work was undertaken to conserve the museum's portraits to improve their visual appreciation for future generations and to investigate the ways in which they were painted.
The purpose of an exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint, 2015, was to share the discoveries of the project and to reveal Reynolds's complex and experimental engagement with painterly materials over the course of his long career. A series of thematic groupings of works from the collection with temporary loans allowed the curators to explore the development of Reynolds's images from both a technical and art historical viewpoint.
As well as exploring his experimentation with materials, the project also revealed the innovative ways in which Reynolds collaborated with his patrons; played with the conventions of genre, composition and pose; engaged with the work of other artists; and organised the submission and display of his work at exhibitions. The commissioning and collecting of Reynolds's work, specifically in the context of the founders of the Wallace Collection (the Seymour-Conway family), was also examined. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA FRS FRSA (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an English painter who specialised in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the \"Grand Style\" in painting, which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts and was knighted by George III in 1769.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, on 16 July 1723, as the third son of the Reverend Samuel Reynolds (1681–1745), master of the Plympton Free Grammar School in the town. His father had been a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, but did not send any of his sons to the university. One of his sisters, seven years his senior, was Mary Palmer (1716–1794), author of Devonshire Dialogue, whose fondness for drawing is said to have had much influence on Joshua as a boy. In 1740, she provided £60, half of the premium paid to Thomas Hudson the portrait-painter, for Joshua's pupillage, and nine years she later advanced money for his expenses in Italy. His other siblings included Frances Reynolds and Elizabeth Johnson.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "As a boy, he also came under the influence of Zachariah Mudge, whose Platonistic philosophy stayed with him all his life. Reynolds made extracts in his commonplace book from Theophrastus, Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Antonius, Ovid, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Aphra Behn and copied passages on art theory by Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy, and André Félibien. The work that came to have the most influence on Reynolds was Jonathan Richardson's An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715). Reynolds' annotated copy was lost for nearly two hundred years until it appeared in a Cambridge bookshop, inscribed with the signature \"J. Reynolds Pictor\". It is now in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Having shown an early interest in art, Reynolds was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable London portrait painter Thomas Hudson, who like Reynolds had been born in Devon. Hudson had a collection of Old Master drawings, including some by Guercino, of which Reynolds made copies. Although apprenticed to Hudson for a period of four years, Reynolds remained with him only until the summer of 1743. Having left Hudson, Reynolds worked for some time as a portrait-painter in Plymouth Dock (now Devonport). He returned to London before the end of 1744, but following his father's death in late 1745 he shared a house in Plymouth Dock with his sisters.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1749, Reynolds met Commodore Augustus Keppel, who invited him to join HMS Centurion, of which he had command, on a voyage to the Mediterranean. While with the ship he visited Lisbon, Cadiz, Algiers and Minorca. From Minorca he travelled to Livorno in Italy, and then to Rome, where he spent two years, studying the Old Masters and acquiring a taste for the \"Grand Style\". Lord Edgcumbe, who had known Reynolds as a boy and introduced him to Keppel, suggested he should study with Pompeo Batoni, the leading painter in Rome, but Reynolds replied that he had nothing to learn from him. While in Rome he suffered a severe cold, which left him partially deaf, and, as a result, he began to carry the small ear trumpet with which he is often pictured.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Reynolds travelled homeward overland via Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Paris. He was accompanied by Giuseppe Marchi, then aged about 17. Apart from a brief interlude in 1770, Marchi remained in Reynolds' employment as a studio assistant for the rest of the artist's career. Following his arrival in England in October 1752, Reynolds spent three months in Devon before establishing himself in London the following year and remaining there for the rest of his life. He took rooms in St Martin's Lane, before moving to Great Newport Street; his sister Frances acted as his housekeeper. He achieved success rapidly, and was extremely prolific. Lord Edgecumbe recommended the Duke of Devonshire and Duke of Grafton to sit for him, and other peers followed, including the Duke of Cumberland, third son of George II, in whose portrait, according to Nicholas Penny \"bulk is brilliantly converted into power\". In 1760, Reynolds moved into a large house, with space to show his works and accommodate his assistants, on the west side of Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Alongside ambitious full-length portraits, Reynolds painted large numbers of smaller works. In the late 1750s, at the height of the social season, he received five or six sitters a day, each for an hour. By 1761, Reynolds could command a fee of 80 guineas for a full-length portrait; in 1764, he was paid 100 guineas for a portrait of Lord Burghersh.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The clothing of Reynolds' sitters was usually painted by either one of his pupils, his studio assistant Giuseppe Marchi, or the specialist drapery painter Peter Toms. James Northcote, his pupil, wrote of this arrangement that \"the imitation of particular stuffs is not the work of genius, but is to be acquired easily by practice, and this was what his pupils could do by care and time more than he himself chose to bestow; but his own slight and masterly work was still the best.\" Lay figures were used to model the clothes.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Reynolds often adapted the poses of his subjects from the works of earlier artists, a practice mocked by Nathaniel Hone in a painting called The Conjuror submitted to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1775, and now in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. It shows a figure representing, though not resembling, Reynolds, seated in front of a cascade of prints from which Reynolds had borrowed with varying degrees of subtlety.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Although not known principally for his landscapes, Reynolds did paint in this genre. He had an excellent vantage from his house, Wick House, on Richmond Hill, and painted the view in about 1780.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Reynolds also was recognised for his portraits of children. He emphasised the innocence and natural grace of children when depicting them. His 1788 portrait, Age of Innocence, is his best known character study of a child. The subject of the painting is not known, although suggestions include Theophila Gwatkin, his great-niece, and Lady Anne Spencer, the youngest daughter of the fourth Duke of Marlborough.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Reynolds worked long hours in his studio, rarely taking a holiday. He was gregarious and keenly intellectual, with many friends from London's intelligentsia, numbered among whom were Dr Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Giuseppe Baretti, Henry Thrale, David Garrick, and artist Angelica Kauffman. Johnson said in 1778: \"Reynolds is too much under [Charles James] Fox and Burke at present. He is under the Fox star and the Irish constellation (meaning Burke). He is always under some planet\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Because of his popularity as a portrait painter, Reynolds enjoyed constant interaction with the wealthy and famous men and women of the day, and it was he who brought together the figures of \"The Club\". It was founded in 1764 and met in a suite of rooms on the first floor of the Turks Head at 9 Gerrard Street, now marked by a plaque. Original members included Burke, Bennet Langton, Topham Beauclerk, Goldsmith, Anthony Chamier, Thomas Hawkins, and Nugent, to be joined by Garrick, Boswell, and Sheridan. In ten years the membership had risen to 35. The Club met every Monday evening for supper and conversation and continued into the early hours of Tuesday morning. In later years, it met fortnightly during Parliamentary sessions. When in 1783 the landlord of the Turks Head died and the property was sold, The Club moved to Sackville Street.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Reynolds was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society of Arts, helped found the Society of Artists of Great Britain, and in 1768 became the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, a position he was to hold until his death. In 1769, he was knighted by George III, only the second English artist to be so honoured. His Discourses, a series of lectures delivered at the academy between 1769 and 1790, are remembered for their sensitivity and perception. In one lecture, he expressed the opinion that \"invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory.\" William Jackson in his contemporary essays said of Reynolds 'there is much ingenuity and originality in all his academic discourses, replete with classical knowledge of his art, acute remarks on the works of others, and general taste and discernment'.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Reynolds and the Royal Academy received a mixed reception. Critics included William Blake who published the vitriolic Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses in 1808. J. M. W. Turner and James Northcote were fervent acolytes: Turner requested he be laid to rest at Reynolds' side, and Northcote, who spent four years as Reynolds' pupil, wrote to his family: \"I know him thoroughly, and all his faults, I am sure, and yet almost worship him.\" In 2018, the Royal Academy of Arts celebrated its 250th anniversary from its opening in 1768. This became an impetus for galleries and museums across the UK to celebrate \"the making, debating and exhibiting art at the Royal Academy\". Waddesdon manor was amongst the historic houses that supported Sir Joshua Reynolds's influence at the academy, acknowledging how:",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "[He] transformed British painting with portraits and subject pictures that engaged their audience's knowledge, imagination, memory and emotions... As an eloquent teacher and art theorist, he used his role at the head of the Royal Academy to raise the status of art and artists of Britain.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the Battle of Ushant against the French in 1778, Lord Keppel commanded the Channel Fleet and the outcome resulted in no clear winner; Keppel ordered the attack be renewed and was obeyed except by Sir Hugh Palliser, who commanded the rear, and the French escaped bombardment. A dispute between Keppel and Palliser arose and Palliser brought charges of misconduct and neglect of duty against Keppel and the Admiralty decided to court-martial him. On 11 February 1779, Keppel was acquitted of all charges and became a national hero. One of Keppel's lawyers commissioned Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland to paint a portrait of Keppel, but Keppel redirected it to Reynolds. Reynolds alluded to Keppel's trial in the portrait by painting his hand on his sword, reflecting the presiding officer's words at the court-martial: \"In delivering to you your sword, I am to congratulate you on its being restored to you with so much honour\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "On 10 August 1784, Allan Ramsay died and the office of Principal Painter in Ordinary to King George III became vacant. Thomas Gainsborough felt that he had a good chance of securing it, but Reynolds felt he deserved it and threatened to resign the presidency of the Royal Academy if he did not receive it. Reynolds noted in his pocket book: \"Sept. 1, 2½, to attend at the Lord Chancellor's Office to be sworn in painter to the King\". It did not make Reynolds happy, however, as he wrote to Boswell: \"If I had known what a shabby miserable place it is, I would not have asked for it; besides as things have turned out I think a certain person is not worth speaking to, nor speaking of\", presumably meaning the king. Reynolds wrote to Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St Asaph, a few weeks later: \"Your Lordship congratulation on my succeeding Mr. Ramsay I take very kindly, but it is a most miserable office, it is reduced from two hundred to thirty-eight pounds per annum, the Kings Rat catcher I believe is a better place, and I am to be paid only a fourth part of what I have from other people, so that the Portraits of their Majesties are not likely to be better done now, than they used to be, I should be ruined if I was to paint them myself\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1787, Reynolds painted the portrait of Lord Heathfield, who became a national hero for the successful defence of Gibraltar in the Great Siege from 1779 to 1783 against the combined forces of France and Spain. Heathfield is depicted against a background of clouds and cannon smoke, wearing the uniform of the 15th Light Dragoons and clasping the key of the Rock, its chain wrapped twice around his right hand. John Constable said in the 1830s that it was \"almost a history of the defence of Gibraltar\". Desmond Shawe-Taylor has claimed that the portrait may have a religious meaning, Heathfield holding the key similar to St. Peter (Jesus' \"rock\") possessing the keys to Heaven, Heathfield \"the rock upon which Britannia builds her military interests\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1789, Reynolds lost the sight of his left eye, which forced him into retirement. In 1791 James Boswell dedicated his Life of Samuel Johnson to Reynolds. Reynolds agreed with Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and, writing in early 1791, expressed his belief that the ancien régime of France had fallen due to spending too much time tending, as he puts it,",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "to the splendor of the foliage, to the neglect of the stirring the earth about the roots. They cultivated only those arts which could add splendor to the nation, to the neglect of those which supported it – They neglected Trade & substantial Manufacture ... but does it follow that a total revolution is necessary that because we have given ourselves up too much to the ornaments of life, we will now have none at all.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "When attending a dinner at Holland House, Fox's niece Caroline was sat next to Reynolds and \"burst out into glorification of the Revolution – and was grievously chilled and checked by her neighbour's cautious and unsympathetic tone\".",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "On 4 June 1791, at a dinner at the Freemasons' Tavern to mark the king's birthday, Reynolds drank to the toasts \"GOD save the KING!\" and \"May our glorious Constitution under which the arts flourish, be immortal!\", in what was reported by the Public Advertiser as \"a fervour truly patriotick\". Reynolds \"filled the chair with a most convivial glee\". He returned to town from Burke's house in Beaconsfield and Edmond Malone wrote that \"we left his carriage at the Inn at Hayes, and walked five miles on the road, in a warm day, without his complaining of any fatigue\".",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Later that month Reynolds suffered from a swelling over his left eye and had to be purged by a surgeon. In October he was too ill to take the president's chair and in November, Frances Burney recorded that",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "I had long languished to see that kindly zealous friend, but his ill health had intimidated me from making the attempt\": \"He had a bandage over one eye, and the other shaded with a green half-bonnet. He seemed serious even to sadness, though extremely kind. 'I am very glad,' he said, in a meek voice and dejected accent, 'to see you again, and I wish I could see you better! but I have only one eye now, and hardly that.' I was really quite touched.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "On 5 November, Reynolds, fearing he might not have an opportunity to write a will, wrote a memorandum intended to be his last will and testament, with Edmund Burke, Edmond Malone, and Philip Metcalfe named as executors. On 10 November, Reynolds wrote to Benjamin West to resign the presidency, but the General Assembly agreed he should be re-elected, with Sir William Chambers and West to deputise for him.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Doctors Richard Warren and Sir George Baker believed Reynolds' illness to be psychological and they bled his neck \"with a view of drawing the humour from his eyes\" but the effect, in the view of his niece, was that it seemed \"as if the 'principle of life' were gone\" from Reynolds. On New Year's Day 1792 Reynolds became \"seized with sickness\", and from that time onwards could not keep food down. Reynolds died on 23 February 1792 at his house at 47 Leicester Fields in London between eight and nine in the evening.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Burke was present on the night Reynolds died, and was moved within hours to write a eulogy of Reynolds, starting with the following sentiments: \"Sir Joshua Reynolds was on very many accounts one of the most memorable men of his Time. He was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant Arts to the other Glories of his Country. In Taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and Harmony of colouring, he was equal to the great masters of the renowned Ages.\" Burke's tribute was well received and one journalist called it \"the eulogium of Apelles pronounced by Pericles\".",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Reynolds was buried at St Paul's Cathedral. In 1903, a statue, by Alfred Drury, was erected in his honour in the Annenberg Courtyard of Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy. Around the statue are fountains and lights, installed in 2000, arranged in the pattern of a star chart at midnight on the night of Reynolds' birth. The planets are marked by granite discs, and the Moon by a water recess.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In appearance Reynolds was not striking. Slightly built, he was about 5'6\" tall with dark brown curls, a florid complexion and features that James Boswell thought were \"rather too largely and strongly limned.\" He had a broad face and a cleft chin, and the bridge of his nose was slightly dented; his skin was scarred by smallpox and his upper lip disfigured as a result of falling from a horse as a young man. Edmond Malone asserted however that \"his appearance at first sight impressed the spectator with the idea of a well-born and well-bred English gentleman.\"",
"title": "Personal characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In his mature years he suffered from deafness, as recorded by Frances Burney, although this did not impede his lively social life.",
"title": "Personal characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Renowned for his placidity, Reynolds often claimed that he \"hated nobody\". This may be self-idealisation. It is well known that he disliked George Romney, whom he referred to only as \"the man in Cavendish Square\" and whom he successfully prevented from becoming a member of the Royal Academy. He did not like Gainsborough, yet appreciated his achievements in the obituary he wrote of his rival. (Rump; Kidson). It is said that when he taught in one of his \"discourses\" that a painter should not amass too much of the colour blue in the foreground of an image, Gainsborough was prompted to paint his famous \"Blue Boy\".",
"title": "Personal characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Never quite losing his Devonshire accent, Reynolds was not only an amiable and original conversationalist, but a friendly and generous host, so that Frances Burney recorded in her diary that he had \"a suavity of disposition that set everybody at their ease in his society\", and William Makepeace Thackeray believed \"of all the polite men of that age, Joshua Reynolds was the finest gentleman\". Dr Johnson commented on the \"inoffensiveness\" of his nature; Edmund Burke noted his \"strong turn for humor\". Thomas Bernard, who later became Bishop of Killaloe, wrote in his closing verses on Reynolds stating:",
"title": "Personal characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Thou say'st not only skill is gained But genius too may be attained By studious imitation; Thy temper mild, thy genius fine I'll copy till I make them mine By constant application.",
"title": "Personal characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Some people, such as Hester Lynch Piozzi, construed Reynolds' equable calm as cool and unfeeling.",
"title": "Personal characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "It is to this lukewarm temperament that Frederick W. Hilles, Bodman Professor of English Literature at Yale attributes Reynolds' never having married. In the editorial notes of his compendium Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hilles theorises that \"as a corollary one might say that he [Reynolds] was somewhat lacking in a capacity for love\", and cites Boswell's notary papers: \"He said the reason he would never marry was that every woman whom he liked had grown indifferent to him, and he had been glad he did not marry her.\" Reynolds' own sister, Frances, who lived with him as housekeeper, took her own negative opinion further still, thinking him \"a gloomy tyrant\". The presence of family compensated Reynolds for the absence of a wife; he wrote on one occasion to his friend Bennet Langton, that both his sister and niece were away from home \"so that I am quite a bachelor\". Reynolds did not marry, and had no known children.",
"title": "Personal characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Biographer Ian McIntyre discusses the possibility of Reynolds having enjoyed sexual relations with certain clients, such as Nelly O'Brien (or \"My Lady O'Brien\", as he playfully dubbed her) and Kitty Fisher, who visited his house for more sittings than were strictly necessary. Dan Cruickshank in his book London's Sinful Secret summarised Reynolds as having visited and re-visited various reputed red light districts in London after his return from Italy as a possible contributor to his medical condition and appearance due to commonly contracted disease in those areas of London.",
"title": "Personal characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 2010, the Wallace Collection launched the Reynolds Research Project. With the support of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and in partnership with the National Gallery and in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, work was undertaken to conserve the museum's portraits to improve their visual appreciation for future generations and to investigate the ways in which they were painted.",
"title": "The Reynolds Research Project"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The purpose of an exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint, 2015, was to share the discoveries of the project and to reveal Reynolds's complex and experimental engagement with painterly materials over the course of his long career. A series of thematic groupings of works from the collection with temporary loans allowed the curators to explore the development of Reynolds's images from both a technical and art historical viewpoint.",
"title": "The Reynolds Research Project"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "As well as exploring his experimentation with materials, the project also revealed the innovative ways in which Reynolds collaborated with his patrons; played with the conventions of genre, composition and pose; engaged with the work of other artists; and organised the submission and display of his work at exhibitions. The commissioning and collecting of Reynolds's work, specifically in the context of the founders of the Wallace Collection (the Seymour-Conway family), was also examined.",
"title": "The Reynolds Research Project"
}
]
| Sir Joshua Reynolds was an English painter who specialised in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting, which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts and was knighted by George III in 1769. | 2001-06-20T08:40:03Z | 2023-12-17T21:08:09Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Reynolds |
15,827 | Joseph Schumpeter | Joseph Alois Schumpeter (German: [ˈʃʊmpeːtɐ]; February 8, 1883 – January 8, 1950) was an Austrian political economist. He served briefly as Finance Minister of Austria in 1919. In 1932, he emigrated to the United States to become a professor at Harvard University, where he remained until the end of his career, and in 1939 obtained American citizenship.
Schumpeter was one of the most influential economists of the early 20th century, and popularized the term "creative destruction", coined by Werner Sombart.
Schumpeter was born in 1883 in Triesch, Habsburg Moravia (now Třešť in the Czech Republic, then part of Austria-Hungary) to German-speaking Catholic parents. Both of his grandmothers were Czech. Schumpeter did not acknowledge his Czech ancestry; he considered himself an ethnic German. His father, who owned a factory, died when Joseph was only four years old. In 1893, Joseph and his mother moved to Vienna. Schumpeter was a loyal supporter of Franz Joseph I of Austria.
Schumpeter was educated at the Theresianum, and began his career studying law at the University of Vienna under Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, an economic theorist of the Austrian School. In 1906, he received his doctoral degree from the faculty of law, with a specialization in economics. In 1909, after some study trips, he became a professor of economics and government at the University of Czernowitz in modern-day Ukraine. In 1911, he joined the University of Graz, where he remained until World War I.
In 1918, Schumpeter was a member of the Socialization Commission established by the Council of the People's Deputies in Germany. In March 1919, he was invited to take office as Minister of Finance in the Republic of German-Austria. He proposed a capital levy as a way to tackle the war debt and opposed the socialization of the Alpine Mountain plant. In 1921, he became president of the private Biedermann Bank. He was also a board member at the Kaufmann Bank. Problems at those banks left Schumpeter in debt. His resignation was a condition of the takeover of the Biedermann Bank in September 1924.
From 1925 until 1932, Schumpeter held a chair at the University of Bonn, Germany. He lectured at Harvard in 1927–1928 and 1930. In 1931, he was a visiting professor at the Tokyo College of Commerce. In 1932, Schumpeter moved to the United States, and soon began what would become extensive efforts to help fellow central European economists displaced by Nazism. Schumpeter also became known for his opposition to Marxism and socialism, which he thought would lead to dictatorship, and even criticized Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1939, Schumpeter became a US citizen. At the beginning of World War II, the FBI investigated him and his wife, Elizabeth Boody (a prominent scholar of Japanese economics) for Nazi sympathies, but found no evidence of such leanings.
At Harvard, Schumpeter was considered a memorable character, erudite, and even showy in the classroom. He became known for his heavy teaching load and his personal and painstaking interest in his students. He served as the faculty advisor of the Graduate Economics Club and organized private seminars and discussion groups. Some colleagues thought his views were outdated by Keynesianism, which was fashionable; others resented his criticisms, particularly of their failure to offer an assistant professorship to Paul Samuelson, but recanted when they thought him likely to accept a position at Yale University. This period of his life was characterized by hard work and comparatively little recognition of his massive 2-volume book Business Cycles. However, Schumpeter persevered, and in 1942 published what became the most popular of all his works, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, reprinted many times and in many languages in the following decades, as well as cited thousands of times.
The source of Schumpeter's dynamic, change-oriented, and innovation-based economics was the historical school of economics. Although his writings could be critical of that perspective, Schumpeter's work on the role of innovation and entrepreneurship can be seen as a continuation of ideas originated by the historical school, especially the work of Gustav von Schmoller and Werner Sombart. Despite being born in Austria and having trained with many of the same economists, some argue he cannot be categorized with the Austrian School of economics without major qualifications while others maintain the opposite.
The Austrian sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid's concept of fiscal sociology influenced Schumpeter's analysis of the tax state. A 2012 paper showed that Schumpeter's writings displayed the influence of Francis Galton's work.
According to Christopher Freeman (2009), "the central point of his whole life work [is]: that capitalism can only be understood as an evolutionary process of continuous innovation and 'creative destruction'".
Schumpeter's scholarship is apparent in his posthumous History of Economic Analysis, Schumpeter thought that the greatest 18th-century economist was Turgot rather than Adam Smith, and he considered Léon Walras to be the "greatest of all economists", beside whom other economists' theories were "like inadequate attempts to catch some particular aspects of Walrasian truth". Schumpeter criticized John Maynard Keynes and David Ricardo for the "Ricardian vice". According to Schumpeter, both Ricardo and Keynes reasoned in terms of abstract models, where they would freeze all but a few variables. Then they could argue that one caused the other in a simple monotonic fashion. This led to the belief that one could easily deduce policy conclusions directly from a highly abstract theoretical model.
In this book, Joseph Schumpeter recognized the implication of a gold monetary standard compared to a fiat monetary standard. In History of Economic Analysis, Schumpeter stated the following: "An 'automatic' gold currency is part and parcel of a laissez-faire and free-trade economy. It links every nation's money rates and price levels with the money rates and price levels of all the other nations that are 'on gold.' However, gold is extremely sensitive to government expenditure and even to attitudes or policies that do not involve expenditure directly, for example, in foreign policy, certain policies of taxation, and, in general, precisely all those policies that violate the principles of [classical] liberalism. This is the reason why gold is so unpopular now and also why it was so popular in a bourgeois era."
Schumpeter's relationships with the ideas of other economists were quite complex in his most important contributions to economic analysis – the theory of business cycles and development. Following neither Walras nor Keynes, Schumpeter starts in The Theory of Economic Development with a treatise of circular flow which, excluding any innovations and innovative activities, leads to a stationary state. The stationary state is, according to Schumpeter, described by Walrasian equilibrium. The hero of his story is the entrepreneur.
The entrepreneur disturbs this equilibrium and is the prime cause of economic development, which proceeds cyclically along with several time scales. In fashioning this theory connecting innovations, cycles, and development, Schumpeter kept alive the Russian Nikolai Kondratiev's ideas on 50-year cycles, Kondratiev waves.
Schumpeter suggested a model in which the four main cycles, Kondratiev (54 years), Kuznets (18 years), Juglar (9 years), and Kitchin (about 4 years) can be added together to form a composite waveform. A Kondratiev wave could consist of three lower-degree Kuznets waves. Each Kuznets wave could, itself, be made up of two Juglar waves. Similarly two (or three) Kitchin waves could form a higher degree Juglar wave. If each of these were in phase; more importantly, if the downward arc of each was simultaneous so that the nadir of each was coincident, it would explain disastrous slumps and consequent depressions. As far as the segmentation of the Kondratiev Wave, Schumpeter never proposed such a fixed model. He saw these cycles varying in time – although in a tight time frame by coincidence – and for each to serve a specific purpose.
In Schumpeter's theory, Walrasian equilibrium is not adequate to capture the key mechanisms of economic development. Schumpeter also thought that the institution enabling the entrepreneur to buy the resources needed to realize his vision was a well-developed capitalist financial system, including a whole range of institutions for granting credit. One could divide economists among (1) those who emphasized "real" analysis and regarded money as merely a "veil" and (2) those who thought monetary institutions were important and money could be a separate driving force. Both Schumpeter and Keynes were among the latter.
Schumpeter's most popular book in English is probably Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. While he agrees with Karl Marx that capitalism will collapse and be replaced by socialism, Schumpeter predicts a different way this will come about. While Marx predicted that capitalism would be overthrown by a violent proletarian revolution, which occurred in the least capitalist countries, Schumpeter believed that capitalism would gradually weaken itself and eventually collapse. Specifically, the success of capitalism would lead to corporatism and to values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals.
"Intellectuals" are a social class in a position to critique societal matters for which they are not directly responsible and to stand up for the interests of other classes. Intellectuals tend to have a negative outlook on capitalism, even while relying on it for prestige because their professions rely on antagonism toward it. The growing number of people with higher education is a great advantage of capitalism, according to Schumpeter. Yet, unemployment and a lack of fulfilling work will lead to intellectual critique, discontent, and protests.
Parliaments will increasingly elect social democratic parties, and democratic majorities will vote for restrictions on entrepreneurship. Increasing workers' self-management, industrial democracy and regulatory institutions would evolve non-politically into "liberal capitalism". Thus, the intellectual and social climate needed for thriving entrepreneurship will be replaced by some form of "laborism". This will exacerbate "creative destruction" (a borrowed phrase to denote an endogenous replacement of old ways of doing things by new ways), which will ultimately undermine and destroy the capitalist structure.
Schumpeter emphasizes throughout this book that he is analyzing trends, not engaging in political advocacy.
William Fellner, in the book Schumpeter's Vision: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy After 40 Years, noted that Schumpeter saw any political system in which the power was fully monopolized as fascist.
In the same book, Schumpeter expounded on a theory of democracy that sought to challenge what he called the "classical doctrine". He disputed the idea that democracy was a process by which the electorate identified the common good, and politicians carried this out for them. He argued this was unrealistic, and that people's ignorance and superficiality meant that they were largely manipulated by politicians, who set the agenda. Furthermore, he claimed that even if the common good was possible to find, it would still not make clear the means needed to reach its end, since citizens do not have the requisite knowledge to design government policy. This made a 'rule by the people' concept both unlikely and undesirable. Instead, he advocated a minimalist model, much influenced by Max Weber, whereby democracy is the mechanism for competition between leaders, much like a market structure. Although periodic votes by the general public legitimize governments and keep them accountable, the policy program is very much seen as their own and not that of the people, and the participatory role of individuals is usually severely limited.
Schumpeter defined democracy as the method by which people elect representatives in competitive elections to carry out their will. This definition has been described as simple, elegant and parsimonious, making it clearer to distinguish political systems that either fulfill or fail these characteristics. This minimalist definition stands in contrast to broader definitions of democracy, which may emphasize aspects such as "representation, accountability, equality, participation, justice, dignity, rationality, security, freedom". Within such a minimalist definition, states which other scholars say have experienced democratic backsliding and which lack civil liberties, a free press, the rule of law and a constrained executive, would still be considered democracies. For Schumpeter, the formation of a government is the endpoint of the democratic process, which means that for the purposes of his democratic theory, he has no comment on what kinds of decisions that the government can take to be a democracy. Schumpeter faced pushback on his theory from other democratic theorists, such as Robert Dahl, who argued that there is more to democracy than simply the formation of government through competitive elections.
Schumpeter's view of democracy has been described as "elitist", as he criticizes the rationality and knowledge of voters, and expresses a preference for politicians making decisions. Democracy is therefore in a sense a means to ensure circulation among elites. However, studies by Natasha Piano (of the University of Chicago) emphasize that Schumpeter had substantial disdain for elites as well.
The field of entrepreneurship theory owed much to Schumpeter's contributions. His fundamental theories are often referred to as Mark I and Mark II. In Mark I, Schumpeter argued that the innovation and technological change of a nation come from entrepreneurs or wild spirits. He coined the word Unternehmergeist, German for "entrepreneur-spirit", and asserted that "... the doing of new things or the doing of things that are already being done in a new way" stemmed directly from the efforts of entrepreneurs.
Schumpeter developed Mark II while a professor at Harvard. Many social economists and popular authors of the day argued that large businesses had a negative effect on the standard of living of ordinary people. Contrary to this prevailing opinion, Schumpeter argued that the agents that drive innovation and the economy are large companies that have the capital to invest in research and development of new products and services and to deliver them to customers more cheaply, thus raising their standard of living. In one of his seminal works, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter wrote:
As soon as we go into details and inquire into the individual items in which progress was most conspicuous, the trail leads not to the doors of those firms that work under conditions of comparatively free competition but precisely to the door of the large concerns – which, as in the case of agricultural machinery, also account for much of the progress in the competitive sector – and a shocking suspicion dawns upon us that big business may have had more to do with creating that standard of life than with keeping it down.
As of 2017 Mark I and Mark II arguments are considered complementary.
Schumpeter was the most influential thinker to argue that long cycles are caused by innovation and are an incident of it. His treatise on how business cycles developed was based on Kondratiev's ideas which attributed the causes very differently. Schumpeter's treatise brought Kondratiev's ideas to the attention of English-speaking economists. Kondratiev fused important elements that Schumpeter missed. Yet, the Schumpeterian variant of the long-cycles hypothesis, stressing the initiating role of innovations, commands the widest attention today. In Schumpeter's view, technological innovation is the cause of both cyclical instability and economic growth. Fluctuations in innovation cause fluctuations in investment and those cause cycles in economic growth. Schumpeter sees innovations as clustering around certain points in time that he refers to as "neighborhoods of equilibrium" when entrepreneurs perceive that risk and returns warrant innovative commitments. These clusters lead to long cycles by generating periods of acceleration in aggregate growth.
The technological view of change needs to demonstrate that changes in the rate of innovation govern changes in the rate of new investments and that the combined impact of innovation clusters takes the form of fluctuation in aggregate output or employment. The process of technological innovation involves extremely complex relations among a set of key variables: inventions, innovations, diffusion paths, and investment activities. The impact of technological innovation on aggregate output is mediated through a succession of relationships that have yet to be explored systematically in the context of the long wave. New inventions are typically primitive, their performance is usually poorer than existing technologies and the cost of their production is high. A production technology may not yet exist, as is often the case in major chemical and pharmaceutical inventions. The speed with which inventions are transformed into innovations and diffused depends on the actual and expected trajectory of performance improvement and cost reduction.
Schumpeter identified innovation as the critical dimension of economic change. He argued that economic change revolves around innovation, entrepreneurial activities, and market power. He sought to prove that innovation-originated market power can provide better results than the invisible hand and price competition. He argued that technological innovation often creates temporary monopolies, allowing abnormal profits that would soon be competed away by rivals and imitators. These temporary monopolies were necessary to provide the incentive for firms to develop new products and processes.
The World Bank's "Doing Business" report was influenced by Schumpeter's focus on removing impediments to creative destruction. The creation of the report is credited in part to his work.
Schumpeter was married three times. His first wife was Gladys Ricarde Seaver, an Englishwoman nearly 12 years his senior (married 1907, separated 1913, divorced 1925). His best man at his wedding was his friend and Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen. His second was Anna Reisinger, 20 years his junior and daughter of the concierge of the apartment where he grew up. As a divorced man, he and his bride converted to Lutheranism to marry. They married in 1925, but within a year, she died in childbirth. The loss of his wife and newborn son came only weeks after Schumpeter's mother had died. Five years after arriving in the US, in 1937, at the age of 54, Schumpeter married the American economic historian Dr. Elizabeth Boody (1898–1953), who helped him popularize his work and edited what became their magnum opus, the posthumously published History of Economic Analysis. Elizabeth assisted him with his research and English writing until his death.
Schumpeter claimed that he had set himself three goals in life: to be the greatest economist in the world, to be the best horseman in all of Austria, and the greatest lover in all of Vienna. He said he had reached two of his goals, but he never said which two, although he is reported to have said that there were too many fine horsemen in Austria for him to succeed in all his aspirations.
Schumpeter died in his home in Taconic, Connecticut, at the age of 66, on the night of January 7, 1950.
For some time after his death, Schumpeter's views were most influential among various heterodox economists, especially Europeans, who were interested in industrial organization, evolutionary theory, and economic development, and who tended to be on the other end of the political spectrum from Schumpeter and were also often influenced by Keynes, Karl Marx, and Thorstein Veblen. Robert Heilbroner was one of Schumpeter's most renowned pupils, who wrote extensively about him in The Worldly Philosophers. In the journal Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster wrote of that journal's founder Paul Sweezy, one of the leading Marxist economists in the United States and a graduate assistant of Schumpeter's at Harvard, that Schumpeter "played a formative role in his development as a thinker". Other outstanding students of Schumpeter's include the economists Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Hyman Minsky and John Kenneth Galbraith and former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Future Nobel Laureate Robert Solow was his student at Harvard, and he expanded on Schumpeter's theory.
Today, Schumpeter has a following outside standard textbook economics, in areas such as economic policy, management studies, industrial policy, and the study of innovation. Schumpeter was probably the first scholar to develop theories about entrepreneurship. For instance, the European Union's innovation program, and its main development plan, the Lisbon Strategy, are influenced by Schumpeter. The International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society awards the Schumpeter Prize.
The Schumpeter School of Business and Economics opened in October 2008 at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. According to University President Professor Lambert T. Koch, "Schumpeter will not only be the name of the Faculty of Management and Economics, but this is also a research and teaching programme related to Joseph A. Schumpeter."
On September 17, 2009, The Economist inaugurated a column on business and management named "Schumpeter". The publication has a history of naming columns after significant figures or symbols in the covered field, including naming its British affairs column after former editor Walter Bagehot and its European affairs column after Charlemagne. The initial Schumpeter column praised him as a "champion of innovation and entrepreneurship" whose writing showed an understanding of the benefits and dangers of business that proved to be far ahead of its time.
Schumpeter's thoughts inspired the economic theory of Adam Przeworski. | [
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"text": "Schumpeter was born in 1883 in Triesch, Habsburg Moravia (now Třešť in the Czech Republic, then part of Austria-Hungary) to German-speaking Catholic parents. Both of his grandmothers were Czech. Schumpeter did not acknowledge his Czech ancestry; he considered himself an ethnic German. His father, who owned a factory, died when Joseph was only four years old. In 1893, Joseph and his mother moved to Vienna. Schumpeter was a loyal supporter of Franz Joseph I of Austria.",
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"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Schumpeter was educated at the Theresianum, and began his career studying law at the University of Vienna under Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, an economic theorist of the Austrian School. In 1906, he received his doctoral degree from the faculty of law, with a specialization in economics. In 1909, after some study trips, he became a professor of economics and government at the University of Czernowitz in modern-day Ukraine. In 1911, he joined the University of Graz, where he remained until World War I.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1918, Schumpeter was a member of the Socialization Commission established by the Council of the People's Deputies in Germany. In March 1919, he was invited to take office as Minister of Finance in the Republic of German-Austria. He proposed a capital levy as a way to tackle the war debt and opposed the socialization of the Alpine Mountain plant. In 1921, he became president of the private Biedermann Bank. He was also a board member at the Kaufmann Bank. Problems at those banks left Schumpeter in debt. His resignation was a condition of the takeover of the Biedermann Bank in September 1924.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "From 1925 until 1932, Schumpeter held a chair at the University of Bonn, Germany. He lectured at Harvard in 1927–1928 and 1930. In 1931, he was a visiting professor at the Tokyo College of Commerce. In 1932, Schumpeter moved to the United States, and soon began what would become extensive efforts to help fellow central European economists displaced by Nazism. Schumpeter also became known for his opposition to Marxism and socialism, which he thought would lead to dictatorship, and even criticized Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1939, Schumpeter became a US citizen. At the beginning of World War II, the FBI investigated him and his wife, Elizabeth Boody (a prominent scholar of Japanese economics) for Nazi sympathies, but found no evidence of such leanings.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "At Harvard, Schumpeter was considered a memorable character, erudite, and even showy in the classroom. He became known for his heavy teaching load and his personal and painstaking interest in his students. He served as the faculty advisor of the Graduate Economics Club and organized private seminars and discussion groups. Some colleagues thought his views were outdated by Keynesianism, which was fashionable; others resented his criticisms, particularly of their failure to offer an assistant professorship to Paul Samuelson, but recanted when they thought him likely to accept a position at Yale University. This period of his life was characterized by hard work and comparatively little recognition of his massive 2-volume book Business Cycles. However, Schumpeter persevered, and in 1942 published what became the most popular of all his works, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, reprinted many times and in many languages in the following decades, as well as cited thousands of times.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The source of Schumpeter's dynamic, change-oriented, and innovation-based economics was the historical school of economics. Although his writings could be critical of that perspective, Schumpeter's work on the role of innovation and entrepreneurship can be seen as a continuation of ideas originated by the historical school, especially the work of Gustav von Schmoller and Werner Sombart. Despite being born in Austria and having trained with many of the same economists, some argue he cannot be categorized with the Austrian School of economics without major qualifications while others maintain the opposite.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Austrian sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid's concept of fiscal sociology influenced Schumpeter's analysis of the tax state. A 2012 paper showed that Schumpeter's writings displayed the influence of Francis Galton's work.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "According to Christopher Freeman (2009), \"the central point of his whole life work [is]: that capitalism can only be understood as an evolutionary process of continuous innovation and 'creative destruction'\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Schumpeter's scholarship is apparent in his posthumous History of Economic Analysis, Schumpeter thought that the greatest 18th-century economist was Turgot rather than Adam Smith, and he considered Léon Walras to be the \"greatest of all economists\", beside whom other economists' theories were \"like inadequate attempts to catch some particular aspects of Walrasian truth\". Schumpeter criticized John Maynard Keynes and David Ricardo for the \"Ricardian vice\". According to Schumpeter, both Ricardo and Keynes reasoned in terms of abstract models, where they would freeze all but a few variables. Then they could argue that one caused the other in a simple monotonic fashion. This led to the belief that one could easily deduce policy conclusions directly from a highly abstract theoretical model.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In this book, Joseph Schumpeter recognized the implication of a gold monetary standard compared to a fiat monetary standard. In History of Economic Analysis, Schumpeter stated the following: \"An 'automatic' gold currency is part and parcel of a laissez-faire and free-trade economy. It links every nation's money rates and price levels with the money rates and price levels of all the other nations that are 'on gold.' However, gold is extremely sensitive to government expenditure and even to attitudes or policies that do not involve expenditure directly, for example, in foreign policy, certain policies of taxation, and, in general, precisely all those policies that violate the principles of [classical] liberalism. This is the reason why gold is so unpopular now and also why it was so popular in a bourgeois era.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Schumpeter's relationships with the ideas of other economists were quite complex in his most important contributions to economic analysis – the theory of business cycles and development. Following neither Walras nor Keynes, Schumpeter starts in The Theory of Economic Development with a treatise of circular flow which, excluding any innovations and innovative activities, leads to a stationary state. The stationary state is, according to Schumpeter, described by Walrasian equilibrium. The hero of his story is the entrepreneur.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The entrepreneur disturbs this equilibrium and is the prime cause of economic development, which proceeds cyclically along with several time scales. In fashioning this theory connecting innovations, cycles, and development, Schumpeter kept alive the Russian Nikolai Kondratiev's ideas on 50-year cycles, Kondratiev waves.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Schumpeter suggested a model in which the four main cycles, Kondratiev (54 years), Kuznets (18 years), Juglar (9 years), and Kitchin (about 4 years) can be added together to form a composite waveform. A Kondratiev wave could consist of three lower-degree Kuznets waves. Each Kuznets wave could, itself, be made up of two Juglar waves. Similarly two (or three) Kitchin waves could form a higher degree Juglar wave. If each of these were in phase; more importantly, if the downward arc of each was simultaneous so that the nadir of each was coincident, it would explain disastrous slumps and consequent depressions. As far as the segmentation of the Kondratiev Wave, Schumpeter never proposed such a fixed model. He saw these cycles varying in time – although in a tight time frame by coincidence – and for each to serve a specific purpose.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In Schumpeter's theory, Walrasian equilibrium is not adequate to capture the key mechanisms of economic development. Schumpeter also thought that the institution enabling the entrepreneur to buy the resources needed to realize his vision was a well-developed capitalist financial system, including a whole range of institutions for granting credit. One could divide economists among (1) those who emphasized \"real\" analysis and regarded money as merely a \"veil\" and (2) those who thought monetary institutions were important and money could be a separate driving force. Both Schumpeter and Keynes were among the latter.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Schumpeter's most popular book in English is probably Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. While he agrees with Karl Marx that capitalism will collapse and be replaced by socialism, Schumpeter predicts a different way this will come about. While Marx predicted that capitalism would be overthrown by a violent proletarian revolution, which occurred in the least capitalist countries, Schumpeter believed that capitalism would gradually weaken itself and eventually collapse. Specifically, the success of capitalism would lead to corporatism and to values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "\"Intellectuals\" are a social class in a position to critique societal matters for which they are not directly responsible and to stand up for the interests of other classes. Intellectuals tend to have a negative outlook on capitalism, even while relying on it for prestige because their professions rely on antagonism toward it. The growing number of people with higher education is a great advantage of capitalism, according to Schumpeter. Yet, unemployment and a lack of fulfilling work will lead to intellectual critique, discontent, and protests.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Parliaments will increasingly elect social democratic parties, and democratic majorities will vote for restrictions on entrepreneurship. Increasing workers' self-management, industrial democracy and regulatory institutions would evolve non-politically into \"liberal capitalism\". Thus, the intellectual and social climate needed for thriving entrepreneurship will be replaced by some form of \"laborism\". This will exacerbate \"creative destruction\" (a borrowed phrase to denote an endogenous replacement of old ways of doing things by new ways), which will ultimately undermine and destroy the capitalist structure.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Schumpeter emphasizes throughout this book that he is analyzing trends, not engaging in political advocacy.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "William Fellner, in the book Schumpeter's Vision: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy After 40 Years, noted that Schumpeter saw any political system in which the power was fully monopolized as fascist.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In the same book, Schumpeter expounded on a theory of democracy that sought to challenge what he called the \"classical doctrine\". He disputed the idea that democracy was a process by which the electorate identified the common good, and politicians carried this out for them. He argued this was unrealistic, and that people's ignorance and superficiality meant that they were largely manipulated by politicians, who set the agenda. Furthermore, he claimed that even if the common good was possible to find, it would still not make clear the means needed to reach its end, since citizens do not have the requisite knowledge to design government policy. This made a 'rule by the people' concept both unlikely and undesirable. Instead, he advocated a minimalist model, much influenced by Max Weber, whereby democracy is the mechanism for competition between leaders, much like a market structure. Although periodic votes by the general public legitimize governments and keep them accountable, the policy program is very much seen as their own and not that of the people, and the participatory role of individuals is usually severely limited.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Schumpeter defined democracy as the method by which people elect representatives in competitive elections to carry out their will. This definition has been described as simple, elegant and parsimonious, making it clearer to distinguish political systems that either fulfill or fail these characteristics. This minimalist definition stands in contrast to broader definitions of democracy, which may emphasize aspects such as \"representation, accountability, equality, participation, justice, dignity, rationality, security, freedom\". Within such a minimalist definition, states which other scholars say have experienced democratic backsliding and which lack civil liberties, a free press, the rule of law and a constrained executive, would still be considered democracies. For Schumpeter, the formation of a government is the endpoint of the democratic process, which means that for the purposes of his democratic theory, he has no comment on what kinds of decisions that the government can take to be a democracy. Schumpeter faced pushback on his theory from other democratic theorists, such as Robert Dahl, who argued that there is more to democracy than simply the formation of government through competitive elections.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Schumpeter's view of democracy has been described as \"elitist\", as he criticizes the rationality and knowledge of voters, and expresses a preference for politicians making decisions. Democracy is therefore in a sense a means to ensure circulation among elites. However, studies by Natasha Piano (of the University of Chicago) emphasize that Schumpeter had substantial disdain for elites as well.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The field of entrepreneurship theory owed much to Schumpeter's contributions. His fundamental theories are often referred to as Mark I and Mark II. In Mark I, Schumpeter argued that the innovation and technological change of a nation come from entrepreneurs or wild spirits. He coined the word Unternehmergeist, German for \"entrepreneur-spirit\", and asserted that \"... the doing of new things or the doing of things that are already being done in a new way\" stemmed directly from the efforts of entrepreneurs.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Schumpeter developed Mark II while a professor at Harvard. Many social economists and popular authors of the day argued that large businesses had a negative effect on the standard of living of ordinary people. Contrary to this prevailing opinion, Schumpeter argued that the agents that drive innovation and the economy are large companies that have the capital to invest in research and development of new products and services and to deliver them to customers more cheaply, thus raising their standard of living. In one of his seminal works, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter wrote:",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "As soon as we go into details and inquire into the individual items in which progress was most conspicuous, the trail leads not to the doors of those firms that work under conditions of comparatively free competition but precisely to the door of the large concerns – which, as in the case of agricultural machinery, also account for much of the progress in the competitive sector – and a shocking suspicion dawns upon us that big business may have had more to do with creating that standard of life than with keeping it down.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "As of 2017 Mark I and Mark II arguments are considered complementary.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Schumpeter was the most influential thinker to argue that long cycles are caused by innovation and are an incident of it. His treatise on how business cycles developed was based on Kondratiev's ideas which attributed the causes very differently. Schumpeter's treatise brought Kondratiev's ideas to the attention of English-speaking economists. Kondratiev fused important elements that Schumpeter missed. Yet, the Schumpeterian variant of the long-cycles hypothesis, stressing the initiating role of innovations, commands the widest attention today. In Schumpeter's view, technological innovation is the cause of both cyclical instability and economic growth. Fluctuations in innovation cause fluctuations in investment and those cause cycles in economic growth. Schumpeter sees innovations as clustering around certain points in time that he refers to as \"neighborhoods of equilibrium\" when entrepreneurs perceive that risk and returns warrant innovative commitments. These clusters lead to long cycles by generating periods of acceleration in aggregate growth.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The technological view of change needs to demonstrate that changes in the rate of innovation govern changes in the rate of new investments and that the combined impact of innovation clusters takes the form of fluctuation in aggregate output or employment. The process of technological innovation involves extremely complex relations among a set of key variables: inventions, innovations, diffusion paths, and investment activities. The impact of technological innovation on aggregate output is mediated through a succession of relationships that have yet to be explored systematically in the context of the long wave. New inventions are typically primitive, their performance is usually poorer than existing technologies and the cost of their production is high. A production technology may not yet exist, as is often the case in major chemical and pharmaceutical inventions. The speed with which inventions are transformed into innovations and diffused depends on the actual and expected trajectory of performance improvement and cost reduction.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Schumpeter identified innovation as the critical dimension of economic change. He argued that economic change revolves around innovation, entrepreneurial activities, and market power. He sought to prove that innovation-originated market power can provide better results than the invisible hand and price competition. He argued that technological innovation often creates temporary monopolies, allowing abnormal profits that would soon be competed away by rivals and imitators. These temporary monopolies were necessary to provide the incentive for firms to develop new products and processes.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The World Bank's \"Doing Business\" report was influenced by Schumpeter's focus on removing impediments to creative destruction. The creation of the report is credited in part to his work.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Schumpeter was married three times. His first wife was Gladys Ricarde Seaver, an Englishwoman nearly 12 years his senior (married 1907, separated 1913, divorced 1925). His best man at his wedding was his friend and Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen. His second was Anna Reisinger, 20 years his junior and daughter of the concierge of the apartment where he grew up. As a divorced man, he and his bride converted to Lutheranism to marry. They married in 1925, but within a year, she died in childbirth. The loss of his wife and newborn son came only weeks after Schumpeter's mother had died. Five years after arriving in the US, in 1937, at the age of 54, Schumpeter married the American economic historian Dr. Elizabeth Boody (1898–1953), who helped him popularize his work and edited what became their magnum opus, the posthumously published History of Economic Analysis. Elizabeth assisted him with his research and English writing until his death.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Schumpeter claimed that he had set himself three goals in life: to be the greatest economist in the world, to be the best horseman in all of Austria, and the greatest lover in all of Vienna. He said he had reached two of his goals, but he never said which two, although he is reported to have said that there were too many fine horsemen in Austria for him to succeed in all his aspirations.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Schumpeter died in his home in Taconic, Connecticut, at the age of 66, on the night of January 7, 1950.",
"title": "Later life and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "For some time after his death, Schumpeter's views were most influential among various heterodox economists, especially Europeans, who were interested in industrial organization, evolutionary theory, and economic development, and who tended to be on the other end of the political spectrum from Schumpeter and were also often influenced by Keynes, Karl Marx, and Thorstein Veblen. Robert Heilbroner was one of Schumpeter's most renowned pupils, who wrote extensively about him in The Worldly Philosophers. In the journal Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster wrote of that journal's founder Paul Sweezy, one of the leading Marxist economists in the United States and a graduate assistant of Schumpeter's at Harvard, that Schumpeter \"played a formative role in his development as a thinker\". Other outstanding students of Schumpeter's include the economists Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Hyman Minsky and John Kenneth Galbraith and former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Future Nobel Laureate Robert Solow was his student at Harvard, and he expanded on Schumpeter's theory.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Today, Schumpeter has a following outside standard textbook economics, in areas such as economic policy, management studies, industrial policy, and the study of innovation. Schumpeter was probably the first scholar to develop theories about entrepreneurship. For instance, the European Union's innovation program, and its main development plan, the Lisbon Strategy, are influenced by Schumpeter. The International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society awards the Schumpeter Prize.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The Schumpeter School of Business and Economics opened in October 2008 at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. According to University President Professor Lambert T. Koch, \"Schumpeter will not only be the name of the Faculty of Management and Economics, but this is also a research and teaching programme related to Joseph A. Schumpeter.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "On September 17, 2009, The Economist inaugurated a column on business and management named \"Schumpeter\". The publication has a history of naming columns after significant figures or symbols in the covered field, including naming its British affairs column after former editor Walter Bagehot and its European affairs column after Charlemagne. The initial Schumpeter column praised him as a \"champion of innovation and entrepreneurship\" whose writing showed an understanding of the benefits and dangers of business that proved to be far ahead of its time.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Schumpeter's thoughts inspired the economic theory of Adam Przeworski.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian political economist. He served briefly as Finance Minister of Austria in 1919. In 1932, he emigrated to the United States to become a professor at Harvard University, where he remained until the end of his career, and in 1939 obtained American citizenship. Schumpeter was one of the most influential economists of the early 20th century, and popularized the term "creative destruction", coined by Werner Sombart. | 2001-06-21T20:38:42Z | 2023-12-18T08:50:50Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter |
15,830 | John Lee Hooker | John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1912 or 1917 – June 21, 2001) was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The son of a sharecropper, he rose to prominence performing an electric guitar-style adaptation of Delta blues that he developed in Detroit. Hooker often incorporated other elements, including talking blues and early North Mississippi hill country blues. He developed his own driving-rhythm boogie style, distinct from the 1930s–1940s piano-derived boogie-woogie. Hooker was ranked 35 in Rolling Stone's 2015 list of 100 greatest guitarists.
Some of his best known songs include "Boogie Chillen'" (1948), "Crawling King Snake" (1949), "Dimples" (1956), "Boom Boom" (1962), and "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (1966). Several of his later albums, including The Healer (1989), Mr. Lucky (1991), Chill Out (1995), and Don't Look Back (1997), were album chart successes in the U.S. and UK. The Healer (for the song "I'm in the Mood") and Chill Out (for the album) both earned him Grammy wins as well as Don't Look Back, which went on to earn him a double-Grammy win for Best Traditional Blues Recording and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals (with Van Morrison).
Hooker's date of birth is a subject of debate; the years 1912, 1915, 1917, 1920, and 1923 have all been suggested. Most official sources list 1917, though at times Hooker stated he was born in 1920. Information found in the 1920 and 1930 censuses indicates that he was actually born in 1912. In 2017, a series of events took place to celebrate the purported centenary of his birth. In the 1920 federal census, John Hooker is seven years old and one of nine children living with William and Minnie Hooker in Tutwiler, Mississippi.
It is believed that he was born in Tutwiler, in Tallahatchie County, although some sources say his birthplace was near Clarksdale, in Coahoma County. He was the youngest of the 11 children of William Hooker (born 1871, died after 1923), a sharecropper and Baptist preacher, and Minnie Ramsey (born c. 1880, date of death unknown). In the 1920 federal census, William and Minnie were recorded as being 48 and 39 years old, respectively, which implies that Minnie was born about 1880, not 1875. She was said to have been a "decade or so younger" than her husband, which gives additional credibility to this census record as evidence of Hooker's origins.
The Hooker children were homeschooled. They were permitted to listen only to religious songs; the spirituals sung in church were their earliest exposure to music. In 1921, their parents separated. The next year, their mother married William Moore, a blues singer, who provided John Lee with an introduction to the guitar (and whom he would later credit for his distinctive playing style).
Moore was his first significant blues influence. He was a local blues guitarist who, in Shreveport, Louisiana, learned to play a droning, one-chord blues that was strikingly different from the Delta blues of the time.
Another influence was Tony Hollins, who dated Hooker's sister Alice, helped teach Hooker to play, and gave him his first guitar. For the rest of his life, Hooker regarded Hollins as a formative influence on his style of playing and his career as a musician. Among the songs that Hollins reputedly taught Hooker were versions of "Crawlin' King Snake" and "Catfish Blues".
At the age of 14, Hooker ran away from home, reportedly never seeing his mother or stepfather again. In the mid-1930s, he lived in Memphis, Tennessee, where he performed on Beale Street, at the New Daisy Theatre and occasionally at house parties.
He worked in factories in various cities during World War II, eventually getting a job with the Ford Motor Company in Detroit in 1943. He frequented the blues clubs and bars on Hastings Street, the heart of the black entertainment district, on Detroit's east side. In a city noted for its pianists, guitar players were scarce. Hooker's popularity grew quickly as he performed in Detroit clubs, and, seeking an instrument louder than his acoustic guitar, he bought his first electric guitar.
Hooker was working as janitor in a Detroit steel mill when his recording career began in 1948, when Modern Records, based in Los Angeles, released a demo he had recorded for Bernie Besman in Detroit. The single, "Boogie Chillen'", became a hit and the best-selling race record of 1949. Though illiterate, Hooker was a prolific lyricist. In addition to adapting traditional blues lyrics, he composed original songs. In the 1950s, like many black musicians, Hooker earned little from record sales, and so he often recorded variations of his songs for different studios for an up-front fee. To evade his recording contract, he used various pseudonyms, including John Lee Booker (for Chess Records and Chance Records in 1951–1952), Johnny Lee (for De Luxe Records in 1953–1954), John Lee, John Lee Cooker, Texas Slim, Delta John, Birmingham Sam and his Magic Guitar, Johnny Williams, and the Boogie Man.
His early solo songs were recorded by Bernie Besman. Hooker rarely played with a standard beat, but instead he changed tempo to fit the needs of the song. This often made it difficult to use backing musicians, who were not accustomed to Hooker's musical vagaries. As a result, Besman recorded Hooker playing guitar, singing and stomping on a wooden pallet in time with the music.
For much of this period he recorded and toured with Eddie Kirkland. In Hooker's later sessions for Vee-Jay Records in Chicago, studio musicians accompanied him on most of his recordings, including Eddie Taylor, who could handle his musical idiosyncrasies. "Boom Boom" (1962) and "Dimples", two popular songs by Hooker, were originally released by Vee-Jay.
Beginning in 1962, Hooker gained greater exposure when he toured Europe in the annual American Folk Blues Festival. His "Dimples" became a successful single on the UK Singles Charts in 1964, eight years after its first US release. Hooker began to perform and record with rock musicians. One of his earliest collaborations was with British blues rock band the Groundhogs. In 1970, he recorded the joint album Hooker 'n Heat, with the American blues and boogie rock group Canned Heat, whose repertoire included adaptations of Hooker songs. It became the first of Hooker's albums to reach the Billboard charts, peaking at number 78 on the Billboard 200. Other collaboration albums soon followed, including Endless Boogie (1971) and Never Get Out of These Blues Alive (1972), which included Steve Miller, Elvin Bishop, Van Morrison, and others.
Hooker appeared in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers as a street musician playing "Boom Boom". In 1989, he recorded the album The Healer with Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, and others. The 1990s saw additional collaboration albums: Mr. Lucky (1991), Chill Out (1995), and Don't Look Back (1997) with Morrison, Santana, Los Lobos, and additional guest musicians. His re-recording of "Boom Boom" (the title track for his 1992 album) with guitarist Jimmie Vaughan became Hooker's highest charting single (number 16) in the UK. Come See About Me, a 2004 DVD, includes performances filmed between 1960 and 1994 and interviews with several of the musicians.
Hooker owned five houses in his later life, including ones in the California cities of Los Altos, Redwood City, and Long Beach. On June 21, 2001, Hooker died in his sleep at home in Los Altos.
Among his many awards, Hooker was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. He was a recipient of a 1983 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. He was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000 and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He is also inducted into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame.
Two of his songs, "Boogie Chillen" and "Boom Boom", are included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. "Boogie Chillen" is also included in the Recording Industry Association of America's list of the "Songs of the Century". | [
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"text": "John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1912 or 1917 – June 21, 2001) was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The son of a sharecropper, he rose to prominence performing an electric guitar-style adaptation of Delta blues that he developed in Detroit. Hooker often incorporated other elements, including talking blues and early North Mississippi hill country blues. He developed his own driving-rhythm boogie style, distinct from the 1930s–1940s piano-derived boogie-woogie. Hooker was ranked 35 in Rolling Stone's 2015 list of 100 greatest guitarists.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Some of his best known songs include \"Boogie Chillen'\" (1948), \"Crawling King Snake\" (1949), \"Dimples\" (1956), \"Boom Boom\" (1962), and \"One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer\" (1966). Several of his later albums, including The Healer (1989), Mr. Lucky (1991), Chill Out (1995), and Don't Look Back (1997), were album chart successes in the U.S. and UK. The Healer (for the song \"I'm in the Mood\") and Chill Out (for the album) both earned him Grammy wins as well as Don't Look Back, which went on to earn him a double-Grammy win for Best Traditional Blues Recording and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals (with Van Morrison).",
"title": ""
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{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Hooker's date of birth is a subject of debate; the years 1912, 1915, 1917, 1920, and 1923 have all been suggested. Most official sources list 1917, though at times Hooker stated he was born in 1920. Information found in the 1920 and 1930 censuses indicates that he was actually born in 1912. In 2017, a series of events took place to celebrate the purported centenary of his birth. In the 1920 federal census, John Hooker is seven years old and one of nine children living with William and Minnie Hooker in Tutwiler, Mississippi.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "It is believed that he was born in Tutwiler, in Tallahatchie County, although some sources say his birthplace was near Clarksdale, in Coahoma County. He was the youngest of the 11 children of William Hooker (born 1871, died after 1923), a sharecropper and Baptist preacher, and Minnie Ramsey (born c. 1880, date of death unknown). In the 1920 federal census, William and Minnie were recorded as being 48 and 39 years old, respectively, which implies that Minnie was born about 1880, not 1875. She was said to have been a \"decade or so younger\" than her husband, which gives additional credibility to this census record as evidence of Hooker's origins.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Hooker children were homeschooled. They were permitted to listen only to religious songs; the spirituals sung in church were their earliest exposure to music. In 1921, their parents separated. The next year, their mother married William Moore, a blues singer, who provided John Lee with an introduction to the guitar (and whom he would later credit for his distinctive playing style).",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Moore was his first significant blues influence. He was a local blues guitarist who, in Shreveport, Louisiana, learned to play a droning, one-chord blues that was strikingly different from the Delta blues of the time.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Another influence was Tony Hollins, who dated Hooker's sister Alice, helped teach Hooker to play, and gave him his first guitar. For the rest of his life, Hooker regarded Hollins as a formative influence on his style of playing and his career as a musician. Among the songs that Hollins reputedly taught Hooker were versions of \"Crawlin' King Snake\" and \"Catfish Blues\".",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "At the age of 14, Hooker ran away from home, reportedly never seeing his mother or stepfather again. In the mid-1930s, he lived in Memphis, Tennessee, where he performed on Beale Street, at the New Daisy Theatre and occasionally at house parties.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "He worked in factories in various cities during World War II, eventually getting a job with the Ford Motor Company in Detroit in 1943. He frequented the blues clubs and bars on Hastings Street, the heart of the black entertainment district, on Detroit's east side. In a city noted for its pianists, guitar players were scarce. Hooker's popularity grew quickly as he performed in Detroit clubs, and, seeking an instrument louder than his acoustic guitar, he bought his first electric guitar.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Hooker was working as janitor in a Detroit steel mill when his recording career began in 1948, when Modern Records, based in Los Angeles, released a demo he had recorded for Bernie Besman in Detroit. The single, \"Boogie Chillen'\", became a hit and the best-selling race record of 1949. Though illiterate, Hooker was a prolific lyricist. In addition to adapting traditional blues lyrics, he composed original songs. In the 1950s, like many black musicians, Hooker earned little from record sales, and so he often recorded variations of his songs for different studios for an up-front fee. To evade his recording contract, he used various pseudonyms, including John Lee Booker (for Chess Records and Chance Records in 1951–1952), Johnny Lee (for De Luxe Records in 1953–1954), John Lee, John Lee Cooker, Texas Slim, Delta John, Birmingham Sam and his Magic Guitar, Johnny Williams, and the Boogie Man.",
"title": "Earlier career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "His early solo songs were recorded by Bernie Besman. Hooker rarely played with a standard beat, but instead he changed tempo to fit the needs of the song. This often made it difficult to use backing musicians, who were not accustomed to Hooker's musical vagaries. As a result, Besman recorded Hooker playing guitar, singing and stomping on a wooden pallet in time with the music.",
"title": "Earlier career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "For much of this period he recorded and toured with Eddie Kirkland. In Hooker's later sessions for Vee-Jay Records in Chicago, studio musicians accompanied him on most of his recordings, including Eddie Taylor, who could handle his musical idiosyncrasies. \"Boom Boom\" (1962) and \"Dimples\", two popular songs by Hooker, were originally released by Vee-Jay.",
"title": "Earlier career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Beginning in 1962, Hooker gained greater exposure when he toured Europe in the annual American Folk Blues Festival. His \"Dimples\" became a successful single on the UK Singles Charts in 1964, eight years after its first US release. Hooker began to perform and record with rock musicians. One of his earliest collaborations was with British blues rock band the Groundhogs. In 1970, he recorded the joint album Hooker 'n Heat, with the American blues and boogie rock group Canned Heat, whose repertoire included adaptations of Hooker songs. It became the first of Hooker's albums to reach the Billboard charts, peaking at number 78 on the Billboard 200. Other collaboration albums soon followed, including Endless Boogie (1971) and Never Get Out of These Blues Alive (1972), which included Steve Miller, Elvin Bishop, Van Morrison, and others.",
"title": "Later career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Hooker appeared in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers as a street musician playing \"Boom Boom\". In 1989, he recorded the album The Healer with Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, and others. The 1990s saw additional collaboration albums: Mr. Lucky (1991), Chill Out (1995), and Don't Look Back (1997) with Morrison, Santana, Los Lobos, and additional guest musicians. His re-recording of \"Boom Boom\" (the title track for his 1992 album) with guitarist Jimmie Vaughan became Hooker's highest charting single (number 16) in the UK. Come See About Me, a 2004 DVD, includes performances filmed between 1960 and 1994 and interviews with several of the musicians.",
"title": "Later career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Hooker owned five houses in his later life, including ones in the California cities of Los Altos, Redwood City, and Long Beach. On June 21, 2001, Hooker died in his sleep at home in Los Altos.",
"title": "Later career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Among his many awards, Hooker was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. He was a recipient of a 1983 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. He was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000 and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He is also inducted into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame.",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Two of his songs, \"Boogie Chillen\" and \"Boom Boom\", are included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. \"Boogie Chillen\" is also included in the Recording Industry Association of America's list of the \"Songs of the Century\".",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
}
]
| John Lee Hooker was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The son of a sharecropper, he rose to prominence performing an electric guitar-style adaptation of Delta blues that he developed in Detroit. Hooker often incorporated other elements, including talking blues and early North Mississippi hill country blues. He developed his own driving-rhythm boogie style, distinct from the 1930s–1940s piano-derived boogie-woogie. Hooker was ranked 35 in Rolling Stone's 2015 list of 100 greatest guitarists. Some of his best known songs include "Boogie Chillen'" (1948), "Crawling King Snake" (1949), "Dimples" (1956), "Boom Boom" (1962), and "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (1966). Several of his later albums, including The Healer (1989), Mr. Lucky (1991), Chill Out (1995), and Don't Look Back (1997), were album chart successes in the U.S. and UK. The Healer and Chill Out both earned him Grammy wins as well as Don't Look Back, which went on to earn him a double-Grammy win for Best Traditional Blues Recording and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. | 2001-06-22T18:32:08Z | 2023-11-12T23:47:07Z | [
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15,831 | June 23 | June 23 is the 174th day of the year (175th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 191 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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"text": "June 23 is the 174th day of the year (175th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 191 days remain until the end of the year.",
"title": ""
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| June 23 is the 174th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 191 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-07-03T21:47:09Z | 2023-11-11T09:49:54Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_23 |
15,834 | Satires (Juvenal) | The Satires (Latin: Saturae) are a collection of satirical poems by the Latin author Juvenal written between the end of the first and the early second centuries A.D.
Juvenal is credited with sixteen known poems divided among five books; all are in the Roman genre of satire, which, at its most basic in the time of the author, comprised a wide-ranging discussion of society and social mores in dactylic hexameter. The sixth and tenth satires are some of the most renowned works in the collection. The poems are not individually titled, but translators have often added titles for the convenience of readers.
Roman Satura was a formal literary genre rather than being simply clever, humorous critique in no particular format. Juvenal wrote in this tradition, which originated with Lucilius and included the Sermones of Horace and the Satires of Persius. In a tone and manner ranging from irony to apparent rage, Juvenal criticizes the actions and beliefs of many of his contemporaries, providing insight more into value systems and questions of morality and less into the realities of Roman life. The author employs outright obscenity less frequently than Martial or Catullus, but the scenes painted in his text are no less vivid or lurid for that discretion.
The author makes constant allusion to history and myth as a source of object lessons or exemplars of particular vices and virtues. Coupled with his dense and elliptical Latin, these tangential references indicate that the intended reader of the Satires was highly educated. The Satires are concerned with perceived threats to the social continuity of the Roman citizens: social-climbing foreigners, unfaithfulness, and other more extreme excesses of their own class. The intended audience of the Satires constituted a subset of the Roman elite, primarily adult males of a more conservative social stance.
Scholarly estimates for the dating of the individual books have varied. It is generally accepted that the fifth book must date to a point after 127, because of a reference to the Roman consul Lucius Aemilius Juncus in Satire 15. A recent scholar has argued that the first book should be dated to 100 or 101. Juvenal's works are contemporary with those of Martial, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger.
The controversies concerning the surviving texts of the Satires have been extensive and heated. Many manuscripts survive, but only P (the Codex Pithoeanus Montepessulanus), a 9th-century manuscript based on an edition prepared in the 4th century by a pupil of Servius Honoratus, the grammarian, is reasonably reliable. At the same time as the Servian text was produced, however, other and lesser scholars also created their editions of Juvenal: it is these on which most medieval manuscripts of Juvenal are based. It did not help matters that P disappeared sometime during the Renaissance and was only rediscovered around 1840. It is not, however, uncommon for the generally inferior manuscripts to supply a better reading in cases when P is imperfect. In addition, modern scholarly debate has also raged around the authenticity of the text which has survived, as various editors have argued that considerable portions are not, in fact, authentically Juvenalian and represent interpolations from early editors of the text. Jachmann (1943) argued that up to one-third of what survives is non-authentic: Ulrick Knoche (1950) deleted about hundred lines, Clausen about forty, Courtney (1975) a similar number. Willis (1997) italicizes 297 lines as being potentially suspect. On the other hand, Vahlen, Housman, Duff, Griffith, Ferguson and Green believe the surviving text to be largely authentic: indeed Green regards the main problem as being not interpolations but lacunae.
In recent times debate has focused on the authenticity of the "O Passage" of Satire VI, 36 lines (34 of which are continuous) discovered by E. O. Winstedt in an 11th-century manuscript in Oxford's Bodleian Library. These lines occur in no other manuscript of Juvenal, and when discovered were considerably corrupted. Ever since Housman translated and emended the "O Passage" there has been considerable controversy over whether the fragment is in fact a forgery: the field is currently split between those (Green, Ferguson, Courtney) who believe it is not, and those (Willis, Anderson), who believe it is.
This so-called "Programmatic Satire" lays out for the reader a catalogue of ills and annoyances that prompt the narrator to write satire. Some examples cited by Juvenal include eunuchs getting married, elite women performing in a beast hunt, and the dregs of society suddenly becoming wealthy by gross acts of sycophancy. To the extent that it is programmatic, this satire concerns the first book rather than the satires of the other four known books. The narrator explicitly marks the writings of Lucilius as the model for his book of poems (lines 19–20), although he claims that to attack the living as his model did incur great risk (lines 165–167). The narrator contends that traditional Roman virtues, such as fides and virtus, had disappeared from society, to the extent that "Rome was no longer Roman":
170 lines. The narrator claims to want to flee civilization (i.e. Roma) to beyond the world's end when confronted by moral hypocrisy. Although the broad theme of this poem is the process of gender inversion, it would be an error to take it as simple invective against pathic men. Juvenal is concerned with gender deviance.
322 lines. In the place where Numa Pompilius (the legendary second king of Rome) received a nymph's advice on creating Roman law, the narrator has a final conversation with his Roman friend Umbricius, who is emigrating to Cumae. Umbricius claims that slick and immoral foreigners have shut a real Roman out of all opportunity to prosper. Only the first 20 lines are in the voice of the narrator; the remainder of the poem is cast as the words of Umbricius.
In 1738, Samuel Johnson was inspired by this text to write his London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal. The archetypal question of whether an urban life of hectic ambition is to be preferred to a pastoral fantasy retreat to the country is posed by the narrator:
154 lines. The narrator makes the emperor Domitian and his court the objects of his ridicule in this mock-epic tale of a fish so prodigious that it was fit for the emperor alone. The council of state is called to deal with the crisis of how to cook it, where the fish can neither be cooked by conventional means due to its size, nor can it be cut into pieces. The main themes of this poem are the corruption and incompetence of sycophantic courtiers and the inability or unwillingness to speak truth to power.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's motto, vitam impendere vero (to pay his life for the truth), is taken from the passage below, a description of the qualifications of an imperial courtier in the reign of Domitian:
173 lines. The narrative frame of this poem is a dinner party where many potential dysfunctions in the ideal of the patron-client relationship are put on display. Rather than being a performance of faux-equality, the patron (Virro as in 9.35) emphasizes the superiority of himself and his peers (amici) over his clients (viles amici) by offering food and drink of unequal quality to each. Juvenal concludes with the observation that the clients who put up with this treatment deserve it.
c. 695 lines. For the discussion and synopsis, see Satire VI.
243 lines. Juvenal returns to his theme of distorted economic values among the Roman elite – in this instance centered on their unwillingness to provide appropriate support for poets, lawyers, and teachers. It is the capricious whims of fate that determine the variables of a human life.
275 lines. The narrator takes issue with the idea that pedigree ought to be taken as evidence of a person's worth.
150 lines. This satire is in the form of a dialogue between the narrator and Naevolus – a male prostitute, the disgruntled client of a pathic patron.
366 lines. The theme of this poem encompasses the myriad objects of prayer unwisely sought from the gods: wealth, power, beauty, children, long life, et cetera. The narrator argues that each of these is a false Good; each desired thing is shown to be not good in itself, but only good so long as other factors do not intervene. This satire is the source of the well-known phrase mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body), which appears in the passage above. It is also the source of the phrase panem et circenses (bread and circuses) – the only remaining cares of a Roman populace which has given up its birthright of political freedom (10.81).
208 lines. The main themes of this poem are self-awareness and moderation. The poem explicitly mentions one apothegm γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know thyself) from the temple of Apollo at Delphi, while its theme calls to mind another μηδέν ἄγαν (nothing in excess). The subject, in this instance, is the role of food and the cena (formal dinner) in Roman society. The narrator contrasts the ruinous spending habits of gourmands with the moderation of a simple meal of home-grown foods in the manner of the mythical ancient Romans.
130 lines. The narrator describes to his addressee Corvinus the sacrificial vows that he has made for the salvation of his friend Catullus from shipwreck. These vows are to the primary Roman gods – Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva (the Capitoline Triad) – but other shipwrecked sailors are said to make offerings to Isis. In the passage quoted above, the narrator asserts that his sacrifices are not to curry favor or gain an inheritance, common reasons for making vows among those who would not hesitate to sacrifice their slaves or even children if it would bring them an inheritance.
249 lines. This poem is a dissuasion from excessive rage and the desire for revenge when one is defrauded. The narrator recommends a philosophical moderation and the perspective that comes from realizing that there are many things worse than financial loss.
331 lines. The narrator stresses that children most readily learn all forms of vice from their parents. Avarice must actually be taught since it runs counter to nature. This vice is particularly pernicious, since it has the appearance of a virtue and is the source of a myriad of crimes and cruelties.
174 lines. The narrator discusses the centrality of compassion for other people to the preservation of civilization. While severe circumstances have at times called for desperate measures to preserve life, even the most savage tribes have refrained from cannibalism. We were given minds to allow us to live together in mutual assistance and security. Without limits on rage against our enemies, we are worse than animals.
60 lines preserved. The primary theme of the preserved lines is the advantages of soldiers over mere citizens. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Satires (Latin: Saturae) are a collection of satirical poems by the Latin author Juvenal written between the end of the first and the early second centuries A.D.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Juvenal is credited with sixteen known poems divided among five books; all are in the Roman genre of satire, which, at its most basic in the time of the author, comprised a wide-ranging discussion of society and social mores in dactylic hexameter. The sixth and tenth satires are some of the most renowned works in the collection. The poems are not individually titled, but translators have often added titles for the convenience of readers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Roman Satura was a formal literary genre rather than being simply clever, humorous critique in no particular format. Juvenal wrote in this tradition, which originated with Lucilius and included the Sermones of Horace and the Satires of Persius. In a tone and manner ranging from irony to apparent rage, Juvenal criticizes the actions and beliefs of many of his contemporaries, providing insight more into value systems and questions of morality and less into the realities of Roman life. The author employs outright obscenity less frequently than Martial or Catullus, but the scenes painted in his text are no less vivid or lurid for that discretion.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The author makes constant allusion to history and myth as a source of object lessons or exemplars of particular vices and virtues. Coupled with his dense and elliptical Latin, these tangential references indicate that the intended reader of the Satires was highly educated. The Satires are concerned with perceived threats to the social continuity of the Roman citizens: social-climbing foreigners, unfaithfulness, and other more extreme excesses of their own class. The intended audience of the Satires constituted a subset of the Roman elite, primarily adult males of a more conservative social stance.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Scholarly estimates for the dating of the individual books have varied. It is generally accepted that the fifth book must date to a point after 127, because of a reference to the Roman consul Lucius Aemilius Juncus in Satire 15. A recent scholar has argued that the first book should be dated to 100 or 101. Juvenal's works are contemporary with those of Martial, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The controversies concerning the surviving texts of the Satires have been extensive and heated. Many manuscripts survive, but only P (the Codex Pithoeanus Montepessulanus), a 9th-century manuscript based on an edition prepared in the 4th century by a pupil of Servius Honoratus, the grammarian, is reasonably reliable. At the same time as the Servian text was produced, however, other and lesser scholars also created their editions of Juvenal: it is these on which most medieval manuscripts of Juvenal are based. It did not help matters that P disappeared sometime during the Renaissance and was only rediscovered around 1840. It is not, however, uncommon for the generally inferior manuscripts to supply a better reading in cases when P is imperfect. In addition, modern scholarly debate has also raged around the authenticity of the text which has survived, as various editors have argued that considerable portions are not, in fact, authentically Juvenalian and represent interpolations from early editors of the text. Jachmann (1943) argued that up to one-third of what survives is non-authentic: Ulrick Knoche (1950) deleted about hundred lines, Clausen about forty, Courtney (1975) a similar number. Willis (1997) italicizes 297 lines as being potentially suspect. On the other hand, Vahlen, Housman, Duff, Griffith, Ferguson and Green believe the surviving text to be largely authentic: indeed Green regards the main problem as being not interpolations but lacunae.",
"title": "Manuscript tradition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In recent times debate has focused on the authenticity of the \"O Passage\" of Satire VI, 36 lines (34 of which are continuous) discovered by E. O. Winstedt in an 11th-century manuscript in Oxford's Bodleian Library. These lines occur in no other manuscript of Juvenal, and when discovered were considerably corrupted. Ever since Housman translated and emended the \"O Passage\" there has been considerable controversy over whether the fragment is in fact a forgery: the field is currently split between those (Green, Ferguson, Courtney) who believe it is not, and those (Willis, Anderson), who believe it is.",
"title": "Manuscript tradition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "This so-called \"Programmatic Satire\" lays out for the reader a catalogue of ills and annoyances that prompt the narrator to write satire. Some examples cited by Juvenal include eunuchs getting married, elite women performing in a beast hunt, and the dregs of society suddenly becoming wealthy by gross acts of sycophancy. To the extent that it is programmatic, this satire concerns the first book rather than the satires of the other four known books. The narrator explicitly marks the writings of Lucilius as the model for his book of poems (lines 19–20), although he claims that to attack the living as his model did incur great risk (lines 165–167). The narrator contends that traditional Roman virtues, such as fides and virtus, had disappeared from society, to the extent that \"Rome was no longer Roman\":",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "170 lines. The narrator claims to want to flee civilization (i.e. Roma) to beyond the world's end when confronted by moral hypocrisy. Although the broad theme of this poem is the process of gender inversion, it would be an error to take it as simple invective against pathic men. Juvenal is concerned with gender deviance.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "322 lines. In the place where Numa Pompilius (the legendary second king of Rome) received a nymph's advice on creating Roman law, the narrator has a final conversation with his Roman friend Umbricius, who is emigrating to Cumae. Umbricius claims that slick and immoral foreigners have shut a real Roman out of all opportunity to prosper. Only the first 20 lines are in the voice of the narrator; the remainder of the poem is cast as the words of Umbricius.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1738, Samuel Johnson was inspired by this text to write his London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal. The archetypal question of whether an urban life of hectic ambition is to be preferred to a pastoral fantasy retreat to the country is posed by the narrator:",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "154 lines. The narrator makes the emperor Domitian and his court the objects of his ridicule in this mock-epic tale of a fish so prodigious that it was fit for the emperor alone. The council of state is called to deal with the crisis of how to cook it, where the fish can neither be cooked by conventional means due to its size, nor can it be cut into pieces. The main themes of this poem are the corruption and incompetence of sycophantic courtiers and the inability or unwillingness to speak truth to power.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Jean-Jacques Rousseau's motto, vitam impendere vero (to pay his life for the truth), is taken from the passage below, a description of the qualifications of an imperial courtier in the reign of Domitian:",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "173 lines. The narrative frame of this poem is a dinner party where many potential dysfunctions in the ideal of the patron-client relationship are put on display. Rather than being a performance of faux-equality, the patron (Virro as in 9.35) emphasizes the superiority of himself and his peers (amici) over his clients (viles amici) by offering food and drink of unequal quality to each. Juvenal concludes with the observation that the clients who put up with this treatment deserve it.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "c. 695 lines. For the discussion and synopsis, see Satire VI.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "243 lines. Juvenal returns to his theme of distorted economic values among the Roman elite – in this instance centered on their unwillingness to provide appropriate support for poets, lawyers, and teachers. It is the capricious whims of fate that determine the variables of a human life.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "275 lines. The narrator takes issue with the idea that pedigree ought to be taken as evidence of a person's worth.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "150 lines. This satire is in the form of a dialogue between the narrator and Naevolus – a male prostitute, the disgruntled client of a pathic patron.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "366 lines. The theme of this poem encompasses the myriad objects of prayer unwisely sought from the gods: wealth, power, beauty, children, long life, et cetera. The narrator argues that each of these is a false Good; each desired thing is shown to be not good in itself, but only good so long as other factors do not intervene. This satire is the source of the well-known phrase mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body), which appears in the passage above. It is also the source of the phrase panem et circenses (bread and circuses) – the only remaining cares of a Roman populace which has given up its birthright of political freedom (10.81).",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "208 lines. The main themes of this poem are self-awareness and moderation. The poem explicitly mentions one apothegm γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know thyself) from the temple of Apollo at Delphi, while its theme calls to mind another μηδέν ἄγαν (nothing in excess). The subject, in this instance, is the role of food and the cena (formal dinner) in Roman society. The narrator contrasts the ruinous spending habits of gourmands with the moderation of a simple meal of home-grown foods in the manner of the mythical ancient Romans.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "130 lines. The narrator describes to his addressee Corvinus the sacrificial vows that he has made for the salvation of his friend Catullus from shipwreck. These vows are to the primary Roman gods – Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva (the Capitoline Triad) – but other shipwrecked sailors are said to make offerings to Isis. In the passage quoted above, the narrator asserts that his sacrifices are not to curry favor or gain an inheritance, common reasons for making vows among those who would not hesitate to sacrifice their slaves or even children if it would bring them an inheritance.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "249 lines. This poem is a dissuasion from excessive rage and the desire for revenge when one is defrauded. The narrator recommends a philosophical moderation and the perspective that comes from realizing that there are many things worse than financial loss.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "331 lines. The narrator stresses that children most readily learn all forms of vice from their parents. Avarice must actually be taught since it runs counter to nature. This vice is particularly pernicious, since it has the appearance of a virtue and is the source of a myriad of crimes and cruelties.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "174 lines. The narrator discusses the centrality of compassion for other people to the preservation of civilization. While severe circumstances have at times called for desperate measures to preserve life, even the most savage tribes have refrained from cannibalism. We were given minds to allow us to live together in mutual assistance and security. Without limits on rage against our enemies, we are worse than animals.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "60 lines preserved. The primary theme of the preserved lines is the advantages of soldiers over mere citizens.",
"title": "Synopsis of the Satires"
}
]
| The Satires are a collection of satirical poems by the Latin author Juvenal written between the end of the first and the early second centuries A.D. Juvenal is credited with sixteen known poems divided among five books; all are in the Roman genre of satire, which, at its most basic in the time of the author, comprised a wide-ranging discussion of society and social mores in dactylic hexameter. The sixth and tenth satires are some of the most renowned works in the collection. The poems are not individually titled, but translators have often added titles for the convenience of readers. Book I: Satires 1–5
Book II: Satire 6
Book III: Satires 7–9
Book IV: Satires 10–12
Book V: Satires 13–16 Roman Satura was a formal literary genre rather than being simply clever, humorous critique in no particular format. Juvenal wrote in this tradition, which originated with Lucilius and included the Sermones of Horace and the Satires of Persius. In a tone and manner ranging from irony to apparent rage, Juvenal criticizes the actions and beliefs of many of his contemporaries, providing insight more into value systems and questions of morality and less into the realities of Roman life. The author employs outright obscenity less frequently than Martial or Catullus, but the scenes painted in his text are no less vivid or lurid for that discretion. The author makes constant allusion to history and myth as a source of object lessons or exemplars of particular vices and virtues. Coupled with his dense and elliptical Latin, these tangential references indicate that the intended reader of the Satires was highly educated. The Satires are concerned with perceived threats to the social continuity of the Roman citizens: social-climbing foreigners, unfaithfulness, and other more extreme excesses of their own class. The intended audience of the Satires constituted a subset of the Roman elite, primarily adult males of a more conservative social stance. Scholarly estimates for the dating of the individual books have varied. It is generally accepted that the fifth book must date to a point after 127, because of a reference to the Roman consul Lucius Aemilius Juncus in Satire 15. A recent scholar has argued that the first book should be dated to 100 or 101. Juvenal's works are contemporary with those of Martial, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger. | 2001-06-27T20:25:22Z | 2023-12-20T03:32:26Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satires_(Juvenal) |
15,837 | Jean Cocteau | Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (UK: /ˈkɒktoʊ/ KOK-toh, US: /kɒkˈtoʊ/ kok-TOH, French: [ʒɑ̃ mɔʁis øʒɛn klemɑ̃ kɔkto]; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost artists of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements and an influential figure in early 20th century art. The National Observer suggested that, "of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man."
He is best known for his novels Le Grand Écart (1923), Le Livre blanc (1928), and Les Enfants Terribles (1929); the stage plays La Voix Humaine (1930), La Machine Infernale (1934), Les Parents terribles (1938), La Machine à écrire (1941), and L'Aigle à deux têtes (1946); and the films The Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents Terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Orpheus (1950), and Testament of Orpheus (1960), which alongside Blood of a Poet and Orpheus constitute the so-called Orphic Trilogy. He was described as "one of [the] avant-garde's most successful and influential filmmakers" by AllMovie. Cocteau, according to Annette Insdorf, "left behind a body of work unequalled for its variety of artistic expression."
Though his body of work encompassed many different mediums, Cocteau insisted on calling himself a poet, classifying the great variety of his works – poems, novels, plays, essays, drawings, films – as "poésie", "poésie de roman", "poésie de thêatre", "poésie critique", "poésie graphique" and "poésie cinématographique".
Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, to Georges Cocteau and his wife, Eugénie Lecomte, a socially prominent Parisian family. His father, a lawyer and amateur painter, committed suicide when Cocteau was nine. From 1900 to 1904, Cocteau attended the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a relationship with schoolmate Pierre Dargelos, who reappeared throughout Cocteau's work, "John Cocteau: Erotic Drawings." He left home at fifteen. He published his first volume of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen. Cocteau soon became known in Bohemian artistic circles as The Frivolous Prince, the title of a volume he published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City..."
In his early twenties, Cocteau became associated with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Maurice Barrès. In 1912, he collaborated with Léon Bakst on Le Dieu bleu for the Ballets Russes; the principal dancers being Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky. During World War I, Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. This was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and numerous other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated. Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev persuaded Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which resulted in Parade in 1917. It was produced by Diaghilev, with sets by Picasso, the libretto by Apollinaire and the music by Erik Satie. "If it had not been for Apollinaire in uniform," wrote Cocteau, "with his skull shaved, the scar on his temple and the bandage around his head, women would have gouged our eyes out with hairpins."
An important exponent of avant-garde art, Cocteau had great influence on the work of others, including a group of composers known as Les six. In the early twenties, he and other members of Les six frequented a wildly popular bar named Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a name that Cocteau himself had a hand in picking. The popularity was due in no small measure to the presence of Cocteau and his friends.
In 1918 he met the French poet Raymond Radiguet. They collaborated extensively, socialized, and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau also got Radiguet exempted from military service. Admiring of Radiguet's great literary talent, Cocteau promoted his friend's works in his artistic circle and arranged for the publication by Grasset of Le Diable au corps (a largely autobiographical story of an adulterous relationship between a married woman and a younger man), exerting his influence to have the novel awarded the "Nouveau Monde" literary prize. Some contemporaries and later commentators thought there might have been a romantic component to their friendship. Cocteau himself was aware of this perception, and worked earnestly to dispel the notion that their relationship was sexual in nature.
There is disagreement over Cocteau's reaction to Radiguet's sudden death in 1923, with some claiming that it left him stunned, despondent and prey to opium addiction. Opponents of that interpretation point out that he did not attend the funeral (he generally did not attend funerals) and immediately left Paris with Diaghilev for a performance of Les noces (The Wedding) by the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo. Cocteau himself much later characterised his reaction as one of "stupor and disgust." His opium addiction at the time, Cocteau said, was only coincidental, due to a chance meeting with Louis Laloy, the administrator of the Monte Carlo Opera. Cocteau's opium use and his efforts to stop profoundly changed his literary style. His most notable book, Les Enfants Terribles, was written in a week during a strenuous opium weaning. In Opium: Journal of drug rehabilitation [fr], he recounts the experience of his recovery from opium addiction in 1929. His account, which includes vivid pen-and-ink illustrations, alternates between his moment-to-moment experiences of drug withdrawal and his current thoughts about people and events in his world. Cocteau was supported throughout his recovery by his friend and correspondent, Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Under Maritain's influence Cocteau made a temporary return to the sacraments of the Catholic Church. He again returned to the Church later in life and undertook a number of religious art projects.
On 15 June 1926 Cocteau's play Orphée was staged in Paris. It was quickly followed by an exhibition of drawings and "constructions" called Poésie plastique–objets, dessins. Cocteau wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, which had its original performance in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on 30 May 1927. In 1929 one of his most celebrated and well known works, the novel Les Enfants terribles was published.
In 1930 Cocteau made his first film The Blood of a Poet, publicly shown in 1932. Though now generally accepted as a surrealist film, the surrealists themselves did not accept it as a truly surrealist work. Although this is one of Cocteau's best known works, his 1930s are notable rather for a number of stage plays, above all La Voix humaine and Les Parents terribles, which was a popular success. His 1934 play La Machine infernale was Cocteau's stage version of the Oedipus legend and is considered to be his greatest work for the theater. During this period Cocteau also published two volumes of journalism, including Mon Premier Voyage: Tour du Monde en 80 jours, a neo-Jules Verne around the world travel reportage he made for the newspaper Paris-Soir.
Throughout his life, Cocteau tried to maintain a distance from political movements, confessing to a friend that "my politics are non-existent." According to Claude Arnaud, from the 1920s on, Cocteau's only deeply held political convictions were a marked pacifism and antiracism. He praised the French republic for serving as a haven for the persecuted, and applauded Picasso's anti-war painting Guernica as a cross that "Franco would always carry on his shoulder." In 1940, Cocteau signed a petition circulated by the Ligue internationale contre l'antisémitisme which protested the rise of racism and antisemitism in France, and declared himself "ashamed of his white skin" after witnessing the plight of colonized peoples during his travels.
Although in 1938 Cocteau had compared Adolf Hitler to an evil demiurge who wished to perpetrate a Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre against Jews, his friend Arno Breker convinced him that Hitler was a pacifist and patron of the arts with France's best interests in mind. During the Nazi occupation of France, he was in a "round-table" of French and German intellectuals who met at the Georges V Hotel in Paris, including Cocteau, the writers Ernst Jünger, Paul Morand and Henry Millon de Montherlant, the publisher Gaston Gallimard and the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt. In his diary, Cocteau accused France of disrespect towards Hitler and speculated on the Führer's sexuality. Cocteau effusively praised Breker's sculptures in an article entitled 'Salut à Breker' published in 1942. This piece caused him to be arraigned on charges of collaboration after the war, though he was cleared of any wrongdoing and had used his contacts to his failed attempt to save friends such as Max Jacob. Later, after growing closer with communists such as Louis Aragon, Cocteau would name Joseph Stalin as "the only great politician of the era."
In 1940, Le Bel Indifférent, Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf (who died the day before Cocteau), was enormously successful.
Cocteau's later years are mostly associated with his films. Cocteau's films, most of which he both wrote and directed, were particularly important in introducing the avant-garde into French cinema and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave genre.
Following The Blood of a Poet (1930), his best known films include Beauty and the Beast (1946), Les Parents terribles (1948), and Orpheus (1949). His final film, Le Testament d'Orphée (The Testament of Orpheus) (1960), featured appearances by Picasso and matador Luis Miguel Dominguín, along with Yul Brynner, who also helped finance the film.
In 1945 Cocteau was one of several designers who created sets for the Théâtre de la Mode. He drew inspiration from filmmaker René Clair while making Tribute to René Clair: I Married a Witch. The maquette is described in his "Journal 1942–1945," in his entry for 12 February 1945:
I saw the model of my set. Fashion bores me, but I am amused by the set and fashion placed together. It is a smoldering maid's room. One discovers an aerial view of Paris through the wall and ceiling holes. It creates vertigo. On the iron bed lies a fainted bride. Behind her stand several dismayed ladies. On the right, a very elegant lady washes her hands in a flophouse basin. Through the unhinged door on the left, a lady enters with raised arms. Others are pushed against the walls. The vision provoking this catastrophe is a bride-witch astride a broom, flying through the ceiling, her hair and train streaming.
In 1956 Cocteau decorated the Chapelle Saint-Pierre in Villefranche-sur-Mer with mural paintings. The following year he also decorated the marriage hall at the Hôtel de Ville in Menton.
Jean Cocteau never hid his homosexuality. He was the author of the mildly homoerotic and semi-autobiographical Le Livre blanc (translated as The White Paper or The White Book), published anonymously in 1928. He never repudiated its authorship and a later edition of the novel features his foreword and drawings. The novel begins:
As far back as I can remember, and even at an age when the mind does not yet influence the senses, I find traces of my love of boys. I have always loved the strong sex that I find legitimate to call the fair sex. My misfortunes came from a society that condemns the rare as a crime and forces us to reform our inclinations.
Frequently his work, either literary (Les enfants terribles), graphic (erotic drawings, book illustration, paintings) or cinematographic (The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, Beauty and the Beast), is pervaded with homosexual undertones, homoerotic imagery/symbolism or camp. In 1947 Paul Morihien published a clandestine edition of Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet, featuring 29 very explicit erotic drawings by Cocteau. In recent years several albums of Cocteau's homoerotica have been available to the general public.
In the 1930s, Cocteau is rumoured to have had a very brief affair with Princess Natalie Paley, the daughter of a Romanov Grand Duke and herself a sometime actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong.
Cocteau's longest-lasting relationships were with French actors Jean Marais and Édouard Dermit, whom Cocteau formally adopted. Cocteau cast Marais in The Eternal Return (1943), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Ruy Blas (1947), and Orpheus (1949).
Cocteau died of a heart attack at his château in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne, France, on 11 October 1963 at the age of 74. His friend, French singer Édith Piaf, died the day before but that was announced on the morning of Cocteau's day of death; it has been said, in a story which is almost certainly apocryphal, that his heart failed upon hearing of Piaf's death. Cocteau's health had already been in decline for several months, and he had previously had a severe heart attack on 22 April 1963. A more plausible suggestion for the reason behind this decline in health has been proposed by author Roger Peyrefitte, who notes that Cocteau had been devastated by a breach with his longtime friend, socialite and notable patron Francine Weisweiller, as a result of an affair she had been having with a minor writer. Weisweiller and Cocteau did not reconcile until shortly before Cocteau's death.
According to his wishes Cocteau is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint-Blaise des Simples in Milly-la-Forêt. The epitaph on his gravestone set in the floor of the chapel reads: "I stay with you" ("Je reste avec vous").
In 1955, Cocteau was made a member of the Académie Française and The Royal Academy of Belgium.
During his life, Cocteau was commander of the Legion of Honor, Member of the Mallarmé Academy, German Academy (Berlin), American Academy, Mark Twain (U.S.A) Academy, Honorary President of the Cannes Film Festival, Honorary President of the France-Hungary Association and President of the Jazz Academy and of the Academy of the Disc. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (UK: /ˈkɒktoʊ/ KOK-toh, US: /kɒkˈtoʊ/ kok-TOH, French: [ʒɑ̃ mɔʁis øʒɛn klemɑ̃ kɔkto]; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost artists of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements and an influential figure in early 20th century art. The National Observer suggested that, \"of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "He is best known for his novels Le Grand Écart (1923), Le Livre blanc (1928), and Les Enfants Terribles (1929); the stage plays La Voix Humaine (1930), La Machine Infernale (1934), Les Parents terribles (1938), La Machine à écrire (1941), and L'Aigle à deux têtes (1946); and the films The Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents Terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Orpheus (1950), and Testament of Orpheus (1960), which alongside Blood of a Poet and Orpheus constitute the so-called Orphic Trilogy. He was described as \"one of [the] avant-garde's most successful and influential filmmakers\" by AllMovie. Cocteau, according to Annette Insdorf, \"left behind a body of work unequalled for its variety of artistic expression.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Though his body of work encompassed many different mediums, Cocteau insisted on calling himself a poet, classifying the great variety of his works – poems, novels, plays, essays, drawings, films – as \"poésie\", \"poésie de roman\", \"poésie de thêatre\", \"poésie critique\", \"poésie graphique\" and \"poésie cinématographique\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, to Georges Cocteau and his wife, Eugénie Lecomte, a socially prominent Parisian family. His father, a lawyer and amateur painter, committed suicide when Cocteau was nine. From 1900 to 1904, Cocteau attended the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a relationship with schoolmate Pierre Dargelos, who reappeared throughout Cocteau's work, \"John Cocteau: Erotic Drawings.\" He left home at fifteen. He published his first volume of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen. Cocteau soon became known in Bohemian artistic circles as The Frivolous Prince, the title of a volume he published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man \"to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City...\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In his early twenties, Cocteau became associated with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Maurice Barrès. In 1912, he collaborated with Léon Bakst on Le Dieu bleu for the Ballets Russes; the principal dancers being Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky. During World War I, Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. This was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and numerous other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated. Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev persuaded Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which resulted in Parade in 1917. It was produced by Diaghilev, with sets by Picasso, the libretto by Apollinaire and the music by Erik Satie. \"If it had not been for Apollinaire in uniform,\" wrote Cocteau, \"with his skull shaved, the scar on his temple and the bandage around his head, women would have gouged our eyes out with hairpins.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "An important exponent of avant-garde art, Cocteau had great influence on the work of others, including a group of composers known as Les six. In the early twenties, he and other members of Les six frequented a wildly popular bar named Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a name that Cocteau himself had a hand in picking. The popularity was due in no small measure to the presence of Cocteau and his friends.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1918 he met the French poet Raymond Radiguet. They collaborated extensively, socialized, and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau also got Radiguet exempted from military service. Admiring of Radiguet's great literary talent, Cocteau promoted his friend's works in his artistic circle and arranged for the publication by Grasset of Le Diable au corps (a largely autobiographical story of an adulterous relationship between a married woman and a younger man), exerting his influence to have the novel awarded the \"Nouveau Monde\" literary prize. Some contemporaries and later commentators thought there might have been a romantic component to their friendship. Cocteau himself was aware of this perception, and worked earnestly to dispel the notion that their relationship was sexual in nature.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "There is disagreement over Cocteau's reaction to Radiguet's sudden death in 1923, with some claiming that it left him stunned, despondent and prey to opium addiction. Opponents of that interpretation point out that he did not attend the funeral (he generally did not attend funerals) and immediately left Paris with Diaghilev for a performance of Les noces (The Wedding) by the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo. Cocteau himself much later characterised his reaction as one of \"stupor and disgust.\" His opium addiction at the time, Cocteau said, was only coincidental, due to a chance meeting with Louis Laloy, the administrator of the Monte Carlo Opera. Cocteau's opium use and his efforts to stop profoundly changed his literary style. His most notable book, Les Enfants Terribles, was written in a week during a strenuous opium weaning. In Opium: Journal of drug rehabilitation [fr], he recounts the experience of his recovery from opium addiction in 1929. His account, which includes vivid pen-and-ink illustrations, alternates between his moment-to-moment experiences of drug withdrawal and his current thoughts about people and events in his world. Cocteau was supported throughout his recovery by his friend and correspondent, Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Under Maritain's influence Cocteau made a temporary return to the sacraments of the Catholic Church. He again returned to the Church later in life and undertook a number of religious art projects.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "On 15 June 1926 Cocteau's play Orphée was staged in Paris. It was quickly followed by an exhibition of drawings and \"constructions\" called Poésie plastique–objets, dessins. Cocteau wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, which had its original performance in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on 30 May 1927. In 1929 one of his most celebrated and well known works, the novel Les Enfants terribles was published.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1930 Cocteau made his first film The Blood of a Poet, publicly shown in 1932. Though now generally accepted as a surrealist film, the surrealists themselves did not accept it as a truly surrealist work. Although this is one of Cocteau's best known works, his 1930s are notable rather for a number of stage plays, above all La Voix humaine and Les Parents terribles, which was a popular success. His 1934 play La Machine infernale was Cocteau's stage version of the Oedipus legend and is considered to be his greatest work for the theater. During this period Cocteau also published two volumes of journalism, including Mon Premier Voyage: Tour du Monde en 80 jours, a neo-Jules Verne around the world travel reportage he made for the newspaper Paris-Soir.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Throughout his life, Cocteau tried to maintain a distance from political movements, confessing to a friend that \"my politics are non-existent.\" According to Claude Arnaud, from the 1920s on, Cocteau's only deeply held political convictions were a marked pacifism and antiracism. He praised the French republic for serving as a haven for the persecuted, and applauded Picasso's anti-war painting Guernica as a cross that \"Franco would always carry on his shoulder.\" In 1940, Cocteau signed a petition circulated by the Ligue internationale contre l'antisémitisme which protested the rise of racism and antisemitism in France, and declared himself \"ashamed of his white skin\" after witnessing the plight of colonized peoples during his travels.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Although in 1938 Cocteau had compared Adolf Hitler to an evil demiurge who wished to perpetrate a Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre against Jews, his friend Arno Breker convinced him that Hitler was a pacifist and patron of the arts with France's best interests in mind. During the Nazi occupation of France, he was in a \"round-table\" of French and German intellectuals who met at the Georges V Hotel in Paris, including Cocteau, the writers Ernst Jünger, Paul Morand and Henry Millon de Montherlant, the publisher Gaston Gallimard and the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt. In his diary, Cocteau accused France of disrespect towards Hitler and speculated on the Führer's sexuality. Cocteau effusively praised Breker's sculptures in an article entitled 'Salut à Breker' published in 1942. This piece caused him to be arraigned on charges of collaboration after the war, though he was cleared of any wrongdoing and had used his contacts to his failed attempt to save friends such as Max Jacob. Later, after growing closer with communists such as Louis Aragon, Cocteau would name Joseph Stalin as \"the only great politician of the era.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1940, Le Bel Indifférent, Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf (who died the day before Cocteau), was enormously successful.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Cocteau's later years are mostly associated with his films. Cocteau's films, most of which he both wrote and directed, were particularly important in introducing the avant-garde into French cinema and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave genre.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Following The Blood of a Poet (1930), his best known films include Beauty and the Beast (1946), Les Parents terribles (1948), and Orpheus (1949). His final film, Le Testament d'Orphée (The Testament of Orpheus) (1960), featured appearances by Picasso and matador Luis Miguel Dominguín, along with Yul Brynner, who also helped finance the film.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1945 Cocteau was one of several designers who created sets for the Théâtre de la Mode. He drew inspiration from filmmaker René Clair while making Tribute to René Clair: I Married a Witch. The maquette is described in his \"Journal 1942–1945,\" in his entry for 12 February 1945:",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "I saw the model of my set. Fashion bores me, but I am amused by the set and fashion placed together. It is a smoldering maid's room. One discovers an aerial view of Paris through the wall and ceiling holes. It creates vertigo. On the iron bed lies a fainted bride. Behind her stand several dismayed ladies. On the right, a very elegant lady washes her hands in a flophouse basin. Through the unhinged door on the left, a lady enters with raised arms. Others are pushed against the walls. The vision provoking this catastrophe is a bride-witch astride a broom, flying through the ceiling, her hair and train streaming.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1956 Cocteau decorated the Chapelle Saint-Pierre in Villefranche-sur-Mer with mural paintings. The following year he also decorated the marriage hall at the Hôtel de Ville in Menton.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Jean Cocteau never hid his homosexuality. He was the author of the mildly homoerotic and semi-autobiographical Le Livre blanc (translated as The White Paper or The White Book), published anonymously in 1928. He never repudiated its authorship and a later edition of the novel features his foreword and drawings. The novel begins:",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "As far back as I can remember, and even at an age when the mind does not yet influence the senses, I find traces of my love of boys. I have always loved the strong sex that I find legitimate to call the fair sex. My misfortunes came from a society that condemns the rare as a crime and forces us to reform our inclinations.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Frequently his work, either literary (Les enfants terribles), graphic (erotic drawings, book illustration, paintings) or cinematographic (The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, Beauty and the Beast), is pervaded with homosexual undertones, homoerotic imagery/symbolism or camp. In 1947 Paul Morihien published a clandestine edition of Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet, featuring 29 very explicit erotic drawings by Cocteau. In recent years several albums of Cocteau's homoerotica have been available to the general public.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In the 1930s, Cocteau is rumoured to have had a very brief affair with Princess Natalie Paley, the daughter of a Romanov Grand Duke and herself a sometime actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Cocteau's longest-lasting relationships were with French actors Jean Marais and Édouard Dermit, whom Cocteau formally adopted. Cocteau cast Marais in The Eternal Return (1943), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Ruy Blas (1947), and Orpheus (1949).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Cocteau died of a heart attack at his château in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne, France, on 11 October 1963 at the age of 74. His friend, French singer Édith Piaf, died the day before but that was announced on the morning of Cocteau's day of death; it has been said, in a story which is almost certainly apocryphal, that his heart failed upon hearing of Piaf's death. Cocteau's health had already been in decline for several months, and he had previously had a severe heart attack on 22 April 1963. A more plausible suggestion for the reason behind this decline in health has been proposed by author Roger Peyrefitte, who notes that Cocteau had been devastated by a breach with his longtime friend, socialite and notable patron Francine Weisweiller, as a result of an affair she had been having with a minor writer. Weisweiller and Cocteau did not reconcile until shortly before Cocteau's death.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "According to his wishes Cocteau is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint-Blaise des Simples in Milly-la-Forêt. The epitaph on his gravestone set in the floor of the chapel reads: \"I stay with you\" (\"Je reste avec vous\").",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 1955, Cocteau was made a member of the Académie Française and The Royal Academy of Belgium.",
"title": "Honours and awards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "During his life, Cocteau was commander of the Legion of Honor, Member of the Mallarmé Academy, German Academy (Berlin), American Academy, Mark Twain (U.S.A) Academy, Honorary President of the Cannes Film Festival, Honorary President of the France-Hungary Association and President of the Jazz Academy and of the Academy of the Disc.",
"title": "Honours and awards"
}
]
| Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost artists of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements and an influential figure in early 20th century art. The National Observer suggested that, "of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man." He is best known for his novels Le Grand Écart (1923), Le Livre blanc (1928), and Les Enfants Terribles (1929); the stage plays La Voix Humaine (1930), La Machine Infernale (1934), Les Parents terribles (1938), La Machine à écrire (1941), and L'Aigle à deux têtes (1946); and the films The Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents Terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Orpheus (1950), and Testament of Orpheus (1960), which alongside Blood of a Poet and Orpheus constitute the so-called Orphic Trilogy. He was described as "one of [the] avant-garde's most successful and influential filmmakers" by AllMovie. Cocteau, according to Annette Insdorf, "left behind a body of work unequalled for its variety of artistic expression." Though his body of work encompassed many different mediums, Cocteau insisted on calling himself a poet, classifying the great variety of his works – poems, novels, plays, essays, drawings, films – as "poésie", "poésie de roman", "poésie de thêatre", "poésie critique", "poésie graphique" and "poésie cinématographique". | 2001-06-29T05:15:28Z | 2023-11-20T04:32:39Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Cocteau |
15,838 | John Donne | John Donne (/dʌn/ DUN) (1571 or 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a cleric in the Church of England. Under royal patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1621–1631). He is considered the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His poetical works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs and satires. He is also known for his sermons.
Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorised. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.
Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after his education on womanising, literature, pastimes and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615 he was ordained Anglican deacon and then priest, although he did not want to take holy orders and only did so because the king ordered it. He served as a member of Parliament in 1601 and in 1614.
Donne was born in London in 1571 or 1572, into a recusant Roman Catholic family when practice of that religion was illegal in England. Donne was the third of six children. His father, also named John Donne, was married to Elizabeth Heywood. He was of Welsh descent and a warden of the Ironmongers Company in the City of London. He avoided unwelcome government attention out of fear of religious persecution.
His father died in 1576, when Donne was four years old, leaving his mother, Elizabeth, with the responsibility of raising the children alone. Heywood was also from a recusant Roman Catholic family, the daughter of John Heywood, the playwright, and sister of the Reverend Jasper Heywood, a Jesuit priest and translator. She was a great-niece of Thomas More. A few months after her husband died, Donne's mother married Dr. John Syminges, a wealthy widower with three children of his own.
Donne was educated privately. There is no evidence to support the popular claim that he was taught by Jesuits. In 1583, at the age of 11, he began studies at Hart Hall, now Hertford College, Oxford. After three years of studies there, Donne was admitted to the University of Cambridge, where he studied for another three years. Donne could not obtain a degree from either institution because of his Catholicism, since he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy required to graduate. In 1591 he was accepted as a student at the Thavies Inn legal school, one of the Inns of Chancery in London. On 6 May 1592, he was admitted to Lincoln's Inn, one of the Inns of Court.
In 1593, five years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada and during the intermittent Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), Queen Elizabeth issued the first English statute against sectarian dissent from the Church of England, titled "An Act for restraining Popish recusants". It defined "Popish recusants" as those "convicted for not repairing to some Church, Chapel, or usual place of Common Prayer to hear Divine Service there, but forbearing the same contrary to the tenor of the laws and statutes heretofore made and provided in that behalf". Donne's brother Henry was also a university student prior to his arrest in 1593 for harbouring a Catholic priest, William Harrington, and died in Newgate Prison of bubonic plague, leading Donne to begin questioning his Catholic faith.
During and after his education, Donne spent much of his considerable inheritance on women, literature, pastimes and travel. Although no record details precisely where Donne travelled, he crossed Europe. He later fought alongside the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh against the Spanish at Cadiz (1596) and the Azores (1597), and witnessed the loss of the Spanish flagship, the San Felipe. According to Izaak Walton, his earliest biographer,
... he returned not back into England till he had stayed some years, first in Italy, and then in Spain, where he made many useful observations of those countries, their laws and manner of government, and returned perfect in their languages.
By the age of 25 he was well prepared for the diplomatic career he appeared to be seeking. He was appointed chief secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, and was established at Egerton's London home, York House, Strand, close to the Palace of Whitehall, then the most influential social centre in England.
During the next four years, Donne fell in love with Egerton's niece Anne More. They were secretly married just before Christmas in 1601, against the wishes of both Egerton and Anne's father George More, who was Lieutenant of the Tower. Upon discovery, this wedding ruined Donne's career, getting him dismissed and put in Fleet Prison, along with the Church of England priest Samuel Brooke, who married them, and his brother Christopher, who stood in, in the absence of George More, to give Anne away. Donne was released shortly thereafter when the marriage was proved to be valid, and he soon secured the release of the other two. Walton tells us that when Donne wrote to his wife to tell her about losing his post, he wrote after his name: John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done. It was not until 1609 that Donne was reconciled with his father-in-law and received his wife's dowry.
After his release, Donne had to accept a retired country life in a small house in Pyrford, Surrey, owned by Anne's cousin, Sir Francis Wooley, where they lived until the end of 1604. In spring 1605 they moved to another small house in Mitcham, Surrey, where he scraped a meagre living as a lawyer, while Anne Donne bore a new baby almost every year. Though he also worked as an assistant pamphleteer to Thomas Morton writing anti-Catholic pamphlets, Donne was in a constant state of financial insecurity.
Anne gave birth to twelve children in sixteen years of marriage, including two stillbirths—their eighth and then, in 1617, their last child. The ten surviving children were Constance, John, George, Francis, Lucy (named after Donne's patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford, her godmother), Bridget, Mary, Nicholas, Margaret and Elizabeth. Three, Francis, Nicholas and Mary, died before they were ten.
In a state of despair that almost drove him to kill himself, Donne noted that the death of a child would mean one mouth fewer to feed, but he could not afford the burial expenses. During this time, Donne wrote but did not publish Biathanatos, his defence of suicide. His wife died on 15 August 1617, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, a still-born baby. Donne mourned her deeply, and wrote of his love and loss in his 17th Holy Sonnet.
In 1602, Donne was elected as a member of parliament (MP) for the constituency of Brackley, but the post was not a paid position. Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, being succeeded by King James VI of Scotland as King James I of England. The fashion for coterie poetry of the period gave Donne a means to seek patronage. Many of his poems were written for wealthy friends or patrons, especially for MP Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted (1575–1615), whom he met in 1610 and who became his chief patron, furnishing him and his family an apartment in his large house in Drury Lane.
In 1610 and 1611, Donne wrote two anti-Catholic polemics: Pseudo-Martyr and Ignatius His Conclave for Morton. He then wrote two Anniversaries, An Anatomy of the World (1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul (1612) for Drury.
Donne sat as an MP again, this time for Taunton, in the Addled Parliament of 1614. Though he attracted five appointments within its business he made no recorded speech. Although King James was pleased with Donne's work, he refused to reinstate him at court and instead urged him to take holy orders. At length, Donne acceded to the king's wishes, and in 1615 was an ordained priest in the Church of England.
In 1615, Donne was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity from Cambridge University. He became a Royal Chaplain in the same year. He became a reader of divinity at Lincoln's Inn in 1616, where he served in the chapel as minister until 1622. In 1618, he became chaplain to Viscount Doncaster, who was an ambassador to the princes of Germany. Donne did not return to England until 1620. In 1621, Donne was made Dean of St Paul's, a leading and well-paid position in the Church of England, which he held until his death in 1631.
In 1616 he was granted the living as rector of two parishes, Keyston in Huntingdonshire and Sevenoaks in Kent, and in 1621 of Blunham, in Bedfordshire, all held until his death. Blunham Parish Church has an imposing stained glass window commemorating Donne, designed by Derek Hunt. During Donne's period as dean his daughter Lucy died, aged eighteen. In late November and early December 1623 he suffered a nearly fatal illness, thought to be either typhus or a combination of a cold followed by a period of fever.
During his convalescence he wrote a series of meditations and prayers on health, pain and sickness that were published as a book in 1624 under the title of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. One of these meditations, Meditation XVII, contains the well-known phrases "No man is an Iland" (often modernised as "No man is an island") and "...for whom the bell tolls". In 1624, he became vicar of St Dunstan-in-the-West, and in 1625 a prolocutor to Charles I. He earned a reputation as an eloquent preacher. 160 of his sermons have survived, including Death's Duel, his famous sermon delivered at the Palace of Whitehall before King Charles I in February 1631.
Donne died on 31 March 1631. He was buried in old St Paul's Cathedral, where a memorial statue of him by Nicholas Stone was erected with a Latin epigraph probably composed by himself. The memorial was one of the few to survive the Great Fire of London in 1666 and is now in St Paul's Cathedral. The statue was said by Izaac Walton in his biography, to have been modelled from the life by Donne to suggest his appearance at the resurrection. It started a vogue of such monuments during the 17th century. In 2012, a bust of the poet by Nigel Boonham was unveiled outside in the cathedral churchyard.
Donne's earliest poems showed a developed knowledge of English society coupled with sharp criticism of its problems. His satires dealt with common Elizabethan topics, such as corruption in the legal system, mediocre poets and pompous courtiers. His images of sickness, vomit, manure and plague reflected his strongly satiric view of a society populated by fools and knaves. His third satire, however, deals with the problem of true religion, a matter of great importance to Donne. He argued that it was better to examine carefully one's religious convictions than blindly to follow any established tradition, for none would be saved at the Final Judgment, by claiming "A Harry, or a Martin taught [them] this."
Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphors, such as a flea biting two lovers being compared to sex. Donne did not publish these poems, although they circulated widely in manuscript form. One such, a previously unknown manuscript that is believed to be one of the largest contemporary collections of Donne's work (among that of others), was found at Melford Hall in November 2018.
Some have speculated that Donne's numerous illnesses, financial strain and the deaths of his friends all contributed to the development of a more sombre and pious tone in his later poems. The change can be clearly seen in "An Anatomy of the World" (1611), a poem that Donne wrote in memory of Elizabeth Drury, daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, Suffolk. This poem treats Elizabeth's demise with extreme gloominess, using it as a symbol for the fall of man and the destruction of the universe.
The increasing gloominess of Donne's tone may also be observed in the religious works that he began writing during the same period. Having converted to the Anglican Church, Donne quickly became noted for his sermons and religious poems. Towards the end of his life Donne wrote works that challenged death, and the fear that it inspired in many, on the grounds of his belief that those who die are sent to Heaven to live eternally. One example of this challenge is his Holy Sonnet X, "Death Be Not Proud".
Even as he lay dying during Lent in 1631, he rose from his sickbed and delivered the Death's Duel sermon, which was later described as his own funeral sermon. Death's Duel portrays life as a steady descent to suffering and death; death becomes merely another process of life, in which the 'winding sheet' of the womb is the same as that of the grave. Hope is seen in salvation and immortality through an embrace of God, Christ and the Resurrection.
His work has received much criticism over the years, especially concerning his metaphysical form. Donne is generally considered the most prominent member of the metaphysical poets, a phrase coined in 1781 by Samuel Johnson, following a comment on Donne by John Dryden. Dryden had written of Donne in 1693: "He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love."
In Life of Cowley (from Samuel Johnson's 1781 work of biography and criticism Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets), Johnson refers to the beginning of the 17th century in which there "appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets". Donne's immediate successors in poetry therefore tended to regard his works with ambivalence, with the Neoclassical poets regarding his conceits as abuse of the metaphor. However, he was revived by Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Browning, though his more recent revival in the early 20th century by poets such as T. S. Eliot and critics like F. R. Leavis tended to portray him, with approval, as an anti-Romantic.
Donne is considered a master of the metaphysical conceit, an extended metaphor that combines two vastly different ideas into a single idea, often using imagery. An example of this is his equation of lovers with saints in "The Canonization". Unlike the conceits found in other Elizabethan poetry, most notably Petrarchan conceits, which formed clichéd comparisons between more closely related objects (such as a rose and love), metaphysical conceits go to a greater depth in comparing two completely unlike objects. One of the most famous of Donne's conceits is found in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" where he compares the apartness of two separated lovers to the working of the legs of a compass.
Donne's works are also witty, employing paradoxes, puns and subtle yet remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic and cynical, especially regarding love and human motives. Common subjects of Donne's poems are love (especially in his early life), death (especially after his wife's death) and religion.
John Donne's poetry represented a shift from classical forms to more personal poetry. Donne is noted for his poetic metre, which was structured with changing and jagged rhythms that closely resemble casual speech (it was for this that the more classical-minded Ben Jonson commented that "Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging").
Some scholars believe that Donne's literary works reflect the changing trends of his life, with love poetry and satires from his youth and religious sermons during his later years. Other scholars, such as Helen Gardner, question the validity of this dating—most of his poems were published posthumously (1633). The exception to these is his Anniversaries, which were published in 1612 and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions published in 1624. His sermons are also dated, sometimes specifically by date and year.
Donne is remembered in the Calendar of Saints of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church liturgical calendar and the Calendar of Saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for his life as both poet and priest. His commemoration is on 31 March.
During his lifetime several likenesses were made of the poet. The earliest was the anonymous portrait of 1594 now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, which was restored in 2012. One of the earliest Elizabethan portraits of an author, the fashionably dressed poet is shown darkly brooding on his love. The portrait was described in Donne's will as "that picture of myne wych is taken in the shaddowes", and bequeathed by him to Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancram. Other paintings include a 1616 head and shoulders after Isaac Oliver, also in the National Portrait Gallery, and a 1622 head and shoulders in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1911, the young Stanley Spencer devoted a visionary painting to John Donne arriving in heaven (1911) which is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Donne's reception until the 20th century was influenced by the publication of his writings in the 17th century. Because Donne avoided publication during his life, the majority of his works were brought to the press by others in the decades after his death. These publications present what Erin McCarthy calls a "teleological narrative of Donne's growth" from young rake "Jack Donne" to reverend divine "Dr. Donne". For example, while the first edition of Poems, by J. D. (1633) mingled amorous and pious verse indiscriminately, all editions after 1635 separated poems into "Songs and Sonnets" and "Divine Poems". This organization "promulgated the tale of Jack Donne's transformation into Doctor Donne and made it the dominant way of understanding Donne's life and work."
A similar effort to justify Donne's early writings appeared in the publication of his prose. This pattern can be seen in a 1652 volume that combines texts from throughout Donne's career, including flippant works like Ignatius His Conclave and more pious writings like Essays in Divinity. In the preface, Donne's son "unifies the otherwise disparate texts around an impression of Donne's divinity" by comparing his father's varied writing to Jesus' miracles. Christ "began his first Miracle here, by turning Water into Wine, and made it his last to ascend from Earth to Heaven."
Donne first wrote "things conducing to cheerfulness & entertainment of Mankind," and later "change[d] his conversation from Men to Angels." Another figure who contributed to Donne's legacy as a rake-turned-preacher was Donne's first biographer Izaak Walton. Walton's biography separated Donne's life into two stages, comparing Donne's life to the transformation of St. Paul. Walton writes, "where [Donne] had been a Saul… in his irregular youth," he became "a Paul, and preach[ed] salvation to his brethren."
The idea that Donne's writings reflect two distinct stages of his life remains common; however, many scholars have challenged this understanding. In 1948, Evelyn Simpson wrote, "a close study of his works... makes it clear that his was no case of dual personality. He was not a Jekyll-Hyde in Jacobean dress... There is an essential unity underlying the flagrant and manifold contradictions of his temperament."
After Donne's death, a number of poetical tributes were paid to him, of which one of the principal (and most difficult to follow) was his friend Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "Elegy for Doctor Donne". Posthumous editions of Donne's poems were accompanied by several "Elegies upon the Author" over the course of the next two centuries. Six of these were written by fellow churchmen, others by such courtly writers as Thomas Carew, Sidney Godolphin and Endymion Porter. In 1963 came Joseph Brodsky's "The Great Elegy for John Donne".
Beginning in the 20th century, several historical novels appeared taking as their subject various episodes in Donne's life. His courtship of Anne More is the subject of Elizabeth Gray Vining's Take Heed of Loving Me: A novel about John Donne (1963) and Maeve Haran's The Lady and the Poet (2010). Both characters also make interspersed appearances in Mary Novik's Conceit (2007), where the main focus is on their rebellious daughter Pegge. English treatments include Garry O'Connor's Death's Duel: a novel of John Donne (2015), which deals with the poet as a young man.
He also plays a significant role in Christie Dickason's The Noble Assassin (2012), a novel based on the life of Donne's patron and (the author claims) his lover, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford. Finally there is Bryan Crockett's Love's Alchemy: a John Donne Mystery (2015), in which the poet, blackmailed into service in Robert Cecil's network of spies, attempts to avert political disaster and at the same time outwit Cecil.
There were musical settings of Donne's lyrics even during his lifetime and in the century following his death. These included Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger's ("So, so, leave off this last lamenting kisse" in his 1609 Ayres); John Cooper's ("The Message"); Henry Lawes' ("Break of Day"); John Dowland's ("Break of Day" and "To ask for all thy love"); and settings of "A Hymn to God the Father" by John Hilton the younger and Pelham Humfrey (published 1688).
After the 17th century, there were no more until the start of the 20th century with Havergal Brian ("A nocturnal on St Lucy's Day", first performed in 1905), Eleanor Everest Freer ("Break of Day, published in 1905) and Walford Davies ("The Cross", 1909) among the earliest. In 1916–18, the composer Hubert Parry set Donne's "Holy Sonnet 7" ("At the round earth's imagined corners") to music in his choral work, Songs of Farewell. Regina Hansen Willman (1914-1965) set Donne's "First Holy Sonnet" for voice and string trio. In 1945, Benjamin Britten set nine of Donne's Holy Sonnets in his song cycle for voice and piano The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. in 1968, Williametta Spencer used Donne's text for her choral work "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners." Among them is also the choral setting of "Negative Love" that opens Harmonium (1981), as well as the aria setting of "Holy Sonnet XIV" at the end of the 1st act of Doctor Atomic, both by John Adams.
There have been settings in popular music as well. One is the version of the song "Go and Catch a Falling Star" on John Renbourn's debut album John Renbourn (1966), in which the last line is altered to "False, ere I count one, two, three". On their 1992 album Duality, the English Neoclassical dark wave band In the Nursery used a recitation of the entirety of Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" for the track "Mecciano" and an augmented version of "A Fever" for the track "Corruption." Prose texts by Donne have also been set to music. In 1954, Priaulx Rainier set some in her Cycle for Declamation for solo voice. In 2009, the American Jennifer Higdon composed the choral piece On the Death of the Righteous, based on Donne's sermons. Still more recent is the Russian minimalist Anton Batagov's " I Fear No More, selected songs and meditations of John Donne" (2015). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Donne (/dʌn/ DUN) (1571 or 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a cleric in the Church of England. Under royal patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1621–1631). He is considered the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His poetical works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs and satires. He is also known for his sermons.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorised. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after his education on womanising, literature, pastimes and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615 he was ordained Anglican deacon and then priest, although he did not want to take holy orders and only did so because the king ordered it. He served as a member of Parliament in 1601 and in 1614.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Donne was born in London in 1571 or 1572, into a recusant Roman Catholic family when practice of that religion was illegal in England. Donne was the third of six children. His father, also named John Donne, was married to Elizabeth Heywood. He was of Welsh descent and a warden of the Ironmongers Company in the City of London. He avoided unwelcome government attention out of fear of religious persecution.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "His father died in 1576, when Donne was four years old, leaving his mother, Elizabeth, with the responsibility of raising the children alone. Heywood was also from a recusant Roman Catholic family, the daughter of John Heywood, the playwright, and sister of the Reverend Jasper Heywood, a Jesuit priest and translator. She was a great-niece of Thomas More. A few months after her husband died, Donne's mother married Dr. John Syminges, a wealthy widower with three children of his own.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Donne was educated privately. There is no evidence to support the popular claim that he was taught by Jesuits. In 1583, at the age of 11, he began studies at Hart Hall, now Hertford College, Oxford. After three years of studies there, Donne was admitted to the University of Cambridge, where he studied for another three years. Donne could not obtain a degree from either institution because of his Catholicism, since he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy required to graduate. In 1591 he was accepted as a student at the Thavies Inn legal school, one of the Inns of Chancery in London. On 6 May 1592, he was admitted to Lincoln's Inn, one of the Inns of Court.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1593, five years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada and during the intermittent Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), Queen Elizabeth issued the first English statute against sectarian dissent from the Church of England, titled \"An Act for restraining Popish recusants\". It defined \"Popish recusants\" as those \"convicted for not repairing to some Church, Chapel, or usual place of Common Prayer to hear Divine Service there, but forbearing the same contrary to the tenor of the laws and statutes heretofore made and provided in that behalf\". Donne's brother Henry was also a university student prior to his arrest in 1593 for harbouring a Catholic priest, William Harrington, and died in Newgate Prison of bubonic plague, leading Donne to begin questioning his Catholic faith.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "During and after his education, Donne spent much of his considerable inheritance on women, literature, pastimes and travel. Although no record details precisely where Donne travelled, he crossed Europe. He later fought alongside the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh against the Spanish at Cadiz (1596) and the Azores (1597), and witnessed the loss of the Spanish flagship, the San Felipe. According to Izaak Walton, his earliest biographer,",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "... he returned not back into England till he had stayed some years, first in Italy, and then in Spain, where he made many useful observations of those countries, their laws and manner of government, and returned perfect in their languages.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "By the age of 25 he was well prepared for the diplomatic career he appeared to be seeking. He was appointed chief secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, and was established at Egerton's London home, York House, Strand, close to the Palace of Whitehall, then the most influential social centre in England.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "During the next four years, Donne fell in love with Egerton's niece Anne More. They were secretly married just before Christmas in 1601, against the wishes of both Egerton and Anne's father George More, who was Lieutenant of the Tower. Upon discovery, this wedding ruined Donne's career, getting him dismissed and put in Fleet Prison, along with the Church of England priest Samuel Brooke, who married them, and his brother Christopher, who stood in, in the absence of George More, to give Anne away. Donne was released shortly thereafter when the marriage was proved to be valid, and he soon secured the release of the other two. Walton tells us that when Donne wrote to his wife to tell her about losing his post, he wrote after his name: John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done. It was not until 1609 that Donne was reconciled with his father-in-law and received his wife's dowry.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "After his release, Donne had to accept a retired country life in a small house in Pyrford, Surrey, owned by Anne's cousin, Sir Francis Wooley, where they lived until the end of 1604. In spring 1605 they moved to another small house in Mitcham, Surrey, where he scraped a meagre living as a lawyer, while Anne Donne bore a new baby almost every year. Though he also worked as an assistant pamphleteer to Thomas Morton writing anti-Catholic pamphlets, Donne was in a constant state of financial insecurity.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Anne gave birth to twelve children in sixteen years of marriage, including two stillbirths—their eighth and then, in 1617, their last child. The ten surviving children were Constance, John, George, Francis, Lucy (named after Donne's patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford, her godmother), Bridget, Mary, Nicholas, Margaret and Elizabeth. Three, Francis, Nicholas and Mary, died before they were ten.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In a state of despair that almost drove him to kill himself, Donne noted that the death of a child would mean one mouth fewer to feed, but he could not afford the burial expenses. During this time, Donne wrote but did not publish Biathanatos, his defence of suicide. His wife died on 15 August 1617, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, a still-born baby. Donne mourned her deeply, and wrote of his love and loss in his 17th Holy Sonnet.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1602, Donne was elected as a member of parliament (MP) for the constituency of Brackley, but the post was not a paid position. Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, being succeeded by King James VI of Scotland as King James I of England. The fashion for coterie poetry of the period gave Donne a means to seek patronage. Many of his poems were written for wealthy friends or patrons, especially for MP Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted (1575–1615), whom he met in 1610 and who became his chief patron, furnishing him and his family an apartment in his large house in Drury Lane.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1610 and 1611, Donne wrote two anti-Catholic polemics: Pseudo-Martyr and Ignatius His Conclave for Morton. He then wrote two Anniversaries, An Anatomy of the World (1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul (1612) for Drury.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Donne sat as an MP again, this time for Taunton, in the Addled Parliament of 1614. Though he attracted five appointments within its business he made no recorded speech. Although King James was pleased with Donne's work, he refused to reinstate him at court and instead urged him to take holy orders. At length, Donne acceded to the king's wishes, and in 1615 was an ordained priest in the Church of England.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1615, Donne was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity from Cambridge University. He became a Royal Chaplain in the same year. He became a reader of divinity at Lincoln's Inn in 1616, where he served in the chapel as minister until 1622. In 1618, he became chaplain to Viscount Doncaster, who was an ambassador to the princes of Germany. Donne did not return to England until 1620. In 1621, Donne was made Dean of St Paul's, a leading and well-paid position in the Church of England, which he held until his death in 1631.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1616 he was granted the living as rector of two parishes, Keyston in Huntingdonshire and Sevenoaks in Kent, and in 1621 of Blunham, in Bedfordshire, all held until his death. Blunham Parish Church has an imposing stained glass window commemorating Donne, designed by Derek Hunt. During Donne's period as dean his daughter Lucy died, aged eighteen. In late November and early December 1623 he suffered a nearly fatal illness, thought to be either typhus or a combination of a cold followed by a period of fever.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "During his convalescence he wrote a series of meditations and prayers on health, pain and sickness that were published as a book in 1624 under the title of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. One of these meditations, Meditation XVII, contains the well-known phrases \"No man is an Iland\" (often modernised as \"No man is an island\") and \"...for whom the bell tolls\". In 1624, he became vicar of St Dunstan-in-the-West, and in 1625 a prolocutor to Charles I. He earned a reputation as an eloquent preacher. 160 of his sermons have survived, including Death's Duel, his famous sermon delivered at the Palace of Whitehall before King Charles I in February 1631.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Donne died on 31 March 1631. He was buried in old St Paul's Cathedral, where a memorial statue of him by Nicholas Stone was erected with a Latin epigraph probably composed by himself. The memorial was one of the few to survive the Great Fire of London in 1666 and is now in St Paul's Cathedral. The statue was said by Izaac Walton in his biography, to have been modelled from the life by Donne to suggest his appearance at the resurrection. It started a vogue of such monuments during the 17th century. In 2012, a bust of the poet by Nigel Boonham was unveiled outside in the cathedral churchyard.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Donne's earliest poems showed a developed knowledge of English society coupled with sharp criticism of its problems. His satires dealt with common Elizabethan topics, such as corruption in the legal system, mediocre poets and pompous courtiers. His images of sickness, vomit, manure and plague reflected his strongly satiric view of a society populated by fools and knaves. His third satire, however, deals with the problem of true religion, a matter of great importance to Donne. He argued that it was better to examine carefully one's religious convictions than blindly to follow any established tradition, for none would be saved at the Final Judgment, by claiming \"A Harry, or a Martin taught [them] this.\"",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphors, such as a flea biting two lovers being compared to sex. Donne did not publish these poems, although they circulated widely in manuscript form. One such, a previously unknown manuscript that is believed to be one of the largest contemporary collections of Donne's work (among that of others), was found at Melford Hall in November 2018.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Some have speculated that Donne's numerous illnesses, financial strain and the deaths of his friends all contributed to the development of a more sombre and pious tone in his later poems. The change can be clearly seen in \"An Anatomy of the World\" (1611), a poem that Donne wrote in memory of Elizabeth Drury, daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, Suffolk. This poem treats Elizabeth's demise with extreme gloominess, using it as a symbol for the fall of man and the destruction of the universe.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The increasing gloominess of Donne's tone may also be observed in the religious works that he began writing during the same period. Having converted to the Anglican Church, Donne quickly became noted for his sermons and religious poems. Towards the end of his life Donne wrote works that challenged death, and the fear that it inspired in many, on the grounds of his belief that those who die are sent to Heaven to live eternally. One example of this challenge is his Holy Sonnet X, \"Death Be Not Proud\".",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Even as he lay dying during Lent in 1631, he rose from his sickbed and delivered the Death's Duel sermon, which was later described as his own funeral sermon. Death's Duel portrays life as a steady descent to suffering and death; death becomes merely another process of life, in which the 'winding sheet' of the womb is the same as that of the grave. Hope is seen in salvation and immortality through an embrace of God, Christ and the Resurrection.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "His work has received much criticism over the years, especially concerning his metaphysical form. Donne is generally considered the most prominent member of the metaphysical poets, a phrase coined in 1781 by Samuel Johnson, following a comment on Donne by John Dryden. Dryden had written of Donne in 1693: \"He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love.\"",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In Life of Cowley (from Samuel Johnson's 1781 work of biography and criticism Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets), Johnson refers to the beginning of the 17th century in which there \"appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets\". Donne's immediate successors in poetry therefore tended to regard his works with ambivalence, with the Neoclassical poets regarding his conceits as abuse of the metaphor. However, he was revived by Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Browning, though his more recent revival in the early 20th century by poets such as T. S. Eliot and critics like F. R. Leavis tended to portray him, with approval, as an anti-Romantic.",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Donne is considered a master of the metaphysical conceit, an extended metaphor that combines two vastly different ideas into a single idea, often using imagery. An example of this is his equation of lovers with saints in \"The Canonization\". Unlike the conceits found in other Elizabethan poetry, most notably Petrarchan conceits, which formed clichéd comparisons between more closely related objects (such as a rose and love), metaphysical conceits go to a greater depth in comparing two completely unlike objects. One of the most famous of Donne's conceits is found in \"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning\" where he compares the apartness of two separated lovers to the working of the legs of a compass.",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Donne's works are also witty, employing paradoxes, puns and subtle yet remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic and cynical, especially regarding love and human motives. Common subjects of Donne's poems are love (especially in his early life), death (especially after his wife's death) and religion.",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "John Donne's poetry represented a shift from classical forms to more personal poetry. Donne is noted for his poetic metre, which was structured with changing and jagged rhythms that closely resemble casual speech (it was for this that the more classical-minded Ben Jonson commented that \"Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging\").",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Some scholars believe that Donne's literary works reflect the changing trends of his life, with love poetry and satires from his youth and religious sermons during his later years. Other scholars, such as Helen Gardner, question the validity of this dating—most of his poems were published posthumously (1633). The exception to these is his Anniversaries, which were published in 1612 and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions published in 1624. His sermons are also dated, sometimes specifically by date and year.",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Donne is remembered in the Calendar of Saints of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church liturgical calendar and the Calendar of Saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for his life as both poet and priest. His commemoration is on 31 March.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "During his lifetime several likenesses were made of the poet. The earliest was the anonymous portrait of 1594 now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, which was restored in 2012. One of the earliest Elizabethan portraits of an author, the fashionably dressed poet is shown darkly brooding on his love. The portrait was described in Donne's will as \"that picture of myne wych is taken in the shaddowes\", and bequeathed by him to Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancram. Other paintings include a 1616 head and shoulders after Isaac Oliver, also in the National Portrait Gallery, and a 1622 head and shoulders in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1911, the young Stanley Spencer devoted a visionary painting to John Donne arriving in heaven (1911) which is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Donne's reception until the 20th century was influenced by the publication of his writings in the 17th century. Because Donne avoided publication during his life, the majority of his works were brought to the press by others in the decades after his death. These publications present what Erin McCarthy calls a \"teleological narrative of Donne's growth\" from young rake \"Jack Donne\" to reverend divine \"Dr. Donne\". For example, while the first edition of Poems, by J. D. (1633) mingled amorous and pious verse indiscriminately, all editions after 1635 separated poems into \"Songs and Sonnets\" and \"Divine Poems\". This organization \"promulgated the tale of Jack Donne's transformation into Doctor Donne and made it the dominant way of understanding Donne's life and work.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "A similar effort to justify Donne's early writings appeared in the publication of his prose. This pattern can be seen in a 1652 volume that combines texts from throughout Donne's career, including flippant works like Ignatius His Conclave and more pious writings like Essays in Divinity. In the preface, Donne's son \"unifies the otherwise disparate texts around an impression of Donne's divinity\" by comparing his father's varied writing to Jesus' miracles. Christ \"began his first Miracle here, by turning Water into Wine, and made it his last to ascend from Earth to Heaven.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Donne first wrote \"things conducing to cheerfulness & entertainment of Mankind,\" and later \"change[d] his conversation from Men to Angels.\" Another figure who contributed to Donne's legacy as a rake-turned-preacher was Donne's first biographer Izaak Walton. Walton's biography separated Donne's life into two stages, comparing Donne's life to the transformation of St. Paul. Walton writes, \"where [Donne] had been a Saul… in his irregular youth,\" he became \"a Paul, and preach[ed] salvation to his brethren.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The idea that Donne's writings reflect two distinct stages of his life remains common; however, many scholars have challenged this understanding. In 1948, Evelyn Simpson wrote, \"a close study of his works... makes it clear that his was no case of dual personality. He was not a Jekyll-Hyde in Jacobean dress... There is an essential unity underlying the flagrant and manifold contradictions of his temperament.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "After Donne's death, a number of poetical tributes were paid to him, of which one of the principal (and most difficult to follow) was his friend Lord Herbert of Cherbury's \"Elegy for Doctor Donne\". Posthumous editions of Donne's poems were accompanied by several \"Elegies upon the Author\" over the course of the next two centuries. Six of these were written by fellow churchmen, others by such courtly writers as Thomas Carew, Sidney Godolphin and Endymion Porter. In 1963 came Joseph Brodsky's \"The Great Elegy for John Donne\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Beginning in the 20th century, several historical novels appeared taking as their subject various episodes in Donne's life. His courtship of Anne More is the subject of Elizabeth Gray Vining's Take Heed of Loving Me: A novel about John Donne (1963) and Maeve Haran's The Lady and the Poet (2010). Both characters also make interspersed appearances in Mary Novik's Conceit (2007), where the main focus is on their rebellious daughter Pegge. English treatments include Garry O'Connor's Death's Duel: a novel of John Donne (2015), which deals with the poet as a young man.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "He also plays a significant role in Christie Dickason's The Noble Assassin (2012), a novel based on the life of Donne's patron and (the author claims) his lover, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford. Finally there is Bryan Crockett's Love's Alchemy: a John Donne Mystery (2015), in which the poet, blackmailed into service in Robert Cecil's network of spies, attempts to avert political disaster and at the same time outwit Cecil.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "There were musical settings of Donne's lyrics even during his lifetime and in the century following his death. These included Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger's (\"So, so, leave off this last lamenting kisse\" in his 1609 Ayres); John Cooper's (\"The Message\"); Henry Lawes' (\"Break of Day\"); John Dowland's (\"Break of Day\" and \"To ask for all thy love\"); and settings of \"A Hymn to God the Father\" by John Hilton the younger and Pelham Humfrey (published 1688).",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "After the 17th century, there were no more until the start of the 20th century with Havergal Brian (\"A nocturnal on St Lucy's Day\", first performed in 1905), Eleanor Everest Freer (\"Break of Day, published in 1905) and Walford Davies (\"The Cross\", 1909) among the earliest. In 1916–18, the composer Hubert Parry set Donne's \"Holy Sonnet 7\" (\"At the round earth's imagined corners\") to music in his choral work, Songs of Farewell. Regina Hansen Willman (1914-1965) set Donne's \"First Holy Sonnet\" for voice and string trio. In 1945, Benjamin Britten set nine of Donne's Holy Sonnets in his song cycle for voice and piano The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. in 1968, Williametta Spencer used Donne's text for her choral work \"At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners.\" Among them is also the choral setting of \"Negative Love\" that opens Harmonium (1981), as well as the aria setting of \"Holy Sonnet XIV\" at the end of the 1st act of Doctor Atomic, both by John Adams.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "There have been settings in popular music as well. One is the version of the song \"Go and Catch a Falling Star\" on John Renbourn's debut album John Renbourn (1966), in which the last line is altered to \"False, ere I count one, two, three\". On their 1992 album Duality, the English Neoclassical dark wave band In the Nursery used a recitation of the entirety of Donne's \"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning\" for the track \"Mecciano\" and an augmented version of \"A Fever\" for the track \"Corruption.\" Prose texts by Donne have also been set to music. In 1954, Priaulx Rainier set some in her Cycle for Declamation for solo voice. In 2009, the American Jennifer Higdon composed the choral piece On the Death of the Righteous, based on Donne's sermons. Still more recent is the Russian minimalist Anton Batagov's \" I Fear No More, selected songs and meditations of John Donne\" (2015).",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| John Donne was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a cleric in the Church of England. Under royal patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1621–1631). He is considered the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His poetical works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs and satires. He is also known for his sermons. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorised. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits. Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after his education on womanising, literature, pastimes and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615 he was ordained Anglican deacon and then priest, although he did not want to take holy orders and only did so because the king ordered it. He served as a member of Parliament in 1601 and in 1614. | 2001-11-07T03:42:40Z | 2023-12-29T16:04:21Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Donne |
15,839 | Joey Ramone | Jeffrey Ross Hyman (May 19, 1951 – April 15, 2001), known professionally as Joey Ramone, was an American singer, best known as the lead vocalist and a founding member of the punk rock band Ramones. His image, voice, and his tenure with the Ramones made him a countercultural icon. He, along with the guitarist Johnny Ramone, are the only two original members who stayed in the band until the disbandment in 1996.
Jeffrey Ross Hyman was born on May 19, 1951, in Queens, New York City, to a Jewish family. His parents were Charlotte (née Mandell) and Noel Hyman. He was born with a parasitic twin growing out of his back, which was incompletely formed and surgically removed. The family resided in Forest Hills, Queens, where Hyman and his future Ramones bandmates attended Forest Hills High School. He grew up with his brother Mickey Leigh. Though generally a happy person, Hyman was something of an outcast, diagnosed at 18 with obsessive–compulsive disorder and schizophrenia. His mother, Charlotte Lesher, divorced her first husband, Noel Hyman. She married a second time but was widowed when her second husband died in a car accident while she was on vacation.
Hyman was a fan of the Beatles, the Who, David Bowie, and the Stooges among other bands, particularly oldies and the Phil Spector-produced girl groups. His idol was Keith Moon of the Who. Hyman took up the drums at 13, and played them throughout his teen years before picking up an acoustic guitar at age 17.
In 1972 Hyman joined the glam punk band Sniper. Sniper played at the Mercer Arts Center, Max's Kansas City and the Coventry, alongside New York Dolls, Suicide, and Queen Elizabeth III. Hyman played with Sniper under the name Jeff Starship. Hyman continued playing with Sniper until early 1974, when he was replaced by Alan Turner.
In 1974, Jeffrey Hyman co-founded the punk rock band the Ramones with friends John Cummings and Douglas Colvin. Colvin was already using the pseudonym "Dee Dee Ramone" and the others also adopted stage names using "Ramone" as their surname: Cummings became Johnny Ramone and Hyman became Joey Ramone. The name "Ramone" stems from Paul McCartney: he briefly used the stage name "Paul Ramon" during 1960–61, when the Beatles, still an unknown five-piece band called the Silver Beetles, did a tour of Scotland and all took up pseudonyms; and again on the 1969 Steve Miller album Brave New World, where he played the drums on one song using that name.
Ramone initially served as the group's drummer while Dee Dee Ramone was the original vocalist. However, when Dee Dee's vocal cords proved unable to sustain the demands of consistent live performances, Ramone's manager Thomas Erdelyi suggested Ramone switch to vocals. Mickey Leigh:
I was shocked when the band came out. Joey was the lead singer and I couldn't believe how good he was. Because he'd been sitting in my house with my acoustic guitar, writing these songs like 'I Don't Care', fucking up my guitar, and suddenly he's this guy on stage who you can't take your eyes off of.
After a series of unsuccessful auditions in search of a new drummer, Erdelyi took over on drums, assuming the name Tommy Ramone.
The Ramones were a major influence on the punk rock movement in the United States, though they achieved only minor commercial success. Their only record with enough U.S. sales to be certified gold in Ramone's lifetime was the compilation album Ramones Mania. Recognition of the band's importance built over the years, and they are now represented in many assessments of all-time great rock music, such as the Rolling Stone lists of the 50 Greatest Artists of All Time and 25 Greatest Live Albums of All Time, VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock, and Mojo's 100 Greatest Albums. In 2002, the Ramones were voted the second greatest rock and roll band ever in Spin, behind the Beatles.
In 1996, after a tour with the Lollapalooza music festival, the band played its final show and then disbanded.
One of Ramone's earliest side projects was with a band called The Seclusions in 1983. Ramone sung vocals alongside his brother Leigh on a cover of the song "Nothing Can Change the Shape of Things to Come" from the album Isolation For Creation. Also appearing on the track were Jimmy Destri, Holly Beth Vincent, Jimmy Ripp, Busta Jones, and Jay Dee Daugherty.
In 1985, Ramone joined Steven Van Zandt's music industry activist group Artists United Against Apartheid, which campaigned against the Sun City resort in South Africa. Ramone and 49 other recording artists – including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, Lou Reed and Run DMC — collaborated on the song "Sun City", in which they pledged they would never perform at the resort.
In 1994, Ramone appeared on the Helen Love album Love and Glitter, Hot Days and Music, singing the track "Punk Boy". Helen Love returned the favor, singing on Ramone's song "Mr. Punchy".
In October 1996, Ramone headlined the "Rock the Reservation" alternative rock festival in Tuba City, Arizona. "Joey Ramone & the Resistance" (Daniel Rey on guitar, John Connor on bass guitar and Roger Murdock on drums) debuted Ramone's interpretation of Louis Armstrong's "Wonderful World" live, as well as Ramone's choice of Ramones classics and some of his other favorite songs, such as The Dave Clark Five's "Any Way You Want It", The Who's "The Kids are Alright" and The Stooges' "No Fun".
Ramone co-wrote and recorded the song "Meatball Sandwich" with Youth Gone Mad. For a short time before his death, he took the role of manager and producer for the punk rock band the Independents.
His last recording as a vocalist was backup vocals on the CD One Nation Under by the Dine Navajo rock group Blackfire. He appeared on two tracks, "What Do You See" and "Lying to Myself".
Ramone produced the Ronnie Spector EP She Talks to Rainbows in 1999. It was critically acclaimed but was not very commercially successful. The title track was previously on the Ramones' final studio album, ¡Adios Amigos!.
Ramone's signature cracks, hiccups, snarls, crooning, and youthful voice made him one of punk rock's most recognizable voices. Allmusic.com wrote that "Joey Ramone's signature bleat was the voice of punk rock in America." As his vocals matured and deepened through his career, so did the Ramones' songwriting, leaving a notable difference from his initial melodic and callow style – two notable tracks serving as examples are "Somebody Put Something in My Drink" and "Mama's Boy". Dee Dee Ramone was quoted as saying, "All the other singers [in New York] were copying David Johansen (of the New York Dolls), who was copying Mick Jagger... But Joey was unique, totally unique."
In 1995, Ramone was diagnosed with lymphoma. He kept his condition private until it was revealed on March 19, 2001, that he was battling the disease. He died of the illness at New York-Presbyterian Hospital on April 15, 2001, a month before he would have turned 50. He was reportedly listening to the song "In a Little While" by U2 when he died. In an interview in 2014 for Radio 538, U2 lead singer Bono confirmed that Joey Ramone's family told him that Ramone listened to the song before he died, which Andy Shernoff (The Dictators) also confirmed. Joey's funeral was attended by former bandmates Tommy, Richie and C. J. Ramone, along with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie, and Joan Jett. Ramone is interred at New Mount Zion Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.
His solo album Don't Worry About Me was released posthumously in 2002, and features the single "What a Wonderful World", a cover of the Louis Armstrong standard. MTV News said: "With his trademark rose-colored shades, black leather jacket, shoulder-length hair, ripped jeans and alternately snarling and crooning vocals, Joey was the iconic godfather of punk."
On November 30, 2003, a block of East 2nd Street in New York City was officially renamed Joey Ramone Place. It is the block where Hyman once lived with bandmate Dee Dee Ramone and is near the former site of the music club CBGB, where the Ramones began their career. Hyman's birthday is celebrated annually during the "Joey Ramone Birthday Bash", hosted in New York City by his brother and, until 2007, his mother, Charlotte.
The Ramones were named as inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the class of 2002.
Several songs have been written in tribute to Ramone. Tommy, C. J., and Marky Ramone and Daniel Rey came together in 2002 to record Jed Davis' Joey Ramone tribute album, The Bowery Electric. Other tributes include "Hello Joe" by Blondie from the album The Curse of Blondie, "You Can't Kill Joey Ramone" by Sloppy Seconds, Joey by Raimundos, "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" by Sleater-Kinney, "Red and White Stripes" by Moler and "Joey" by the Corin Tucker Band, "I Heard Ramona Sing" by Frank Black, Amy Rigby's "Dancin' with Joey Ramone" and "The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)" by U2.
In September 2010, the Associated Press reported that "Joey Ramone Place," a sign at the corner of Bowery and East Second Street, was New York City's most stolen sign. Later, the sign was moved to 20 ft (6.1 m) above ground level. Drummer Marky Ramone thought Joey would appreciate that his sign would be the most stolen, adding "Now you have to be an NBA player to see it."
After several years in development, Ramone's second posthumous album was released on May 22, 2012. Titled ...Ya Know?, it was preceded on Record Store Day by a 7" single re-release of "Blitzkrieg Bop"/"Havana Affair".
On April 15, 2021, the 20th anniversary of Ramone's death, it was announced that Pete Davidson would portray Ramone in the upcoming Netflix biopic, I Slept with Joey Ramone which is based on the memoir of the same name written by Ramone's brother Mickey Leigh. Leigh will serve as an executive producer. The film is being made with the full cooperation and support of Ramone's estate, with a treatment written by Davidson and director Jason Orley.
In 2022, Brookfield Asset Management acquired a majority stake in the music-publishing rights of Ramone for around US$10 million.
Album
EP
Singles
Other appearances
Posthumous demo album
EP | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jeffrey Ross Hyman (May 19, 1951 – April 15, 2001), known professionally as Joey Ramone, was an American singer, best known as the lead vocalist and a founding member of the punk rock band Ramones. His image, voice, and his tenure with the Ramones made him a countercultural icon. He, along with the guitarist Johnny Ramone, are the only two original members who stayed in the band until the disbandment in 1996.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Jeffrey Ross Hyman was born on May 19, 1951, in Queens, New York City, to a Jewish family. His parents were Charlotte (née Mandell) and Noel Hyman. He was born with a parasitic twin growing out of his back, which was incompletely formed and surgically removed. The family resided in Forest Hills, Queens, where Hyman and his future Ramones bandmates attended Forest Hills High School. He grew up with his brother Mickey Leigh. Though generally a happy person, Hyman was something of an outcast, diagnosed at 18 with obsessive–compulsive disorder and schizophrenia. His mother, Charlotte Lesher, divorced her first husband, Noel Hyman. She married a second time but was widowed when her second husband died in a car accident while she was on vacation.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Hyman was a fan of the Beatles, the Who, David Bowie, and the Stooges among other bands, particularly oldies and the Phil Spector-produced girl groups. His idol was Keith Moon of the Who. Hyman took up the drums at 13, and played them throughout his teen years before picking up an acoustic guitar at age 17.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1972 Hyman joined the glam punk band Sniper. Sniper played at the Mercer Arts Center, Max's Kansas City and the Coventry, alongside New York Dolls, Suicide, and Queen Elizabeth III. Hyman played with Sniper under the name Jeff Starship. Hyman continued playing with Sniper until early 1974, when he was replaced by Alan Turner.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1974, Jeffrey Hyman co-founded the punk rock band the Ramones with friends John Cummings and Douglas Colvin. Colvin was already using the pseudonym \"Dee Dee Ramone\" and the others also adopted stage names using \"Ramone\" as their surname: Cummings became Johnny Ramone and Hyman became Joey Ramone. The name \"Ramone\" stems from Paul McCartney: he briefly used the stage name \"Paul Ramon\" during 1960–61, when the Beatles, still an unknown five-piece band called the Silver Beetles, did a tour of Scotland and all took up pseudonyms; and again on the 1969 Steve Miller album Brave New World, where he played the drums on one song using that name.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Ramone initially served as the group's drummer while Dee Dee Ramone was the original vocalist. However, when Dee Dee's vocal cords proved unable to sustain the demands of consistent live performances, Ramone's manager Thomas Erdelyi suggested Ramone switch to vocals. Mickey Leigh:",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "I was shocked when the band came out. Joey was the lead singer and I couldn't believe how good he was. Because he'd been sitting in my house with my acoustic guitar, writing these songs like 'I Don't Care', fucking up my guitar, and suddenly he's this guy on stage who you can't take your eyes off of.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "After a series of unsuccessful auditions in search of a new drummer, Erdelyi took over on drums, assuming the name Tommy Ramone.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Ramones were a major influence on the punk rock movement in the United States, though they achieved only minor commercial success. Their only record with enough U.S. sales to be certified gold in Ramone's lifetime was the compilation album Ramones Mania. Recognition of the band's importance built over the years, and they are now represented in many assessments of all-time great rock music, such as the Rolling Stone lists of the 50 Greatest Artists of All Time and 25 Greatest Live Albums of All Time, VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock, and Mojo's 100 Greatest Albums. In 2002, the Ramones were voted the second greatest rock and roll band ever in Spin, behind the Beatles.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1996, after a tour with the Lollapalooza music festival, the band played its final show and then disbanded.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "One of Ramone's earliest side projects was with a band called The Seclusions in 1983. Ramone sung vocals alongside his brother Leigh on a cover of the song \"Nothing Can Change the Shape of Things to Come\" from the album Isolation For Creation. Also appearing on the track were Jimmy Destri, Holly Beth Vincent, Jimmy Ripp, Busta Jones, and Jay Dee Daugherty.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1985, Ramone joined Steven Van Zandt's music industry activist group Artists United Against Apartheid, which campaigned against the Sun City resort in South Africa. Ramone and 49 other recording artists – including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, Lou Reed and Run DMC — collaborated on the song \"Sun City\", in which they pledged they would never perform at the resort.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1994, Ramone appeared on the Helen Love album Love and Glitter, Hot Days and Music, singing the track \"Punk Boy\". Helen Love returned the favor, singing on Ramone's song \"Mr. Punchy\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In October 1996, Ramone headlined the \"Rock the Reservation\" alternative rock festival in Tuba City, Arizona. \"Joey Ramone & the Resistance\" (Daniel Rey on guitar, John Connor on bass guitar and Roger Murdock on drums) debuted Ramone's interpretation of Louis Armstrong's \"Wonderful World\" live, as well as Ramone's choice of Ramones classics and some of his other favorite songs, such as The Dave Clark Five's \"Any Way You Want It\", The Who's \"The Kids are Alright\" and The Stooges' \"No Fun\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Ramone co-wrote and recorded the song \"Meatball Sandwich\" with Youth Gone Mad. For a short time before his death, he took the role of manager and producer for the punk rock band the Independents.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "His last recording as a vocalist was backup vocals on the CD One Nation Under by the Dine Navajo rock group Blackfire. He appeared on two tracks, \"What Do You See\" and \"Lying to Myself\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Ramone produced the Ronnie Spector EP She Talks to Rainbows in 1999. It was critically acclaimed but was not very commercially successful. The title track was previously on the Ramones' final studio album, ¡Adios Amigos!.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Ramone's signature cracks, hiccups, snarls, crooning, and youthful voice made him one of punk rock's most recognizable voices. Allmusic.com wrote that \"Joey Ramone's signature bleat was the voice of punk rock in America.\" As his vocals matured and deepened through his career, so did the Ramones' songwriting, leaving a notable difference from his initial melodic and callow style – two notable tracks serving as examples are \"Somebody Put Something in My Drink\" and \"Mama's Boy\". Dee Dee Ramone was quoted as saying, \"All the other singers [in New York] were copying David Johansen (of the New York Dolls), who was copying Mick Jagger... But Joey was unique, totally unique.\"",
"title": "Vocal style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1995, Ramone was diagnosed with lymphoma. He kept his condition private until it was revealed on March 19, 2001, that he was battling the disease. He died of the illness at New York-Presbyterian Hospital on April 15, 2001, a month before he would have turned 50. He was reportedly listening to the song \"In a Little While\" by U2 when he died. In an interview in 2014 for Radio 538, U2 lead singer Bono confirmed that Joey Ramone's family told him that Ramone listened to the song before he died, which Andy Shernoff (The Dictators) also confirmed. Joey's funeral was attended by former bandmates Tommy, Richie and C. J. Ramone, along with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie, and Joan Jett. Ramone is interred at New Mount Zion Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.",
"title": "Illness and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "His solo album Don't Worry About Me was released posthumously in 2002, and features the single \"What a Wonderful World\", a cover of the Louis Armstrong standard. MTV News said: \"With his trademark rose-colored shades, black leather jacket, shoulder-length hair, ripped jeans and alternately snarling and crooning vocals, Joey was the iconic godfather of punk.\"",
"title": "Illness and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On November 30, 2003, a block of East 2nd Street in New York City was officially renamed Joey Ramone Place. It is the block where Hyman once lived with bandmate Dee Dee Ramone and is near the former site of the music club CBGB, where the Ramones began their career. Hyman's birthday is celebrated annually during the \"Joey Ramone Birthday Bash\", hosted in New York City by his brother and, until 2007, his mother, Charlotte.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Ramones were named as inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the class of 2002.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Several songs have been written in tribute to Ramone. Tommy, C. J., and Marky Ramone and Daniel Rey came together in 2002 to record Jed Davis' Joey Ramone tribute album, The Bowery Electric. Other tributes include \"Hello Joe\" by Blondie from the album The Curse of Blondie, \"You Can't Kill Joey Ramone\" by Sloppy Seconds, Joey by Raimundos, \"I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone\" by Sleater-Kinney, \"Red and White Stripes\" by Moler and \"Joey\" by the Corin Tucker Band, \"I Heard Ramona Sing\" by Frank Black, Amy Rigby's \"Dancin' with Joey Ramone\" and \"The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)\" by U2.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In September 2010, the Associated Press reported that \"Joey Ramone Place,\" a sign at the corner of Bowery and East Second Street, was New York City's most stolen sign. Later, the sign was moved to 20 ft (6.1 m) above ground level. Drummer Marky Ramone thought Joey would appreciate that his sign would be the most stolen, adding \"Now you have to be an NBA player to see it.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "After several years in development, Ramone's second posthumous album was released on May 22, 2012. Titled ...Ya Know?, it was preceded on Record Store Day by a 7\" single re-release of \"Blitzkrieg Bop\"/\"Havana Affair\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "On April 15, 2021, the 20th anniversary of Ramone's death, it was announced that Pete Davidson would portray Ramone in the upcoming Netflix biopic, I Slept with Joey Ramone which is based on the memoir of the same name written by Ramone's brother Mickey Leigh. Leigh will serve as an executive producer. The film is being made with the full cooperation and support of Ramone's estate, with a treatment written by Davidson and director Jason Orley.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 2022, Brookfield Asset Management acquired a majority stake in the music-publishing rights of Ramone for around US$10 million.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Album",
"title": "Discography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "EP",
"title": "Discography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Singles",
"title": "Discography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Other appearances",
"title": "Discography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Posthumous demo album",
"title": "Discography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "EP",
"title": "Discography"
}
]
| Jeffrey Ross Hyman, known professionally as Joey Ramone, was an American singer, best known as the lead vocalist and a founding member of the punk rock band Ramones. His image, voice, and his tenure with the Ramones made him a countercultural icon. He, along with the guitarist Johnny Ramone, are the only two original members who stayed in the band until the disbandment in 1996. | 2001-06-28T21:48:04Z | 2023-12-23T11:06:29Z | [
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15,842 | June 29 | June 29 is the 180th day of the year (181st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 185 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,843 | June 30 | June 30 is the 181st day of the year (182nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 184 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,844 | July 1 | July 1 is the 182nd day of the year (183rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 183 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,845 | January 25 | January 25 is the 25th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 340 days remain until the end of the year (341 in leap years). | [
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15,846 | July 2 | July 2 is the 183rd day of the year (184th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 182 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| July 2 is the 183rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 182 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-11T22:46:41Z | 2023-12-15T20:29:00Z | [
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15,847 | January 11 | January 11 is the 11th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 354 days remain until the end of the year (355 in leap years). | [
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15,848 | July 3 | July 3 is the 184th day of the year (185th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 181 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,849 | July 4 | July 4 is the 185th day of the year (186th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 180 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,852 | John Lennon | John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon; 9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-songwriter, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. His work included music, writing, drawings and film. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history.
Born in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager. In 1956, he formed The Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960. Sometimes called "the smart Beatle", Lennon initially was the group's de facto leader, a role he gradually ceded to McCartney. Through his songwriting in the Beatles, he embraced myriad musical influences, initially writing and co-writing rock and pop-oriented hit songs in the band's early years, then later incorporating experimental elements into his compositions in the latter half of the Beatles' career as his songs became known for their increasing innovation. Lennon soon expanded his work into other media by participating in numerous films, including How I Won the War, and authoring In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, both collections of nonsense writings and line drawings. Starting with "All You Need Is Love", his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement and the larger counterculture of the 1960s. In 1969, he started the Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, multimedia artist Yoko Ono, held the two-week-long anti-war demonstration Bed-ins for Peace and left the Beatles to embark on a solo career.
Between 1968 and 1972, Lennon and Ono collaborated on many works, including a trilogy of avant-garde albums, several more films, his solo debut John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and the international top-10 singles "Give Peace a Chance", "Instant Karma!", "Imagine", and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". Moving to New York City in 1971, his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a three-year deportation attempt by the Nixon administration. Lennon and Ono separated from 1973 to 1975, during which time he produced Harry Nilsson's album Pussy Cats. He also had chart-topping collaborations with Elton John ("Whatever Gets You thru the Night") and David Bowie ("Fame"). Following a five-year hiatus, Lennon returned to music in 1980 with the Ono collaboration Double Fantasy. He was murdered by a Beatles fan, Mark David Chapman, three weeks after the album's release.
As a performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number-one singles in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Double Fantasy, his best-selling album, won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. That year, he won the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. In 2002, Lennon was voted eighth in a BBC history poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer and 38th greatest artist of all time. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1997) and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (twice, as a member of the Beatles in 1988 and as a solo artist in 1994).
John Lennon was born on 9 October 1940 at Liverpool Maternity Hospital to Julia (née Stanley) (1914–1958) and Alfred Lennon (1912–1976). Alfred was a merchant seaman of Irish descent who was away at the time of his son's birth. His parents named him John Winston Lennon after his paternal grandfather, John "Jack" Lennon, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. His father was often away from home but sent regular pay cheques to 9 Newcastle Road, Liverpool, where Lennon lived with his mother; the cheques stopped when he went absent without leave in February 1944. When he eventually came home six months later, he offered to look after the family, but Julia, by then pregnant with another man's child, rejected the idea. After her sister Mimi complained to Liverpool's Social Services twice, Julia gave her custody of Lennon.
In July 1946, Lennon's father visited her and took his son to Blackpool, secretly intending to emigrate to New Zealand with him. Julia followed them – with her partner at the time, Bobby Dykins – and after a heated argument, his father forced the five-year-old to choose between them. In one account of this incident, Lennon twice chose his father, but as his mother walked away, he began to cry and followed her. According to author Mark Lewisohn, however, Lennon's parents agreed that Julia should take him and give him a home. Billy Hall, who witnessed the incident, has said that the dramatic portrayal of a young John Lennon being forced to make a decision between his parents is inaccurate. Lennon had no further contact with Alf for close to 20 years.
Throughout the rest of his childhood and adolescence, Lennon lived at Mendips, 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton, with Mimi and her husband George Toogood Smith, who had no children of their own. His aunt purchased volumes of short stories for him, and his uncle, a dairyman at his family's farm, bought him a mouth organ and engaged him in solving crossword puzzles. Julia visited Mendips on a regular basis, and John often visited her at 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, where she played him Elvis Presley records, taught him the banjo, and showed him how to play "Ain't That a Shame" by Fats Domino. In September 1980, Lennon commented about his family and his rebellious nature:
A part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouthed lunatic poet/musician. But I cannot be what I am not ... I was the one who all the other boys' parents – including Paul's father – would say, "Keep away from him" ... The parents instinctively recognised I was a troublemaker, meaning I did not conform and I would influence their children, which I did. I did my best to disrupt every friend's home ... Partly out of envy that I didn't have this so-called home ... but I did ... There were five women that were my family. Five strong, intelligent, beautiful women, five sisters. One happened to be my mother. [She] just couldn't deal with life. She was the youngest and she had a husband who ran away to sea and the war was on and she couldn't cope with me, and I ended up living with her elder sister. Now those women were fantastic ... And that was my first feminist education ... I would infiltrate the other boys' minds. I could say, "Parents are not gods because I don't live with mine and, therefore, I know."
He regularly visited his cousin Stanley Parkes, who lived in Fleetwood and took him on trips to local cinemas. During the school holidays Parkes often visited Lennon with Leila Harvey, another cousin, and the three often travelled to Blackpool two or three times a week to watch shows. They would visit the Blackpool Tower Circus and see artists such as Dickie Valentine, Arthur Askey, Max Bygraves and Joe Loss, with Parkes recalling that Lennon particularly liked George Formby. After Parkes's family moved to Scotland, the three cousins often spent their school holidays together there. Parkes recalled, "John, cousin Leila and I were very close. From Edinburgh we would drive up to the family croft at Durness, which was from about the time John was nine years old until he was about 16." Lennon's uncle George died of a liver haemorrhage on 5 June 1955, aged 52.
Lennon was raised as an Anglican and attended Dovedale Primary School. After passing his eleven-plus exam, he attended Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool from September 1952 to 1957, and was described by Harvey at the time as a "happy-go-lucky, good-humoured, easy going, lively lad". However, he was also known to frequently engage in fights, bully and disrupt classes. Despite this, he quickly built a reputation as the class clown and often drew comical cartoons that appeared in his self-made school magazine, the Daily Howl.
In 1956, Julia bought John his first guitar. The instrument was an inexpensive Gallotone Champion acoustic for which she lent her son five pounds and ten shillings on the condition that the guitar be delivered to her own house and not Mimi's, knowing well that her sister was not supportive of her son's musical aspirations. Mimi was sceptical of his claim that he would be famous one day, and she hoped that he would grow bored with music, often telling him, "The guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living out of it."
Lennon's senior school years were marked by a shift in his behaviour. Teachers at Quarry Bank High School described him thus: "He has too many wrong ambitions and his energy is often misplaced", and "His work always lacks effort. He is content to 'drift' instead of using his abilities." Lennon's misbehaviour created a rift in his relationship with his aunt.
On 15 July 1958, at the age of 44, Julia Lennon was struck and killed by a car while she was walking home after visiting the Smiths' house. His mother's death traumatised the teenage Lennon, who, for the next two years, drank heavily and frequently got into fights, consumed by a "blind rage". Julia's memory would later serve as a major creative inspiration for Lennon, inspiring songs such as the 1968 Beatles song "Julia".
Lennon failed his O-level examinations, and was accepted into the Liverpool College of Art after his aunt and headmaster intervened. At the college he began to wear Teddy Boy clothes and was threatened with expulsion for his behaviour. In the description of Cynthia Powell, Lennon's fellow student and subsequently his wife, he was "thrown out of the college before his final year".
At the age of 15, Lennon formed a skiffle group, the Quarrymen. Named after Quarry Bank High School, the group was established by Lennon in September 1956. By the summer of 1957, the Quarrymen played a "spirited set of songs" made up of half skiffle and half rock and roll. Lennon first met Paul McCartney at the Quarrymen's second performance, which was held in Woolton on 6 July at the St Peter's Church garden fête. Lennon then asked McCartney to join the band.
McCartney said that Aunt Mimi "was very aware that John's friends were lower class", and would often patronise him when he arrived to visit Lennon. According to McCartney's brother Mike, their father similarly disapproved of Lennon, declaring that Lennon would get his son "into trouble". McCartney's father nevertheless allowed the fledgling band to rehearse in the family's front room at 20 Forthlin Road. During this time Lennon wrote his first song, "Hello Little Girl", which became a UK top 10 hit for the Fourmost in 1963.
McCartney recommended that his friend George Harrison become the lead guitarist. Lennon thought that Harrison, then 14 years old, was too young. McCartney engineered an audition on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus, where Harrison played "Raunchy" for Lennon and was asked to join. Stuart Sutcliffe, Lennon's friend from art school, later joined as bassist. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Sutcliffe became "The Beatles" in early 1960. In August that year, the Beatles were engaged for a 48-night residency in Hamburg, in West Germany, and were desperately in need of a drummer. They asked Pete Best to join them. Lennon's aunt, horrified when he told her about the trip, pleaded with Lennon to continue his art studies instead. After the first Hamburg residency, the band accepted another in April 1961, and a third in April 1962. As with the other band members, Lennon was introduced to Preludin while in Hamburg, and regularly took the drug as a stimulant during their long, overnight performances.
Brian Epstein managed the Beatles from 1962 until his death in 1967. He had no previous experience managing artists, but he had a strong influence on the group's dress code and attitude on stage. Lennon initially resisted his attempts to encourage the band to present a professional appearance, but eventually complied, saying "I'll wear a bloody balloon if somebody's going to pay me." McCartney took over on bass after Sutcliffe decided to stay in Hamburg, and Best was replaced with drummer Ringo Starr; this completed the four-piece line-up that would remain until the group's break-up in 1970. The band's first single, "Love Me Do", was released in October 1962 and reached No. 17 on the British charts. They recorded their debut album, Please Please Me, in under 10 hours on 11 February 1963, a day when Lennon was suffering the effects of a cold, which is evident in the vocal on the last song to be recorded that day, "Twist and Shout". The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership yielded eight of its fourteen tracks. With a few exceptions, one being the album title itself, Lennon had yet to bring his love of wordplay to bear on his song lyrics, saying: "We were just writing songs ... pop songs with no more thought of them than that – to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant". In a 1987 interview, McCartney said that the other Beatles idolised Lennon: "He was like our own little Elvis ... We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest."
The Beatles achieved mainstream success in the UK early in 1963. Lennon was on tour when his first son, Julian, was born in April. During their Royal Variety Show performance, which was attended by the Queen Mother and other British royalty, Lennon poked fun at the audience: "For our next song, I'd like to ask for your help. For the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands ... and the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewellery." After a year of Beatlemania in the UK, the group's historic February 1964 US debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show marked their breakthrough to international stardom. A two-year period of constant touring, filmmaking, and songwriting followed, during which Lennon wrote two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. The Beatles received recognition from the British establishment when they were appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1965 Queen's Birthday Honours.
Lennon grew concerned that fans who attended Beatles concerts were unable to hear the music above the screaming of fans, and that the band's musicianship was beginning to suffer as a result. Lennon's "Help!" expressed his own feelings in 1965: "I meant it ... It was me singing 'help'". He had put on weight (he would later refer to this as his "Fat Elvis" period), and felt he was subconsciously seeking change. In March that year he and Harrison were unknowingly introduced to LSD when a dentist, hosting a dinner party attended by the two musicians and their wives, spiked the guests' coffee with the drug. When they wanted to leave, their host revealed what they had taken, and strongly advised them not to leave the house because of the likely effects. Later, in a lift at a nightclub, they all believed it was on fire; Lennon recalled: "We were all screaming ... hot and hysterical." In March 1966, during an interview with Evening Standard reporter Maureen Cleave, Lennon remarked, "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink ... We're more popular than Jesus now – I don't know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity." The comment went virtually unnoticed in England but caused great offence in the US when quoted by a magazine there five months later. The furore that followed, which included the burning of Beatles records, Ku Klux Klan activity and threats against Lennon, contributed to the band's decision to stop touring.
After the band's final concert on 29 August 1966, Lennon filmed the anti-war black comedy How I Won the War – his only appearance in a non-Beatles feature film – before rejoining his bandmates for an extended period of recording, beginning in November. Lennon had increased his use of LSD and, according to author Ian MacDonald, his continuous use of the drug in 1967 brought him "close to erasing his identity". The year 1967 saw the release of "Strawberry Fields Forever", hailed by Time magazine for its "astonishing inventiveness", and the group's landmark album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which revealed lyrics by Lennon that contrasted strongly with the simple love songs of the group's early years.
In late June, the Beatles performed Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" as Britain's contribution to the Our World satellite broadcast, before an international audience estimated at up to 400 million. Intentionally simplistic in its message, the song formalised his pacifist stance and provided an anthem for the Summer of Love. After the Beatles were introduced to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the group attended an August weekend of personal instruction at his Transcendental Meditation seminar in Bangor, Wales. During the seminar, they were informed of Epstein's death. "I knew we were in trouble then", Lennon said later. "I didn't have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. I was scared – I thought, 'We've fucking had it now.'" McCartney organised the group's first post-Epstein project, the self-written, -produced and -directed television film Magical Mystery Tour, which was released in December that year. While the film itself proved to be their first critical flop, its soundtrack release, featuring Lennon's Lewis Carroll-inspired "I Am the Walrus", was a success.
Led by Harrison and Lennon's interest, the Beatles travelled to the Maharishi's ashram in India in February 1968 for further guidance. While there, they composed most of the songs for their double album The Beatles, but the band members' mixed experience with Transcendental Meditation signalled a sharp divergence in the group's camaraderie. On their return to London, they became increasingly involved in business activities with the formation of Apple Corps, a multimedia corporation composed of Apple Records and several other subsidiary companies. Lennon described the venture as an attempt to achieve "artistic freedom within a business structure". Released amid the Protests of 1968, the band's debut single for the Apple label included Lennon's B-side "Revolution", in which he called for a "plan" rather than committing to Maoist revolution. The song's pacifist message led to ridicule from political radicals in the New Left press. Adding to the tensions at the Beatles' recording sessions that year, Lennon insisted on having his new girlfriend, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, beside him, thereby contravening the band's policy regarding wives and girlfriends in the studio. He was especially pleased with his songwriting contributions to the double album and identified it as a superior work to Sgt. Pepper. At the end of 1968, Lennon participated in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, a television special that was not broadcast. Lennon performed with the Dirty Mac, a supergroup composed of Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell. The group also backed a vocal performance by Ono. A film version was released in 1996.
By late 1968, Lennon's increased drug use and growing preoccupation with Ono, combined with the Beatles' inability to agree on how the company should be run, left Apple in need of professional management. Lennon asked Lord Beeching to take on the role but he declined, advising Lennon to go back to making records. Lennon was approached by Allen Klein, who had managed the Rolling Stones and other bands during the British Invasion. In early 1969, Klein was appointed as Apple's chief executive by Lennon, Harrison and Starr but McCartney never signed the management contract.
Lennon and Ono were married on 20 March 1969 and soon released a series of 14 lithographs called "Bag One" depicting scenes from their honeymoon, eight of which were deemed indecent and most of which were banned and confiscated. Lennon's creative focus continued to move beyond the Beatles, and between 1968 and 1969 he and Ono recorded three albums of experimental music together: Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (known more for its cover than for its music), Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions and Wedding Album. In 1969, they formed the Plastic Ono Band, releasing Live Peace in Toronto 1969. Between 1969 and 1970, Lennon released the singles "Give Peace a Chance", which was widely adopted as an anti-Vietnam War anthem, "Cold Turkey", which documented his withdrawal symptoms after he became addicted to heroin, and "Instant Karma!".
In protest at Britain's involvement in "the Nigeria-Biafra thing" (namely, the Nigerian Civil War), its support of America in the Vietnam War and (perhaps jokingly) against "Cold Turkey" slipping down the charts, Lennon returned his MBE medal to the Queen. This gesture had no effect on his MBE status, which could not be renounced. The medal, together with Lennon's letter, is held at the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood.
Lennon left the Beatles on 20 September 1969, but agreed not to inform the media while the group renegotiated their recording contract. He was outraged that McCartney publicised his own departure on releasing his debut solo album in April 1970. Lennon's reaction was, "Jesus Christ! He gets all the credit for it!" He later wrote, "I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that." In a December 1970 interview with Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine, he revealed his bitterness towards McCartney, saying, "I was a fool not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record." Lennon also spoke of the hostility he perceived the other members had towards Ono, and of how he, Harrison and Starr "got fed up with being sidemen for Paul ... After Brian Epstein died we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us when we went round in circles?"
When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system's game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they've got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don't know how to handle is non-violence and humor.
—John Lennon
Between 1 April and 15 September 1970, Lennon and Ono went through primal therapy with Arthur Janov at Tittenhurst, in London and at Janov's clinic in Los Angeles, California. Designed to release emotional pain from early childhood, the therapy entailed two half-days a week with Janov for six months; he had wanted to treat the couple for longer, but their American visa ran out and they had to return to the UK. Lennon's debut solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970), was received with praise by many music critics, but its highly personal lyrics and stark sound limited its commercial performance. The album featured the song "Mother", in which Lennon confronted his feelings of childhood rejection, and the Dylanesque "Working Class Hero", a bitter attack against the bourgeois social system which, due to the lyric "you're still fucking peasants", fell foul of broadcasters.
In January 1971, Tariq Ali expressed his revolutionary political views when he interviewed Lennon, who immediately responded by writing "Power to the People". In his lyrics to the song, Lennon reversed the non-confrontational approach he had espoused in "Revolution", although he later disowned "Power to the People", saying that it was borne out of guilt and a desire for approval from radicals such as Ali. Lennon became involved in a protest against the prosecution of Oz magazine for alleged obscenity. Lennon denounced the proceedings as "disgusting fascism", and he and Ono (as Elastic Oz Band) released the single "God Save Us/Do the Oz" and joined marches in support of the magazine.
Eager for a major commercial success, Lennon adopted a more accessible sound for his next album, Imagine (1971). Rolling Stone reported that "it contains a substantial portion of good music" but warned of the possibility that "his posturings will soon seem not merely dull but irrelevant". The album's title track later became an anthem for anti-war movements, while the song "How Do You Sleep?" was a musical attack on McCartney in response to lyrics on Ram that Lennon felt, and McCartney later confirmed, were directed at him and Ono. In "Jealous Guy", Lennon addressed his demeaning treatment of women, acknowledging that his past behaviour was the result of long-held insecurity.
In gratitude for his guitar contributions to Imagine, Lennon initially agreed to perform at Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh benefit shows in New York. Harrison refused to allow Ono to participate at the concerts, however, which resulted in the couple having a heated argument and Lennon pulling out of the event.
Lennon and Ono moved to New York in August 1971 and immediately embraced US radical left politics. The couple released their "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" single in December. During the new year, the Nixon administration took what it called a "strategic counter-measure" against Lennon's anti-war and anti-Nixon propaganda. The administration embarked on what would be a four-year attempt to deport him. Lennon was embroiled in a continuing legal battle with the immigration authorities, and he was denied permanent residency in the US; the issue would not be resolved until 1976.
Some Time in New York City was recorded as a collaboration with Ono and was released in 1972 with backing from the New York band Elephant's Memory. A double LP, it contained songs about women's rights, race relations, Britain's role in Northern Ireland and Lennon's difficulties in obtaining a green card. The album was a commercial failure and was maligned by critics, who found its political sloganeering heavy-handed and relentless. The NME's review took the form of an open letter in which Tony Tyler derided Lennon as a "pathetic, ageing revolutionary". In the US, "Woman Is the Nigger of the World" was released as a single from the album and was televised on 11 May, on The Dick Cavett Show. Many radio stations refused to broadcast the song because of the word "nigger".
Lennon and Ono gave two benefit concerts with Elephant's Memory and guests in New York in aid of patients at the Willowbrook State School mental facility. Staged at Madison Square Garden on 30 August 1972, they were his last full-length concert appearances. After George McGovern lost the 1972 presidential election to Richard Nixon, Lennon and Ono attended a post-election wake held in the New York home of activist Jerry Rubin. Lennon was depressed and got intoxicated; he left Ono embarrassed after he had sex with a female guest. Ono's song "Death of Samantha" was inspired by the incident.
As Lennon was about to record Mind Games in 1973, he and Ono decided to separate. The ensuing 18-month period apart, which he later called his "lost weekend" in reference to the film of the same name, was spent in Los Angeles and New York City in the company of May Pang. Mind Games, credited to the "Plastic U.F.Ono Band", was released in November 1973. Lennon also contributed "I'm the Greatest" to Starr's album Ringo (1973), released the same month. With Harrison joining Starr and Lennon at the recording session for the song, it marked the only occasion when three former Beatles recorded together between the band's break-up and Lennon's death.
In early 1974, Lennon was drinking heavily and his alcohol-fuelled antics with Harry Nilsson made headlines. In March, two widely publicised incidents occurred at The Troubadour club. In the first incident, Lennon stuck an unused menstrual pad on his forehead and scuffled with a waitress. The second incident occurred two weeks later, when Lennon and Nilsson were ejected from the same club after heckling the Smothers Brothers. Lennon decided to produce Nilsson's album Pussy Cats, and Pang rented a Los Angeles beach house for all the musicians. After a month of further debauchery, the recording sessions were in chaos, and Lennon returned to New York with Pang to finish work on the album. In April, Lennon had produced the Mick Jagger song "Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup)" which was, for contractual reasons, to remain unreleased for more than 30 years. Pang supplied the recording for its eventual inclusion on The Very Best of Mick Jagger (2007).
Lennon had settled back in New York when he recorded the album Walls and Bridges. Released in October 1974, it included "Whatever Gets You thru the Night", which featured Elton John on backing vocals and piano, and became Lennon's only single as a solo artist to top the US Billboard Hot 100 chart during his lifetime. A second single from the album, "#9 Dream", followed before the end of the year. Starr's Goodnight Vienna (1974) again saw assistance from Lennon, who wrote the title track and played piano. On 28 November, Lennon made a surprise guest appearance at Elton John's Thanksgiving concert at Madison Square Garden, in fulfilment of his promise to join the singer in a live show if "Whatever Gets You thru the Night", a song whose commercial potential Lennon had doubted, reached number one. Lennon performed the song along with "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I Saw Her Standing There", which he introduced as "a song by an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul".
In the first two weeks of January 1975, Elton John topped the US Billboard Hot 100 singles chart with his cover of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", featuring Lennon on guitar and backing vocals - Lennon is credited on the single under the moniker of "Dr. Winston O'Boogie". As January became February, Lennon and Ono reunited as Lennon and Bowie completed recording of their co-composition "Fame", which became David Bowie's first US number one, featuring guitar and backing vocals by Lennon. In February, Lennon released Rock 'n' Roll (1975), an album of cover songs. "Stand by Me", taken from the album and a US and UK hit, became his last single for five years. He made what would be his final stage appearance in the ATV special A Salute to Lew Grade, recorded on 18 April and televised in June. Playing acoustic guitar and backed by an eight-piece band, Lennon performed two songs from Rock 'n' Roll ("Stand by Me", which was not broadcast, and "Slippin' and Slidin'") followed by "Imagine". The band, known as Etc., wore masks behind their heads, a dig by Lennon, who thought Grade was two-faced.
Sean was Lennon's only child with Ono. Sean was born on 9 October 1975 (Lennon's thirty-fifth birthday), and John took on the role of househusband. Lennon began what would be a five-year hiatus from the music industry, during which time, he later said, he "baked bread" and "looked after the baby". He devoted himself to Sean, rising at 6 am daily to plan and prepare his meals and to spend time with him. He wrote "Cookin' (In the Kitchen of Love)" for Starr's Ringo's Rotogravure (1976), performing on the track in June in what would be his last recording session until 1980. He formally announced his break from music in Tokyo in 1977, saying, "we have basically decided, without any great decision, to be with our baby as much as we can until we feel we can take time off to indulge ourselves in creating things outside of the family." During his career break he created several series of drawings, and drafted a book containing a mix of autobiographical material and what he termed "mad stuff", all of which would be published posthumously.
Lennon emerged from his hiatus in October 1980, when he released the single "(Just Like) Starting Over". In November, he and Ono released the album Double Fantasy, which included songs Lennon had written in Bermuda. In June, Lennon chartered a 43-foot sailboat and embarked on a sailing trip to Bermuda. En route, he and the crew encountered a storm, rendering everyone on board seasick, except Lennon, who took control and sailed the boat through the storm. This experience re-invigorated him and his creative muse. He spent three weeks in Bermuda in a home called Fairylands writing and refining the tracks for the upcoming album.
The music reflected Lennon's fulfilment in his new-found stable family life. Sufficient additional material was recorded for a planned follow-up album Milk and Honey, which was issued posthumously, in 1984. Double Fantasy was not well received initially and drew comments such as Melody Maker's "indulgent sterility ... a godawful yawn".
In New York, at approximately 5:00 p.m. on 8 December 1980, Lennon autographed a copy of Double Fantasy for Mark David Chapman before leaving The Dakota with Ono for a recording session at the Record Plant. After the session, Lennon and Ono returned to the Dakota in a limousine at around 10:50 p.m. (EST). They left the vehicle and walked through the archway of the building. Chapman then shot Lennon twice in the back and twice in the shoulder at close range. Lennon was rushed in a police cruiser to the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:15 p.m. (EST).
Ono issued a statement the next day, saying "There is no funeral for John", ending it with the words, "John loved and prayed for the human race. Please do the same for him." His remains were cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Ono scattered his ashes in New York's Central Park, where the Strawberry Fields memorial was later created. Chapman avoided going to trial when he ignored his lawyer's advice and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20-years-to-life.
In the weeks following the murder, "(Just Like) Starting Over" and Double Fantasy topped the charts in the UK and the US. "Imagine" hit number one in the UK in January 1981 and "Happy Xmas" peaked at number two. "Imagine" was succeeded at the top of the UK chart by "Woman", the second single from Double Fantasy. Later that year, Roxy Music's cover version of "Jealous Guy", recorded as a tribute to Lennon, was also a UK number-one.
Lennon met Cynthia Powell (1939–2015) in 1957, when they were fellow students at the Liverpool College of Art. Although Powell was intimidated by Lennon's attitude and appearance, she heard that he was obsessed with the French actress Brigitte Bardot, so she dyed her hair blonde. Lennon asked her out, but when she said that she was engaged, he shouted, "I didn't ask you to fuckin' marry me, did I?" She often accompanied him to Quarrymen gigs and travelled to Hamburg with McCartney's girlfriend to visit him.
Lennon was jealous by nature and eventually grew possessive, often terrifying Powell with his anger. In her 2005 memoir John, Powell recalled that, when they were dating, Lennon once struck her after he observed her dancing with Stuart Sutcliffe. She ended their relationship as a result, until three months later, when Lennon apologised and asked to reunite. She took him back and later noted that he was never again physically abusive towards her, although he could still be "verbally cutting and unkind". Lennon later said that until he met Ono, he had never questioned his chauvinistic attitude towards women. He said that the Beatles song "Getting Better" told his (or his peers') own story. "I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically – any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace". There is no evidence of him ever having struck a woman again.
Recalling his July 1962 reaction when he learned that Cynthia was pregnant, Lennon said, "There's only one thing for it Cyn. We'll have to get married." The couple wed on 23 August at the Mount Pleasant Register Office in Liverpool, with Brian Epstein serving as best man. His marriage began just as Beatlemania was taking off across the UK. He performed on the evening of his wedding day and would continue to do so almost daily from then on. Epstein feared that fans would be alienated by the idea of a married Beatle, and he asked the Lennons to keep their marriage secret. Julian was born on 8 April 1963; Lennon was on tour at the time and did not see his infant son until three days later.
Cynthia attributed the start of the marriage breakdown to Lennon's use of LSD, and she felt that he slowly lost interest in her as a result of his use of the drug. When the group travelled by train to Bangor, Wales in 1967 for the Maharishi Yogi's Transcendental Meditation seminar, a policeman did not recognise her and stopped her from boarding. She later recalled how the incident seemed to symbolise the end of their marriage. After spending a holiday in Greece, Cynthia arrived home at Kenwood to find Lennon sitting on the floor with Ono in terrycloth robes and left the house to stay with friends, feeling shocked and humiliated,. A few weeks later, Alexis Mardas informed Powell that Lennon was seeking a divorce and custody of Julian. She received a letter stating that Lennon was doing so on the grounds of her adultery with Italian hotelier Roberto Bassanini, an accusation which Powell denied. After negotiations, Lennon capitulated and agreed to let her divorce him on the same grounds. The case was settled out of court in November 1968, with Lennon giving her £100,000, a small annual payment, and custody of Julian.
The Beatles were performing at Liverpool's Cavern Club in November 1961 when they were introduced to Brian Epstein after a midday concert. Epstein was homosexual and closeted, and according to biographer Philip Norman, one of Epstein's reasons for wanting to manage the group was that he was attracted to Lennon. Almost as soon as Julian was born, Lennon went on holiday to Spain with Epstein, which led to speculation about their relationship. When he was later questioned about it, Lennon said, "Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship. It was my first experience with a homosexual that I was conscious was homosexual. We used to sit in a café in Torremolinos looking at all the boys and I'd say, 'Do you like that one? Do you like this one?' I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time: I am experiencing this." Soon after their return from Spain, at McCartney's twenty-first birthday party in June 1963, Lennon physically attacked Cavern Club master of ceremonies Bob Wooler for saying "How was your honeymoon, John?" The MC, known for his wordplay and affectionate but cutting remarks, was making a joke, but ten months had passed since Lennon's marriage, and the deferred honeymoon was still two months in the future. Lennon was drunk at the time and the matter was simple: "He called me a queer so I battered his bloody ribs in."
Lennon delighted in mocking Epstein for his homosexuality and for the fact that he was Jewish. When Epstein invited suggestions for the title of his autobiography, Lennon offered Queer Jew; on learning of the eventual title, A Cellarful of Noise, he parodied, "More like A Cellarful of Boys". He demanded of a visitor to Epstein's flat, "Have you come to blackmail him? If not, you're the only bugger in London who hasn't." During the recording of "Baby, You're a Rich Man", he sang altered choruses of "Baby, you're a rich fag Jew".
During his marriage to Cynthia, Lennon's first son Julian was born at the same time that his commitments with the Beatles were intensifying at the height of Beatlemania. Lennon was touring with the Beatles when Julian was born on 8 April 1963. Julian's birth, like his mother Cynthia's marriage to Lennon, was kept secret because Epstein was convinced that public knowledge of such things would threaten the Beatles' commercial success. Julian recalled that as a small child in Weybridge some four years later, "I was trundled home from school and came walking up with one of my watercolour paintings. It was just a bunch of stars and this blonde girl I knew at school. And Dad said, 'What's this?' I said, 'It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds.'" Lennon used it as the title of a Beatles song, and though it was later reported to have been derived from the initials LSD, Lennon insisted, "It's not an acid song." Lennon was distant from Julian, who felt closer to McCartney than to his father. During a car journey to visit Cynthia and Julian during Lennon's divorce, McCartney composed a song, "Hey Jules", to comfort him. It would evolve into the Beatles song "Hey Jude". Lennon later said, "That's his best song. It started off as a song about my son Julian ... he turned it into 'Hey Jude'. I always thought it was about me and Yoko but he said it wasn't."
Lennon's relationship with Julian was already strained, and after Lennon and Ono moved to New York in 1971, Julian did not see his father again until 1973. With Pang's encouragement, arrangements were made for Julian and his mother to visit Lennon in Los Angeles, where they went to Disneyland. Julian started to see his father regularly, and Lennon gave him a drumming part on a Walls and Bridges track. He bought Julian a Gibson Les Paul guitar and other instruments, and encouraged his interest in music by demonstrating guitar chord techniques. Julian recalls that he and his father "got on a great deal better" during the time he spent in New York: "We had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and had a great time in general."
In a Playboy interview with David Sheff shortly before his death, Lennon said, "Sean is a planned child, and therein lies the difference. I don't love Julian any less as a child. He's still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn't have pills in those days. He's here, he belongs to me, and he always will." He said he was trying to reestablish a connection with the then 17-year-old, and confidently predicted, "Julian and I will have a relationship in the future." After his death it was revealed that he had left Julian very little in his will.
Lennon first met Yoko Ono on 9 November 1966 at the Indica Gallery in London, where Ono was preparing her conceptual art exhibit. They were introduced by gallery owner John Dunbar. Lennon was intrigued by Ono's "Hammer A Nail": patrons hammered a nail into a wooden board, creating the art piece. Although the exhibition had not yet begun, Lennon wanted to hammer a nail into the clean board, but Ono stopped him. Dunbar asked her, "Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it." According to Lennon's recollection in 1980, Ono had not heard of the Beatles, but she relented on condition that Lennon pay her five shillings, to which Lennon said he replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." Ono subsequently related that Lennon had taken a bite out of the apple on display in her work Apple, much to her fury.
Ono began to telephone and visit Lennon at his home. When Cynthia asked him for an explanation, Lennon explained that Ono was only trying to obtain money for her "avant-garde bullshit". While his wife was on holiday in Greece in May 1968, Lennon invited Ono to visit. They spent the night recording what would become the Two Virgins album, after which, he said, they "made love at dawn". When Lennon's wife returned home she found Ono wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with Lennon who simply said, "Oh, hi." Ono became pregnant in 1968 and miscarried a male child on 21 November 1968, a few weeks after Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was granted.
Two years before the Beatles disbanded, Lennon and Ono began public protests against the Vietnam War. They were married in Gibraltar on 20 March 1969, and spent their honeymoon at the Hilton Amsterdam, campaigning with a week-long Bed-In for Peace. They planned another Bed-In in the United States, but were denied entry, so held one instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance". They often combined advocacy with performance art, as in their "Bagism", first introduced during a Vienna press conference. Lennon detailed this period in the Beatles song "The Ballad of John and Yoko". Lennon changed his name by deed poll on 22 April 1969, adding "Ono" as a middle name. The brief ceremony took place on the roof of the Apple Corps building, where the Beatles had performed their rooftop concert three months earlier. Although he used the name John Ono Lennon thereafter, some official documents referred to him as John Winston Ono Lennon. The couple settled at Tittenhurst Park at Sunninghill in Berkshire. After Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a king-size bed to be brought to the recording studio as he worked on the Beatles' album, Abbey Road.
Ono and Lennon moved to New York, to a flat on Bank Street, Greenwich Village. Looking for somewhere with better security, they relocated in 1973 to the more secure Dakota overlooking Central Park at 1 West 72nd Street.
ABKCO Industries was formed in 1968 by Allen Klein as an umbrella company to ABKCO Records. Klein hired May Pang as a receptionist in 1969. Through involvement in a project with ABKCO, Lennon and Ono met her the following year. She became their personal assistant. In 1973, after she had been working with the couple for three years, Ono confided that she and Lennon were becoming estranged. She went on to suggest that Pang should begin a physical relationship with Lennon, telling her, "He likes you a lot." Astounded by Ono's proposition, Pang nevertheless agreed to become Lennon's companion. The pair soon left for Los Angeles, beginning an 18-month period he later called his "lost weekend". In Los Angeles, Pang encouraged Lennon to develop regular contact with Julian, whom he had not seen for two years. He also rekindled friendships with Starr, McCartney, Beatles roadie Mal Evans, and Harry Nilsson.
In June, Lennon and Pang returned to Manhattan in their newly rented penthouse apartment where they prepared a spare room for Julian when he visited them. Lennon, who had been inhibited by Ono in this regard, began to reestablish contact with other relatives and friends. By December, he and Pang were considering a house purchase, and he refused to accept Ono's telephone calls. In January 1975, he agreed to meet Ono, who claimed to have found a cure for smoking. After the meeting, he failed to return home or call Pang. When Pang telephoned the next day, Ono told her that Lennon was unavailable because he was exhausted after a hypnotherapy session. Two days later, Lennon reappeared at a joint dental appointment; he was stupefied and confused to such an extent that Pang believed he had been brainwashed. Lennon told Pang that his separation from Ono was now over, although Ono would allow him to continue seeing her as his mistress.
Ono had previously suffered three miscarriages in her attempt to have a child with Lennon. When Ono and Lennon were reunited, she became pregnant again. She initially said that she wanted to have an abortion but changed her mind and agreed to allow the pregnancy to continue on the condition that Lennon adopt the role of househusband, which he agreed to do.
Following Sean's birth, Lennon's subsequent hiatus from the music industry would span five years. He had a photographer take pictures of Sean every day of his first year and created numerous drawings for him, which were posthumously published as Real Love: The Drawings for Sean. Lennon later proudly declared, "He didn't come out of my belly but, by God, I made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and to how he sleeps, and to the fact that he swims like a fish."
While Lennon remained consistently friendly with Starr during the years that followed the Beatles' break-up in 1970, his relationships with McCartney and Harrison varied. He was initially close to Harrison, but the two drifted apart after Lennon moved to the US in 1971. When Harrison was in New York for his December 1974 Dark Horse tour, Lennon agreed to join him on stage but failed to appear after an argument over Lennon's refusal to sign an agreement that would finally dissolve the Beatles' legal partnership. Harrison later said that when he visited Lennon during his five years away from music, he sensed that Lennon was trying to communicate, but his bond with Ono prevented him. Harrison offended Lennon in 1980 when he published I, Me, Mine, an autobiography that Lennon felt made little mention of him. Lennon told Playboy, "I was hurt by it. By glaring omission ... my influence on his life is absolutely zilch ... he remembers every two-bit sax player or guitarist he met in subsequent years. I'm not in the book."
Lennon's most intense feelings were reserved for McCartney. In addition to attacking him with the lyrics of "How Do You Sleep?", Lennon argued with him through the press for three years after the group split. The two later began to reestablish something of the close friendship they had once known, and in 1974, they even played music together again before eventually growing apart once more. During McCartney's final visit in April 1976, Lennon said that they watched the episode of Saturday Night Live in which Lorne Michaels made a $3,000 offer to get the Beatles to reunite on the show. According to Lennon, the pair considered going to the studio to make a joke appearance, attempting to claim their share of the money, but they were too tired. Lennon summarised his feelings towards McCartney in an interview three days before his death: "Throughout my career, I've selected to work with ... only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono ... That ain't bad picking."
Along with his estrangement from McCartney, Lennon always felt a musical competitiveness with him and kept an ear on his music. During his career break from 1975 until shortly before his death, according to Fred Seaman, Lennon and Ono's assistant at the time, Lennon was content to sit back as long as McCartney was producing what Lennon saw as mediocre material. Lennon took notice when McCartney released "Coming Up" in 1980, which was the year Lennon returned to the studio. "It's driving me crackers!" he jokingly complained, because he could not get the tune out of his head. That same year, Lennon was asked whether the group were dreaded enemies or the best of friends, and he replied that they were neither, and that he had not seen any of them in a long time. But he also said, "I still love those guys. The Beatles are over, but John, Paul, George and Ringo go on."
Lennon and Ono used their honeymoon as a Bed-In for Peace at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel; the March 1969 event attracted worldwide media ridicule. During a second Bed-In three months later at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Lennon wrote and recorded "Give Peace a Chance". Released as a single, the song was quickly interpreted as an anti-war anthem and sung by a quarter of a million demonstrators against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC, on 15 November, the second Vietnam Moratorium Day. In December, they paid for billboards in 10 cities around the world which declared, in the national language, "War Is Over! If You Want It".
During the year, Lennon and Ono began to support efforts by the family of James Hanratty to prove his innocence. Hanratty had been hanged in 1962. According to Lennon, those who had condemned Hanratty were "the same people who are running guns to South Africa and killing blacks in the streets ... The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it's the whole bullshit bourgeois scene." In London, Lennon and Ono staged a "Britain Murdered Hanratty" banner march and a "Silent Protest For James Hanratty", and produced a 40-minute documentary on the case. At an appeal hearing more than thirty years later, Hanratty's conviction was upheld after DNA evidence was found to match, validating those who condemned him.
Lennon and Ono showed their solidarity with the Clydeside UCS workers' work-in of 1971 by sending a bouquet of red roses and a cheque for £5,000. On moving to New York City in August that year, they befriended two of the Chicago Seven, Yippie peace activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Another political activist, John Sinclair, poet and co-founder of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for selling two joints of marijuana after previous convictions for possession of the drug. In December 1971 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, 15,000 people attended the "John Sinclair Freedom Rally", a protest and benefit concert with contributions from Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, and others. Lennon and Ono, backed by David Peel and Jerry Rubin, performed an acoustic set of four songs from their forthcoming Some Time in New York City album including "John Sinclair", whose lyrics called for his release. The day before the rally, the Michigan Senate passed a bill that significantly reduced the penalties for possession of marijuana and four days later Sinclair was released on an appeal bond. The performance was recorded and two of the tracks later appeared on John Lennon Anthology (1998).
Following the Bloody Sunday incident in Northern Ireland in 1972, Lennon said that given the choice between the British army and the IRA he would side with the latter. Lennon and Ono wrote two songs protesting British presence and actions in Ireland for their Some Time in New York City album: "The Luck of the Irish" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday". In 2000, David Shayler, a former member of Britain's domestic security service MI5, suggested that Lennon had given money to the IRA, though this was swiftly denied by Ono. Biographer Bill Harry records that following Bloody Sunday, Lennon and Ono financially supported the production of the film The Irish Tapes, a political documentary with an Irish Republican slant. In February 2000 Lennon's cousin Stanley Parkes stated that the singer had given money to the IRA during the 1970s. After the events of Bloody Sunday Lennon and Ono attended a protest in London while displaying a Red Mole newspaper with the headline "For the IRA, Against British Imperialism".
Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.
—John Lennon
According to FBI surveillance reports, and confirmed by Tariq Ali in 2006, Lennon was sympathetic to the International Marxist Group, a Trotskyist group formed in Britain in 1968. However, the FBI considered Lennon to have limited effectiveness as a revolutionary, as he was "constantly under the influence of narcotics".
In 1972, Lennon contributed a drawing and limerick titled "Why Make It Sad to Be Gay?" to Len Richmond and Gary Noguera's The Gay Liberation Book. Lennon's last act of political activism was a statement in support of the striking minority sanitation workers in San Francisco on 5 December 1980. He and Ono planned to join the workers' protest on 14 December.
Following the impact of "Give Peace a Chance" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" on the anti-war movement, the Nixon administration heard rumours of Lennon's involvement in a concert to be held in San Diego at the same time as the Republican National Convention and tried to have him deported. Nixon believed that Lennon's anti-war activities could cost him his reelection; Republican Senator Strom Thurmond suggested in a February 1972 memo that "deportation would be a strategic counter-measure" against Lennon. The next month the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began deportation proceedings, arguing that his 1968 misdemeanour conviction for cannabis possession in London had made him ineligible for admission to the United States. Lennon spent the next three-and-a-half years in and out of deportation hearings until 8 October 1975, when a court of appeals barred the deportation attempt, stating "the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds". While the legal battle continued, Lennon attended rallies and made television appearances. He and Ono co-hosted The Mike Douglas Show for a week in February 1972, introducing guests such as Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale to mid-America. In 1972, Bob Dylan wrote a letter to the INS defending Lennon, stating:
John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to the country's so-called art institution. They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as Artist Art by the overpowering mass media. Hurray for John and Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country's got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!
On 23 March 1973, Lennon was ordered to leave the US within 60 days. Ono, meanwhile, was granted permanent residence. In response, Lennon and Ono held a press conference on 1 April 1973 at the New York City Bar Association, where they announced the formation of the state of Nutopia; a place with "no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people". Waving the white flag of Nutopia (two handkerchiefs), they asked for political asylum in the US. The press conference was filmed, and appeared in a 2006 documentary, The U.S. vs. John Lennon. Soon after the press conference, Nixon's involvement in a political scandal came to light, and in June the Watergate hearings began in Washington, DC. They led to the president's resignation 14 months later. In December 1974, when he and members of his tour entourage visited the White House, Harrison asked Gerald Ford, Nixon's successor, to intercede in the matter. Ford's administration showed little interest in continuing the battle against Lennon, and the deportation order was overturned in 1975. The following year, Lennon received his green card certifying his permanent residency, and when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, Lennon and Ono attended the Inaugural Ball.
After Lennon's death, historian Jon Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files that documented the Bureau's role in the deportation attempt. The FBI admitted it had 281 pages of files on Lennon, but refused to release most of them on the grounds that they contained national security information. In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. It took 14 years of litigation to force the FBI to release the withheld pages. The ACLU, representing Wiener, won a favourable decision in their suit against the FBI in the Ninth Circuit in 1991. The Justice Department appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in April 1992, but the court declined to review the case. In 1997, respecting President Bill Clinton's newly instigated rule that documents should be withheld only if releasing them would involve "foreseeable harm", the Justice Department settled most of the outstanding issues outside court by releasing all but 10 of the contested documents.
Wiener published the results of his 14-year campaign in January 2000. Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files contained facsimiles of the documents, including "lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges". The story is told in the documentary The US vs. John Lennon. The final 10 documents in Lennon's FBI file, which reported on his ties with London anti-war activists in 1971 and had been withheld as containing "national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality", were released in December 2006. They contained no indication that the British government had regarded Lennon as a serious threat; one example of the released material was a report that two prominent British leftists had hoped Lennon would finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room.
Beatles biographer Bill Harry wrote that Lennon began drawing and writing creatively at an early age with the encouragement of his uncle. He collected his stories, poetry, cartoons and caricatures in a Quarry Bank High School exercise book that he called the Daily Howl. The drawings were often of crippled people, and the writings satirical, and throughout the book was an abundance of wordplay. According to classmate Bill Turner, Lennon created the Daily Howl to amuse his best friend and later Quarrymen bandmate Pete Shotton, to whom he would show his work before he let anyone else see it. Turner said that Lennon "had an obsession for Wigan Pier. It kept cropping up", and in Lennon's story A Carrot in a Potato Mine, "the mine was at the end of Wigan Pier." Turner described how one of Lennon's cartoons depicted a bus stop sign annotated with the question, "Why?" Above was a flying pancake, and below, "a blind man wearing glasses leading along a blind dog – also wearing glasses".
Lennon's love of wordplay and nonsense with a twist found a wider audience when he was 24. Harry writes that In His Own Write (1964) was published after "Some journalist who was hanging around the Beatles came to me and I ended up showing him the stuff. They said, 'Write a book' and that's how the first one came about". Like the Daily Howl it contained a mix of formats including short stories, poetry, plays and drawings. One story, "Good Dog Nigel", tells the tale of "a happy dog, urinating on a lamp post, barking, wagging his tail – until he suddenly hears a message that he will be killed at three o'clock". The Times Literary Supplement considered the poems and stories "remarkable ... also very funny ... the nonsense runs on, words and images prompting one another in a chain of pure fantasy". Book Week reported, "This is nonsense writing, but one has only to review the literature of nonsense to see how well Lennon has brought it off. While some of his homonyms are gratuitous word play, many others have not only double meaning but a double edge." Lennon was not only surprised by the positive reception, but that the book was reviewed at all, and suggested that readers "took the book more seriously than I did myself. It just began as a laugh for me".
In combination with A Spaniard in the Works (1965), In His Own Write formed the basis of the stage play The Lennon Play: In His Own Write, co-adapted by Victor Spinetti and Adrienne Kennedy. After negotiations between Lennon, Spinetti and the artistic director of the National Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier, the play opened at The Old Vic in 1968. Lennon and Ono attended the opening night performance, their second public appearance together. In 1969, Lennon wrote "Four in Hand", a skit based on his teenage experiences of group masturbation, for Kenneth Tynan's play Oh! Calcutta! After Lennon's death, further works were published, including Skywriting by Word of Mouth (1986), Ai: Japan Through John Lennon's Eyes: A Personal Sketchbook (1992), with Lennon's illustrations of the definitions of Japanese words, and Real Love: The Drawings for Sean (1999). The Beatles Anthology (2000) also presented examples of his writings and drawings.
In 1967, Lennon, who had attended art school, funded and anonymously participated in Ono's art exhibition Half-A-Room that was held at Lisson Gallery. Following his collaborating with Ono in the form of The Plastic Ono Band that began in 1968, Lennon became involved with the Fluxus art movement. In the summer of 1968, Lennon began showing his painting and conceptual art at his You Are Here art exhibition held at Robert Fraser Gallery in London. The show, that was dedicated to Ono, included a six foot in diameter round white monochrome painting called You Are Here (1968). Besides the white monochrome paint, its surface contained only the tiny hand written inscription "you are here". This painting, and the show in general, was conceived as a response to Ono's conceptual art piece This is Not Here (1966) that was part of her Fluxus installation of wall text pieces called Blue Room Event (1966). Blue Room Event consisted of sentences that Ono wrote directly on her white New York apartment walls and ceiling. Lennon's You Are Here show also included sixty charity collection boxes, a pair of Lennon's shoes with a sign that read "I take my shoes off to you", a ready made black bike (an apparent homage to Marcel Duchamp and his 1917 Bicycle Wheel), an overturned white hat labeled For The Artist, and a large glass jar full of free-to-take you are here white pin badges. A hidden camera secretly filmed the public reaction to the show. For the 1 July opening, Lennon, dressed all in white (as was Ono), released 365 white balloons into the city sky. Each ballon had attached to it a small paper card to be mailed back to Lennon at the Robert Fraser Gallery at 69 Duke Street, with the finder's comments.
After moving to New York City, from 18 April to 12 June 1970, Lennon and Ono presented a series of Fluxus conceptual art events and concerts at Joe Jones's Tone Deaf Music Store called GRAPEFRUIT FLUXBANQUET. Performances included Come Impersonating John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Grapefruit Banquet and Portrait of John Lennon as a Young Cloud by Yoko + Everybody. That same year, Lennon also made The Complete Yoko Ono Word Poem Game (1970): a conceptual art poem collage that utilized the cut-up (or découpé) aleatory technique typical of the work of John Cage and many Fluxus artists. The cut-up technique can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs. For The Complete Yoko Ono Word Poem Game, Lennon took the portrait photo of himself that was included in the packaging of the 1968 The Beatles LP (aka The White Album) and cut it into 134 small rectangles. A single word was written on the back of each fragment, to be read in any order. The portrait image was meant to be reassembled in any order. The Complete Yoko Ono Word Poem Game was presented by Lennon to Ono on 28 July in an inscribed envelope for her to randomly assemble and reassemble at will.
Lennon made whimsical drawings and fine art prints on occasion until the end of his life. For example, Lennon exhibited at Eugene Schuster's London Arts Gallery his Bag One lithographs in an exhibition that included several depicting erotic imagery. The show opened on 15 January 1970 and 24 hours later it was raided by police officers who confiscated 8 of the 14 lithos on the grounds of indecency. The lithographs had been drawn by Lennon in 1969 chronicling his wedding and honeymoon with Yoko Ono and one of their bed-ins staged in the interests of world peace.
In 1969, Lennon appeared in the Yoko Ono Fluxus art film Self-Portrait, which consisted of a single forty-minute shot of Lennon's penis. The film was premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In 1971, Lennon made an experimental art film called Erection that was edited on 16 mm film by George Maciunas, founder of the Fluxus art movement and avant-garde contemporary of Ono. The film uses the songs "Airmale" and "You" from Ono's 1971 album Fly, as its soundtrack.
Lennon played a mouth organ during a bus journey to visit his cousin in Scotland; the music caught the driver's ear. Impressed, the driver told Lennon of a harmonica he could have if he came to Edinburgh the following day, where one had been stored in the bus depot since a passenger had left it on a bus. The professional instrument quickly replaced Lennon's toy. He would continue to play the harmonica, often using the instrument during the Beatles' Hamburg years, and it became a signature sound in the group's early recordings. His mother taught him how to play the banjo, later buying him an acoustic guitar. At 16, he played rhythm guitar with the Quarrymen.
As his career progressed, he played a variety of electric guitars, predominantly the Rickenbacker 325, Epiphone Casino and Gibson J-160E, and, from the start of his solo career, the Gibson Les Paul Junior. Double Fantasy producer Jack Douglas claimed that since his Beatle days Lennon habitually tuned his D-string slightly flat, so his Aunt Mimi could tell which guitar was his on recordings. Occasionally he played a six-string bass guitar, the Fender Bass VI, providing bass on some Beatles numbers ("Back in the U.S.S.R.", "The Long and Winding Road", "Helter Skelter") that occupied McCartney with another instrument. His other instrument of choice was the piano, on which he composed many songs, including "Imagine", described as his best-known solo work. His jamming on a piano with McCartney in 1963 led to the creation of the Beatles' first US number one, "I Want to Hold Your Hand". In 1964, he became one of the first British musicians to acquire a Mellotron keyboard, though it was not heard on a Beatles recording until "Strawberry Fields Forever" in 1967.
The British critic Nik Cohn observed of Lennon, "He owned one of the best pop voices ever, rasped and smashed and brooding, always fierce." Cohn wrote that Lennon, performing "Twist and Shout", would "rant his way into total incoherence, half rupture himself." When the Beatles recorded the song, the final track during the mammoth one-day session that produced the band's 1963 debut album, Please Please Me, Lennon's voice, already compromised by a cold, came close to giving out. Lennon said, "I couldn't sing the damn thing, I was just screaming." In the words of biographer Barry Miles, "Lennon simply shredded his vocal cords in the interests of rock 'n' roll." The Beatles' producer, George Martin, tells how Lennon "had an inborn dislike of his own voice which I could never understand. He was always saying to me: 'DO something with my voice! ... put something on it ... Make it different.'" Martin obliged, often using double-tracking and other techniques.
As his Beatles era segued into his solo career, his singing voice found a widening range of expression. Biographer Chris Gregory writes of Lennon "tentatively beginning to expose his insecurities in a number of acoustic-led 'confessional' ballads, so beginning the process of 'public therapy' that will eventually culminate in the primal screams of 'Cold Turkey' and the cathartic John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band." Music critic Robert Christgau called this Lennon's "greatest vocal performance ... from scream to whine, is modulated electronically ... echoed, filtered, and double tracked." David Stuart Ryan described Lennon's vocal delivery as ranging from "extreme vulnerability, sensitivity and even naivety" to a hard "rasping" style. Wiener too described contrasts, saying the singer's voice can be "at first subdued; soon it almost cracks with despair". Music historian Ben Urish recalled hearing the Beatles' Ed Sullivan Show performance of "This Boy" played on the radio a few days after Lennon's murder: "As Lennon's vocals reached their peak ... it hurt too much to hear him scream with such anguish and emotion. But it was my emotions I heard in his voice. Just like I always had."
Music historians Schinder and Schwartz wrote of the transformation in popular music styles that took place between the 1950s and the 1960s. They said that the Beatles' influence cannot be overstated: having "revolutionised the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and opened rock and roll's doors to a tidal wave of British rock acts", the group then "spent the rest of the 1960s expanding rock's stylistic frontiers". On National Poetry Day in 1999, the BBC conducted a poll to identify the UK's favourite song lyric and announced "Imagine" as the winner.
Two home recording demos by Lennon, "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love", were finished by the three surviving members of the Beatles when they reunited in 1994 and 1995. Both songs were released as Beatles singles in conjunction with the Anthology compilations. A third song, "Now and Then", was also worked on but not released until 2023 whereupon it was dubbed "the last Beatles song", topping the UK charts.
In 1997, Yoko Ono and the BMI Foundation established an annual music competition programme for songwriters of contemporary musical genres to honour John Lennon's memory and his large creative legacy. Over $400,000 have been given through BMI Foundation's John Lennon Scholarships to talented young musicians in the United States.
In a 2006 Guardian article, Jon Wiener wrote: "For young people in 1972, it was thrilling to see Lennon's courage in standing up to [US President] Nixon. That willingness to take risks with his career, and his life, is one reason why people still admire him today." For music historians Urish and Bielen, Lennon's most significant effort was "the self-portraits ... in his songs [which] spoke to, for, and about, the human condition."
In 2013, Downtown Music Publishing signed a publishing administration agreement for the US with Lenono Music and Ono Music, home to the song catalogues of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, respectively. Under the terms of the agreement, Downtown represents Lennon's solo works, including "Imagine", "Instant Karma (We All Shine On)", "Power to the People", "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", "Jealous Guy", "(Just Like) Starting Over" and others.
Lennon has been the subject of numerous memorials and tributes. In 2002, the airport in Lennon's home town was renamed the Liverpool John Lennon Airport. On what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday in 2010, Cynthia and Julian Lennon unveiled the John Lennon Peace Monument in Chavasse Park, Liverpool. The sculpture, entitled Peace & Harmony, exhibits peace symbols and carries the inscription "Peace on Earth for the Conservation of Life · In Honour of John Lennon 1940–1980". In December 2013, the International Astronomical Union named one of the craters on Mercury after Lennon.
There is a John Lennon Park in Havana, Cuba which features a statue in his likeness sitting on a bench.
The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership is regarded as one of the most influential and successful of the 20th century. As performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number one singles in the US Hot 100 chart. His album sales in the US stand at 14 million units. Double Fantasy was his best-selling album, at three million shipments in the US. Released shortly before his death, it won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. That year, the BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music was given to Lennon.
Participants in a 2002 BBC poll voted him eighth of "100 Greatest Britons". Between 2003 and 2008, Rolling Stone recognised Lennon in several reviews of artists and music, ranking him fifth of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and 38th of "100 Greatest Artists of All Time", and his albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, 22nd and 76th respectively of "Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) with the other Beatles in 1965, but returned his medal in 1969 because of "Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts". Lennon was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
All releases after his death in 1980 use archival footage. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon; 9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-songwriter, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. His work included music, writing, drawings and film. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Born in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager. In 1956, he formed The Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960. Sometimes called \"the smart Beatle\", Lennon initially was the group's de facto leader, a role he gradually ceded to McCartney. Through his songwriting in the Beatles, he embraced myriad musical influences, initially writing and co-writing rock and pop-oriented hit songs in the band's early years, then later incorporating experimental elements into his compositions in the latter half of the Beatles' career as his songs became known for their increasing innovation. Lennon soon expanded his work into other media by participating in numerous films, including How I Won the War, and authoring In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, both collections of nonsense writings and line drawings. Starting with \"All You Need Is Love\", his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement and the larger counterculture of the 1960s. In 1969, he started the Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, multimedia artist Yoko Ono, held the two-week-long anti-war demonstration Bed-ins for Peace and left the Beatles to embark on a solo career.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Between 1968 and 1972, Lennon and Ono collaborated on many works, including a trilogy of avant-garde albums, several more films, his solo debut John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and the international top-10 singles \"Give Peace a Chance\", \"Instant Karma!\", \"Imagine\", and \"Happy Xmas (War Is Over)\". Moving to New York City in 1971, his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a three-year deportation attempt by the Nixon administration. Lennon and Ono separated from 1973 to 1975, during which time he produced Harry Nilsson's album Pussy Cats. He also had chart-topping collaborations with Elton John (\"Whatever Gets You thru the Night\") and David Bowie (\"Fame\"). Following a five-year hiatus, Lennon returned to music in 1980 with the Ono collaboration Double Fantasy. He was murdered by a Beatles fan, Mark David Chapman, three weeks after the album's release.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "As a performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number-one singles in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Double Fantasy, his best-selling album, won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. That year, he won the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. In 2002, Lennon was voted eighth in a BBC history poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer and 38th greatest artist of all time. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1997) and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (twice, as a member of the Beatles in 1988 and as a solo artist in 1994).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "John Lennon was born on 9 October 1940 at Liverpool Maternity Hospital to Julia (née Stanley) (1914–1958) and Alfred Lennon (1912–1976). Alfred was a merchant seaman of Irish descent who was away at the time of his son's birth. His parents named him John Winston Lennon after his paternal grandfather, John \"Jack\" Lennon, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. His father was often away from home but sent regular pay cheques to 9 Newcastle Road, Liverpool, where Lennon lived with his mother; the cheques stopped when he went absent without leave in February 1944. When he eventually came home six months later, he offered to look after the family, but Julia, by then pregnant with another man's child, rejected the idea. After her sister Mimi complained to Liverpool's Social Services twice, Julia gave her custody of Lennon.",
"title": "Early years: 1940–1956"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In July 1946, Lennon's father visited her and took his son to Blackpool, secretly intending to emigrate to New Zealand with him. Julia followed them – with her partner at the time, Bobby Dykins – and after a heated argument, his father forced the five-year-old to choose between them. In one account of this incident, Lennon twice chose his father, but as his mother walked away, he began to cry and followed her. According to author Mark Lewisohn, however, Lennon's parents agreed that Julia should take him and give him a home. Billy Hall, who witnessed the incident, has said that the dramatic portrayal of a young John Lennon being forced to make a decision between his parents is inaccurate. Lennon had no further contact with Alf for close to 20 years.",
"title": "Early years: 1940–1956"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Throughout the rest of his childhood and adolescence, Lennon lived at Mendips, 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton, with Mimi and her husband George Toogood Smith, who had no children of their own. His aunt purchased volumes of short stories for him, and his uncle, a dairyman at his family's farm, bought him a mouth organ and engaged him in solving crossword puzzles. Julia visited Mendips on a regular basis, and John often visited her at 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, where she played him Elvis Presley records, taught him the banjo, and showed him how to play \"Ain't That a Shame\" by Fats Domino. In September 1980, Lennon commented about his family and his rebellious nature:",
"title": "Early years: 1940–1956"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "A part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouthed lunatic poet/musician. But I cannot be what I am not ... I was the one who all the other boys' parents – including Paul's father – would say, \"Keep away from him\" ... The parents instinctively recognised I was a troublemaker, meaning I did not conform and I would influence their children, which I did. I did my best to disrupt every friend's home ... Partly out of envy that I didn't have this so-called home ... but I did ... There were five women that were my family. Five strong, intelligent, beautiful women, five sisters. One happened to be my mother. [She] just couldn't deal with life. She was the youngest and she had a husband who ran away to sea and the war was on and she couldn't cope with me, and I ended up living with her elder sister. Now those women were fantastic ... And that was my first feminist education ... I would infiltrate the other boys' minds. I could say, \"Parents are not gods because I don't live with mine and, therefore, I know.\"",
"title": "Early years: 1940–1956"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "He regularly visited his cousin Stanley Parkes, who lived in Fleetwood and took him on trips to local cinemas. During the school holidays Parkes often visited Lennon with Leila Harvey, another cousin, and the three often travelled to Blackpool two or three times a week to watch shows. They would visit the Blackpool Tower Circus and see artists such as Dickie Valentine, Arthur Askey, Max Bygraves and Joe Loss, with Parkes recalling that Lennon particularly liked George Formby. After Parkes's family moved to Scotland, the three cousins often spent their school holidays together there. Parkes recalled, \"John, cousin Leila and I were very close. From Edinburgh we would drive up to the family croft at Durness, which was from about the time John was nine years old until he was about 16.\" Lennon's uncle George died of a liver haemorrhage on 5 June 1955, aged 52.",
"title": "Early years: 1940–1956"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Lennon was raised as an Anglican and attended Dovedale Primary School. After passing his eleven-plus exam, he attended Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool from September 1952 to 1957, and was described by Harvey at the time as a \"happy-go-lucky, good-humoured, easy going, lively lad\". However, he was also known to frequently engage in fights, bully and disrupt classes. Despite this, he quickly built a reputation as the class clown and often drew comical cartoons that appeared in his self-made school magazine, the Daily Howl.",
"title": "Early years: 1940–1956"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1956, Julia bought John his first guitar. The instrument was an inexpensive Gallotone Champion acoustic for which she lent her son five pounds and ten shillings on the condition that the guitar be delivered to her own house and not Mimi's, knowing well that her sister was not supportive of her son's musical aspirations. Mimi was sceptical of his claim that he would be famous one day, and she hoped that he would grow bored with music, often telling him, \"The guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living out of it.\"",
"title": "Early years: 1940–1956"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Lennon's senior school years were marked by a shift in his behaviour. Teachers at Quarry Bank High School described him thus: \"He has too many wrong ambitions and his energy is often misplaced\", and \"His work always lacks effort. He is content to 'drift' instead of using his abilities.\" Lennon's misbehaviour created a rift in his relationship with his aunt.",
"title": "Early years: 1940–1956"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "On 15 July 1958, at the age of 44, Julia Lennon was struck and killed by a car while she was walking home after visiting the Smiths' house. His mother's death traumatised the teenage Lennon, who, for the next two years, drank heavily and frequently got into fights, consumed by a \"blind rage\". Julia's memory would later serve as a major creative inspiration for Lennon, inspiring songs such as the 1968 Beatles song \"Julia\".",
"title": "Early years: 1940–1956"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Lennon failed his O-level examinations, and was accepted into the Liverpool College of Art after his aunt and headmaster intervened. At the college he began to wear Teddy Boy clothes and was threatened with expulsion for his behaviour. In the description of Cynthia Powell, Lennon's fellow student and subsequently his wife, he was \"thrown out of the college before his final year\".",
"title": "Early years: 1940–1956"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "At the age of 15, Lennon formed a skiffle group, the Quarrymen. Named after Quarry Bank High School, the group was established by Lennon in September 1956. By the summer of 1957, the Quarrymen played a \"spirited set of songs\" made up of half skiffle and half rock and roll. Lennon first met Paul McCartney at the Quarrymen's second performance, which was held in Woolton on 6 July at the St Peter's Church garden fête. Lennon then asked McCartney to join the band.",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "McCartney said that Aunt Mimi \"was very aware that John's friends were lower class\", and would often patronise him when he arrived to visit Lennon. According to McCartney's brother Mike, their father similarly disapproved of Lennon, declaring that Lennon would get his son \"into trouble\". McCartney's father nevertheless allowed the fledgling band to rehearse in the family's front room at 20 Forthlin Road. During this time Lennon wrote his first song, \"Hello Little Girl\", which became a UK top 10 hit for the Fourmost in 1963.",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "McCartney recommended that his friend George Harrison become the lead guitarist. Lennon thought that Harrison, then 14 years old, was too young. McCartney engineered an audition on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus, where Harrison played \"Raunchy\" for Lennon and was asked to join. Stuart Sutcliffe, Lennon's friend from art school, later joined as bassist. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Sutcliffe became \"The Beatles\" in early 1960. In August that year, the Beatles were engaged for a 48-night residency in Hamburg, in West Germany, and were desperately in need of a drummer. They asked Pete Best to join them. Lennon's aunt, horrified when he told her about the trip, pleaded with Lennon to continue his art studies instead. After the first Hamburg residency, the band accepted another in April 1961, and a third in April 1962. As with the other band members, Lennon was introduced to Preludin while in Hamburg, and regularly took the drug as a stimulant during their long, overnight performances.",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Brian Epstein managed the Beatles from 1962 until his death in 1967. He had no previous experience managing artists, but he had a strong influence on the group's dress code and attitude on stage. Lennon initially resisted his attempts to encourage the band to present a professional appearance, but eventually complied, saying \"I'll wear a bloody balloon if somebody's going to pay me.\" McCartney took over on bass after Sutcliffe decided to stay in Hamburg, and Best was replaced with drummer Ringo Starr; this completed the four-piece line-up that would remain until the group's break-up in 1970. The band's first single, \"Love Me Do\", was released in October 1962 and reached No. 17 on the British charts. They recorded their debut album, Please Please Me, in under 10 hours on 11 February 1963, a day when Lennon was suffering the effects of a cold, which is evident in the vocal on the last song to be recorded that day, \"Twist and Shout\". The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership yielded eight of its fourteen tracks. With a few exceptions, one being the album title itself, Lennon had yet to bring his love of wordplay to bear on his song lyrics, saying: \"We were just writing songs ... pop songs with no more thought of them than that – to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant\". In a 1987 interview, McCartney said that the other Beatles idolised Lennon: \"He was like our own little Elvis ... We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest.\"",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Beatles achieved mainstream success in the UK early in 1963. Lennon was on tour when his first son, Julian, was born in April. During their Royal Variety Show performance, which was attended by the Queen Mother and other British royalty, Lennon poked fun at the audience: \"For our next song, I'd like to ask for your help. For the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands ... and the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewellery.\" After a year of Beatlemania in the UK, the group's historic February 1964 US debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show marked their breakthrough to international stardom. A two-year period of constant touring, filmmaking, and songwriting followed, during which Lennon wrote two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. The Beatles received recognition from the British establishment when they were appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1965 Queen's Birthday Honours.",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Lennon grew concerned that fans who attended Beatles concerts were unable to hear the music above the screaming of fans, and that the band's musicianship was beginning to suffer as a result. Lennon's \"Help!\" expressed his own feelings in 1965: \"I meant it ... It was me singing 'help'\". He had put on weight (he would later refer to this as his \"Fat Elvis\" period), and felt he was subconsciously seeking change. In March that year he and Harrison were unknowingly introduced to LSD when a dentist, hosting a dinner party attended by the two musicians and their wives, spiked the guests' coffee with the drug. When they wanted to leave, their host revealed what they had taken, and strongly advised them not to leave the house because of the likely effects. Later, in a lift at a nightclub, they all believed it was on fire; Lennon recalled: \"We were all screaming ... hot and hysterical.\" In March 1966, during an interview with Evening Standard reporter Maureen Cleave, Lennon remarked, \"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink ... We're more popular than Jesus now – I don't know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity.\" The comment went virtually unnoticed in England but caused great offence in the US when quoted by a magazine there five months later. The furore that followed, which included the burning of Beatles records, Ku Klux Klan activity and threats against Lennon, contributed to the band's decision to stop touring.",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "After the band's final concert on 29 August 1966, Lennon filmed the anti-war black comedy How I Won the War – his only appearance in a non-Beatles feature film – before rejoining his bandmates for an extended period of recording, beginning in November. Lennon had increased his use of LSD and, according to author Ian MacDonald, his continuous use of the drug in 1967 brought him \"close to erasing his identity\". The year 1967 saw the release of \"Strawberry Fields Forever\", hailed by Time magazine for its \"astonishing inventiveness\", and the group's landmark album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which revealed lyrics by Lennon that contrasted strongly with the simple love songs of the group's early years.",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In late June, the Beatles performed Lennon's \"All You Need Is Love\" as Britain's contribution to the Our World satellite broadcast, before an international audience estimated at up to 400 million. Intentionally simplistic in its message, the song formalised his pacifist stance and provided an anthem for the Summer of Love. After the Beatles were introduced to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the group attended an August weekend of personal instruction at his Transcendental Meditation seminar in Bangor, Wales. During the seminar, they were informed of Epstein's death. \"I knew we were in trouble then\", Lennon said later. \"I didn't have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. I was scared – I thought, 'We've fucking had it now.'\" McCartney organised the group's first post-Epstein project, the self-written, -produced and -directed television film Magical Mystery Tour, which was released in December that year. While the film itself proved to be their first critical flop, its soundtrack release, featuring Lennon's Lewis Carroll-inspired \"I Am the Walrus\", was a success.",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Led by Harrison and Lennon's interest, the Beatles travelled to the Maharishi's ashram in India in February 1968 for further guidance. While there, they composed most of the songs for their double album The Beatles, but the band members' mixed experience with Transcendental Meditation signalled a sharp divergence in the group's camaraderie. On their return to London, they became increasingly involved in business activities with the formation of Apple Corps, a multimedia corporation composed of Apple Records and several other subsidiary companies. Lennon described the venture as an attempt to achieve \"artistic freedom within a business structure\". Released amid the Protests of 1968, the band's debut single for the Apple label included Lennon's B-side \"Revolution\", in which he called for a \"plan\" rather than committing to Maoist revolution. The song's pacifist message led to ridicule from political radicals in the New Left press. Adding to the tensions at the Beatles' recording sessions that year, Lennon insisted on having his new girlfriend, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, beside him, thereby contravening the band's policy regarding wives and girlfriends in the studio. He was especially pleased with his songwriting contributions to the double album and identified it as a superior work to Sgt. Pepper. At the end of 1968, Lennon participated in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, a television special that was not broadcast. Lennon performed with the Dirty Mac, a supergroup composed of Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell. The group also backed a vocal performance by Ono. A film version was released in 1996.",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "By late 1968, Lennon's increased drug use and growing preoccupation with Ono, combined with the Beatles' inability to agree on how the company should be run, left Apple in need of professional management. Lennon asked Lord Beeching to take on the role but he declined, advising Lennon to go back to making records. Lennon was approached by Allen Klein, who had managed the Rolling Stones and other bands during the British Invasion. In early 1969, Klein was appointed as Apple's chief executive by Lennon, Harrison and Starr but McCartney never signed the management contract.",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Lennon and Ono were married on 20 March 1969 and soon released a series of 14 lithographs called \"Bag One\" depicting scenes from their honeymoon, eight of which were deemed indecent and most of which were banned and confiscated. Lennon's creative focus continued to move beyond the Beatles, and between 1968 and 1969 he and Ono recorded three albums of experimental music together: Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (known more for its cover than for its music), Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions and Wedding Album. In 1969, they formed the Plastic Ono Band, releasing Live Peace in Toronto 1969. Between 1969 and 1970, Lennon released the singles \"Give Peace a Chance\", which was widely adopted as an anti-Vietnam War anthem, \"Cold Turkey\", which documented his withdrawal symptoms after he became addicted to heroin, and \"Instant Karma!\".",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In protest at Britain's involvement in \"the Nigeria-Biafra thing\" (namely, the Nigerian Civil War), its support of America in the Vietnam War and (perhaps jokingly) against \"Cold Turkey\" slipping down the charts, Lennon returned his MBE medal to the Queen. This gesture had no effect on his MBE status, which could not be renounced. The medal, together with Lennon's letter, is held at the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood.",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Lennon left the Beatles on 20 September 1969, but agreed not to inform the media while the group renegotiated their recording contract. He was outraged that McCartney publicised his own departure on releasing his debut solo album in April 1970. Lennon's reaction was, \"Jesus Christ! He gets all the credit for it!\" He later wrote, \"I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that.\" In a December 1970 interview with Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine, he revealed his bitterness towards McCartney, saying, \"I was a fool not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record.\" Lennon also spoke of the hostility he perceived the other members had towards Ono, and of how he, Harrison and Starr \"got fed up with being sidemen for Paul ... After Brian Epstein died we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us when we went round in circles?\"",
"title": "The Quarrymen to the Beatles: 1956–1970"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system's game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they've got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don't know how to handle is non-violence and humor.",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "—John Lennon",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Between 1 April and 15 September 1970, Lennon and Ono went through primal therapy with Arthur Janov at Tittenhurst, in London and at Janov's clinic in Los Angeles, California. Designed to release emotional pain from early childhood, the therapy entailed two half-days a week with Janov for six months; he had wanted to treat the couple for longer, but their American visa ran out and they had to return to the UK. Lennon's debut solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970), was received with praise by many music critics, but its highly personal lyrics and stark sound limited its commercial performance. The album featured the song \"Mother\", in which Lennon confronted his feelings of childhood rejection, and the Dylanesque \"Working Class Hero\", a bitter attack against the bourgeois social system which, due to the lyric \"you're still fucking peasants\", fell foul of broadcasters.",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In January 1971, Tariq Ali expressed his revolutionary political views when he interviewed Lennon, who immediately responded by writing \"Power to the People\". In his lyrics to the song, Lennon reversed the non-confrontational approach he had espoused in \"Revolution\", although he later disowned \"Power to the People\", saying that it was borne out of guilt and a desire for approval from radicals such as Ali. Lennon became involved in a protest against the prosecution of Oz magazine for alleged obscenity. Lennon denounced the proceedings as \"disgusting fascism\", and he and Ono (as Elastic Oz Band) released the single \"God Save Us/Do the Oz\" and joined marches in support of the magazine.",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Eager for a major commercial success, Lennon adopted a more accessible sound for his next album, Imagine (1971). Rolling Stone reported that \"it contains a substantial portion of good music\" but warned of the possibility that \"his posturings will soon seem not merely dull but irrelevant\". The album's title track later became an anthem for anti-war movements, while the song \"How Do You Sleep?\" was a musical attack on McCartney in response to lyrics on Ram that Lennon felt, and McCartney later confirmed, were directed at him and Ono. In \"Jealous Guy\", Lennon addressed his demeaning treatment of women, acknowledging that his past behaviour was the result of long-held insecurity.",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In gratitude for his guitar contributions to Imagine, Lennon initially agreed to perform at Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh benefit shows in New York. Harrison refused to allow Ono to participate at the concerts, however, which resulted in the couple having a heated argument and Lennon pulling out of the event.",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Lennon and Ono moved to New York in August 1971 and immediately embraced US radical left politics. The couple released their \"Happy Xmas (War Is Over)\" single in December. During the new year, the Nixon administration took what it called a \"strategic counter-measure\" against Lennon's anti-war and anti-Nixon propaganda. The administration embarked on what would be a four-year attempt to deport him. Lennon was embroiled in a continuing legal battle with the immigration authorities, and he was denied permanent residency in the US; the issue would not be resolved until 1976.",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Some Time in New York City was recorded as a collaboration with Ono and was released in 1972 with backing from the New York band Elephant's Memory. A double LP, it contained songs about women's rights, race relations, Britain's role in Northern Ireland and Lennon's difficulties in obtaining a green card. The album was a commercial failure and was maligned by critics, who found its political sloganeering heavy-handed and relentless. The NME's review took the form of an open letter in which Tony Tyler derided Lennon as a \"pathetic, ageing revolutionary\". In the US, \"Woman Is the Nigger of the World\" was released as a single from the album and was televised on 11 May, on The Dick Cavett Show. Many radio stations refused to broadcast the song because of the word \"nigger\".",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Lennon and Ono gave two benefit concerts with Elephant's Memory and guests in New York in aid of patients at the Willowbrook State School mental facility. Staged at Madison Square Garden on 30 August 1972, they were his last full-length concert appearances. After George McGovern lost the 1972 presidential election to Richard Nixon, Lennon and Ono attended a post-election wake held in the New York home of activist Jerry Rubin. Lennon was depressed and got intoxicated; he left Ono embarrassed after he had sex with a female guest. Ono's song \"Death of Samantha\" was inspired by the incident.",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "As Lennon was about to record Mind Games in 1973, he and Ono decided to separate. The ensuing 18-month period apart, which he later called his \"lost weekend\" in reference to the film of the same name, was spent in Los Angeles and New York City in the company of May Pang. Mind Games, credited to the \"Plastic U.F.Ono Band\", was released in November 1973. Lennon also contributed \"I'm the Greatest\" to Starr's album Ringo (1973), released the same month. With Harrison joining Starr and Lennon at the recording session for the song, it marked the only occasion when three former Beatles recorded together between the band's break-up and Lennon's death.",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In early 1974, Lennon was drinking heavily and his alcohol-fuelled antics with Harry Nilsson made headlines. In March, two widely publicised incidents occurred at The Troubadour club. In the first incident, Lennon stuck an unused menstrual pad on his forehead and scuffled with a waitress. The second incident occurred two weeks later, when Lennon and Nilsson were ejected from the same club after heckling the Smothers Brothers. Lennon decided to produce Nilsson's album Pussy Cats, and Pang rented a Los Angeles beach house for all the musicians. After a month of further debauchery, the recording sessions were in chaos, and Lennon returned to New York with Pang to finish work on the album. In April, Lennon had produced the Mick Jagger song \"Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup)\" which was, for contractual reasons, to remain unreleased for more than 30 years. Pang supplied the recording for its eventual inclusion on The Very Best of Mick Jagger (2007).",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Lennon had settled back in New York when he recorded the album Walls and Bridges. Released in October 1974, it included \"Whatever Gets You thru the Night\", which featured Elton John on backing vocals and piano, and became Lennon's only single as a solo artist to top the US Billboard Hot 100 chart during his lifetime. A second single from the album, \"#9 Dream\", followed before the end of the year. Starr's Goodnight Vienna (1974) again saw assistance from Lennon, who wrote the title track and played piano. On 28 November, Lennon made a surprise guest appearance at Elton John's Thanksgiving concert at Madison Square Garden, in fulfilment of his promise to join the singer in a live show if \"Whatever Gets You thru the Night\", a song whose commercial potential Lennon had doubted, reached number one. Lennon performed the song along with \"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds\" and \"I Saw Her Standing There\", which he introduced as \"a song by an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul\".",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In the first two weeks of January 1975, Elton John topped the US Billboard Hot 100 singles chart with his cover of \"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds\", featuring Lennon on guitar and backing vocals - Lennon is credited on the single under the moniker of \"Dr. Winston O'Boogie\". As January became February, Lennon and Ono reunited as Lennon and Bowie completed recording of their co-composition \"Fame\", which became David Bowie's first US number one, featuring guitar and backing vocals by Lennon. In February, Lennon released Rock 'n' Roll (1975), an album of cover songs. \"Stand by Me\", taken from the album and a US and UK hit, became his last single for five years. He made what would be his final stage appearance in the ATV special A Salute to Lew Grade, recorded on 18 April and televised in June. Playing acoustic guitar and backed by an eight-piece band, Lennon performed two songs from Rock 'n' Roll (\"Stand by Me\", which was not broadcast, and \"Slippin' and Slidin'\") followed by \"Imagine\". The band, known as Etc., wore masks behind their heads, a dig by Lennon, who thought Grade was two-faced.",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Sean was Lennon's only child with Ono. Sean was born on 9 October 1975 (Lennon's thirty-fifth birthday), and John took on the role of househusband. Lennon began what would be a five-year hiatus from the music industry, during which time, he later said, he \"baked bread\" and \"looked after the baby\". He devoted himself to Sean, rising at 6 am daily to plan and prepare his meals and to spend time with him. He wrote \"Cookin' (In the Kitchen of Love)\" for Starr's Ringo's Rotogravure (1976), performing on the track in June in what would be his last recording session until 1980. He formally announced his break from music in Tokyo in 1977, saying, \"we have basically decided, without any great decision, to be with our baby as much as we can until we feel we can take time off to indulge ourselves in creating things outside of the family.\" During his career break he created several series of drawings, and drafted a book containing a mix of autobiographical material and what he termed \"mad stuff\", all of which would be published posthumously.",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Lennon emerged from his hiatus in October 1980, when he released the single \"(Just Like) Starting Over\". In November, he and Ono released the album Double Fantasy, which included songs Lennon had written in Bermuda. In June, Lennon chartered a 43-foot sailboat and embarked on a sailing trip to Bermuda. En route, he and the crew encountered a storm, rendering everyone on board seasick, except Lennon, who took control and sailed the boat through the storm. This experience re-invigorated him and his creative muse. He spent three weeks in Bermuda in a home called Fairylands writing and refining the tracks for the upcoming album.",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The music reflected Lennon's fulfilment in his new-found stable family life. Sufficient additional material was recorded for a planned follow-up album Milk and Honey, which was issued posthumously, in 1984. Double Fantasy was not well received initially and drew comments such as Melody Maker's \"indulgent sterility ... a godawful yawn\".",
"title": "Solo career: 1970–1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In New York, at approximately 5:00 p.m. on 8 December 1980, Lennon autographed a copy of Double Fantasy for Mark David Chapman before leaving The Dakota with Ono for a recording session at the Record Plant. After the session, Lennon and Ono returned to the Dakota in a limousine at around 10:50 p.m. (EST). They left the vehicle and walked through the archway of the building. Chapman then shot Lennon twice in the back and twice in the shoulder at close range. Lennon was rushed in a police cruiser to the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:15 p.m. (EST).",
"title": "Murder: 8 December 1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Ono issued a statement the next day, saying \"There is no funeral for John\", ending it with the words, \"John loved and prayed for the human race. Please do the same for him.\" His remains were cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Ono scattered his ashes in New York's Central Park, where the Strawberry Fields memorial was later created. Chapman avoided going to trial when he ignored his lawyer's advice and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20-years-to-life.",
"title": "Murder: 8 December 1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In the weeks following the murder, \"(Just Like) Starting Over\" and Double Fantasy topped the charts in the UK and the US. \"Imagine\" hit number one in the UK in January 1981 and \"Happy Xmas\" peaked at number two. \"Imagine\" was succeeded at the top of the UK chart by \"Woman\", the second single from Double Fantasy. Later that year, Roxy Music's cover version of \"Jealous Guy\", recorded as a tribute to Lennon, was also a UK number-one.",
"title": "Murder: 8 December 1980"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Lennon met Cynthia Powell (1939–2015) in 1957, when they were fellow students at the Liverpool College of Art. Although Powell was intimidated by Lennon's attitude and appearance, she heard that he was obsessed with the French actress Brigitte Bardot, so she dyed her hair blonde. Lennon asked her out, but when she said that she was engaged, he shouted, \"I didn't ask you to fuckin' marry me, did I?\" She often accompanied him to Quarrymen gigs and travelled to Hamburg with McCartney's girlfriend to visit him.",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Lennon was jealous by nature and eventually grew possessive, often terrifying Powell with his anger. In her 2005 memoir John, Powell recalled that, when they were dating, Lennon once struck her after he observed her dancing with Stuart Sutcliffe. She ended their relationship as a result, until three months later, when Lennon apologised and asked to reunite. She took him back and later noted that he was never again physically abusive towards her, although he could still be \"verbally cutting and unkind\". Lennon later said that until he met Ono, he had never questioned his chauvinistic attitude towards women. He said that the Beatles song \"Getting Better\" told his (or his peers') own story. \"I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically – any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace\". There is no evidence of him ever having struck a woman again.",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Recalling his July 1962 reaction when he learned that Cynthia was pregnant, Lennon said, \"There's only one thing for it Cyn. We'll have to get married.\" The couple wed on 23 August at the Mount Pleasant Register Office in Liverpool, with Brian Epstein serving as best man. His marriage began just as Beatlemania was taking off across the UK. He performed on the evening of his wedding day and would continue to do so almost daily from then on. Epstein feared that fans would be alienated by the idea of a married Beatle, and he asked the Lennons to keep their marriage secret. Julian was born on 8 April 1963; Lennon was on tour at the time and did not see his infant son until three days later.",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Cynthia attributed the start of the marriage breakdown to Lennon's use of LSD, and she felt that he slowly lost interest in her as a result of his use of the drug. When the group travelled by train to Bangor, Wales in 1967 for the Maharishi Yogi's Transcendental Meditation seminar, a policeman did not recognise her and stopped her from boarding. She later recalled how the incident seemed to symbolise the end of their marriage. After spending a holiday in Greece, Cynthia arrived home at Kenwood to find Lennon sitting on the floor with Ono in terrycloth robes and left the house to stay with friends, feeling shocked and humiliated,. A few weeks later, Alexis Mardas informed Powell that Lennon was seeking a divorce and custody of Julian. She received a letter stating that Lennon was doing so on the grounds of her adultery with Italian hotelier Roberto Bassanini, an accusation which Powell denied. After negotiations, Lennon capitulated and agreed to let her divorce him on the same grounds. The case was settled out of court in November 1968, with Lennon giving her £100,000, a small annual payment, and custody of Julian.",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Beatles were performing at Liverpool's Cavern Club in November 1961 when they were introduced to Brian Epstein after a midday concert. Epstein was homosexual and closeted, and according to biographer Philip Norman, one of Epstein's reasons for wanting to manage the group was that he was attracted to Lennon. Almost as soon as Julian was born, Lennon went on holiday to Spain with Epstein, which led to speculation about their relationship. When he was later questioned about it, Lennon said, \"Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship. It was my first experience with a homosexual that I was conscious was homosexual. We used to sit in a café in Torremolinos looking at all the boys and I'd say, 'Do you like that one? Do you like this one?' I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time: I am experiencing this.\" Soon after their return from Spain, at McCartney's twenty-first birthday party in June 1963, Lennon physically attacked Cavern Club master of ceremonies Bob Wooler for saying \"How was your honeymoon, John?\" The MC, known for his wordplay and affectionate but cutting remarks, was making a joke, but ten months had passed since Lennon's marriage, and the deferred honeymoon was still two months in the future. Lennon was drunk at the time and the matter was simple: \"He called me a queer so I battered his bloody ribs in.\"",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Lennon delighted in mocking Epstein for his homosexuality and for the fact that he was Jewish. When Epstein invited suggestions for the title of his autobiography, Lennon offered Queer Jew; on learning of the eventual title, A Cellarful of Noise, he parodied, \"More like A Cellarful of Boys\". He demanded of a visitor to Epstein's flat, \"Have you come to blackmail him? If not, you're the only bugger in London who hasn't.\" During the recording of \"Baby, You're a Rich Man\", he sang altered choruses of \"Baby, you're a rich fag Jew\".",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "During his marriage to Cynthia, Lennon's first son Julian was born at the same time that his commitments with the Beatles were intensifying at the height of Beatlemania. Lennon was touring with the Beatles when Julian was born on 8 April 1963. Julian's birth, like his mother Cynthia's marriage to Lennon, was kept secret because Epstein was convinced that public knowledge of such things would threaten the Beatles' commercial success. Julian recalled that as a small child in Weybridge some four years later, \"I was trundled home from school and came walking up with one of my watercolour paintings. It was just a bunch of stars and this blonde girl I knew at school. And Dad said, 'What's this?' I said, 'It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds.'\" Lennon used it as the title of a Beatles song, and though it was later reported to have been derived from the initials LSD, Lennon insisted, \"It's not an acid song.\" Lennon was distant from Julian, who felt closer to McCartney than to his father. During a car journey to visit Cynthia and Julian during Lennon's divorce, McCartney composed a song, \"Hey Jules\", to comfort him. It would evolve into the Beatles song \"Hey Jude\". Lennon later said, \"That's his best song. It started off as a song about my son Julian ... he turned it into 'Hey Jude'. I always thought it was about me and Yoko but he said it wasn't.\"",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Lennon's relationship with Julian was already strained, and after Lennon and Ono moved to New York in 1971, Julian did not see his father again until 1973. With Pang's encouragement, arrangements were made for Julian and his mother to visit Lennon in Los Angeles, where they went to Disneyland. Julian started to see his father regularly, and Lennon gave him a drumming part on a Walls and Bridges track. He bought Julian a Gibson Les Paul guitar and other instruments, and encouraged his interest in music by demonstrating guitar chord techniques. Julian recalls that he and his father \"got on a great deal better\" during the time he spent in New York: \"We had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and had a great time in general.\"",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In a Playboy interview with David Sheff shortly before his death, Lennon said, \"Sean is a planned child, and therein lies the difference. I don't love Julian any less as a child. He's still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn't have pills in those days. He's here, he belongs to me, and he always will.\" He said he was trying to reestablish a connection with the then 17-year-old, and confidently predicted, \"Julian and I will have a relationship in the future.\" After his death it was revealed that he had left Julian very little in his will.",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Lennon first met Yoko Ono on 9 November 1966 at the Indica Gallery in London, where Ono was preparing her conceptual art exhibit. They were introduced by gallery owner John Dunbar. Lennon was intrigued by Ono's \"Hammer A Nail\": patrons hammered a nail into a wooden board, creating the art piece. Although the exhibition had not yet begun, Lennon wanted to hammer a nail into the clean board, but Ono stopped him. Dunbar asked her, \"Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it.\" According to Lennon's recollection in 1980, Ono had not heard of the Beatles, but she relented on condition that Lennon pay her five shillings, to which Lennon said he replied, \"I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in.\" Ono subsequently related that Lennon had taken a bite out of the apple on display in her work Apple, much to her fury.",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Ono began to telephone and visit Lennon at his home. When Cynthia asked him for an explanation, Lennon explained that Ono was only trying to obtain money for her \"avant-garde bullshit\". While his wife was on holiday in Greece in May 1968, Lennon invited Ono to visit. They spent the night recording what would become the Two Virgins album, after which, he said, they \"made love at dawn\". When Lennon's wife returned home she found Ono wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with Lennon who simply said, \"Oh, hi.\" Ono became pregnant in 1968 and miscarried a male child on 21 November 1968, a few weeks after Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was granted.",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Two years before the Beatles disbanded, Lennon and Ono began public protests against the Vietnam War. They were married in Gibraltar on 20 March 1969, and spent their honeymoon at the Hilton Amsterdam, campaigning with a week-long Bed-In for Peace. They planned another Bed-In in the United States, but were denied entry, so held one instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they recorded \"Give Peace a Chance\". They often combined advocacy with performance art, as in their \"Bagism\", first introduced during a Vienna press conference. Lennon detailed this period in the Beatles song \"The Ballad of John and Yoko\". Lennon changed his name by deed poll on 22 April 1969, adding \"Ono\" as a middle name. The brief ceremony took place on the roof of the Apple Corps building, where the Beatles had performed their rooftop concert three months earlier. Although he used the name John Ono Lennon thereafter, some official documents referred to him as John Winston Ono Lennon. The couple settled at Tittenhurst Park at Sunninghill in Berkshire. After Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a king-size bed to be brought to the recording studio as he worked on the Beatles' album, Abbey Road.",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Ono and Lennon moved to New York, to a flat on Bank Street, Greenwich Village. Looking for somewhere with better security, they relocated in 1973 to the more secure Dakota overlooking Central Park at 1 West 72nd Street.",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "ABKCO Industries was formed in 1968 by Allen Klein as an umbrella company to ABKCO Records. Klein hired May Pang as a receptionist in 1969. Through involvement in a project with ABKCO, Lennon and Ono met her the following year. She became their personal assistant. In 1973, after she had been working with the couple for three years, Ono confided that she and Lennon were becoming estranged. She went on to suggest that Pang should begin a physical relationship with Lennon, telling her, \"He likes you a lot.\" Astounded by Ono's proposition, Pang nevertheless agreed to become Lennon's companion. The pair soon left for Los Angeles, beginning an 18-month period he later called his \"lost weekend\". In Los Angeles, Pang encouraged Lennon to develop regular contact with Julian, whom he had not seen for two years. He also rekindled friendships with Starr, McCartney, Beatles roadie Mal Evans, and Harry Nilsson.",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In June, Lennon and Pang returned to Manhattan in their newly rented penthouse apartment where they prepared a spare room for Julian when he visited them. Lennon, who had been inhibited by Ono in this regard, began to reestablish contact with other relatives and friends. By December, he and Pang were considering a house purchase, and he refused to accept Ono's telephone calls. In January 1975, he agreed to meet Ono, who claimed to have found a cure for smoking. After the meeting, he failed to return home or call Pang. When Pang telephoned the next day, Ono told her that Lennon was unavailable because he was exhausted after a hypnotherapy session. Two days later, Lennon reappeared at a joint dental appointment; he was stupefied and confused to such an extent that Pang believed he had been brainwashed. Lennon told Pang that his separation from Ono was now over, although Ono would allow him to continue seeing her as his mistress.",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Ono had previously suffered three miscarriages in her attempt to have a child with Lennon. When Ono and Lennon were reunited, she became pregnant again. She initially said that she wanted to have an abortion but changed her mind and agreed to allow the pregnancy to continue on the condition that Lennon adopt the role of househusband, which he agreed to do.",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Following Sean's birth, Lennon's subsequent hiatus from the music industry would span five years. He had a photographer take pictures of Sean every day of his first year and created numerous drawings for him, which were posthumously published as Real Love: The Drawings for Sean. Lennon later proudly declared, \"He didn't come out of my belly but, by God, I made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and to how he sleeps, and to the fact that he swims like a fish.\"",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "While Lennon remained consistently friendly with Starr during the years that followed the Beatles' break-up in 1970, his relationships with McCartney and Harrison varied. He was initially close to Harrison, but the two drifted apart after Lennon moved to the US in 1971. When Harrison was in New York for his December 1974 Dark Horse tour, Lennon agreed to join him on stage but failed to appear after an argument over Lennon's refusal to sign an agreement that would finally dissolve the Beatles' legal partnership. Harrison later said that when he visited Lennon during his five years away from music, he sensed that Lennon was trying to communicate, but his bond with Ono prevented him. Harrison offended Lennon in 1980 when he published I, Me, Mine, an autobiography that Lennon felt made little mention of him. Lennon told Playboy, \"I was hurt by it. By glaring omission ... my influence on his life is absolutely zilch ... he remembers every two-bit sax player or guitarist he met in subsequent years. I'm not in the book.\"",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Lennon's most intense feelings were reserved for McCartney. In addition to attacking him with the lyrics of \"How Do You Sleep?\", Lennon argued with him through the press for three years after the group split. The two later began to reestablish something of the close friendship they had once known, and in 1974, they even played music together again before eventually growing apart once more. During McCartney's final visit in April 1976, Lennon said that they watched the episode of Saturday Night Live in which Lorne Michaels made a $3,000 offer to get the Beatles to reunite on the show. According to Lennon, the pair considered going to the studio to make a joke appearance, attempting to claim their share of the money, but they were too tired. Lennon summarised his feelings towards McCartney in an interview three days before his death: \"Throughout my career, I've selected to work with ... only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono ... That ain't bad picking.\"",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Along with his estrangement from McCartney, Lennon always felt a musical competitiveness with him and kept an ear on his music. During his career break from 1975 until shortly before his death, according to Fred Seaman, Lennon and Ono's assistant at the time, Lennon was content to sit back as long as McCartney was producing what Lennon saw as mediocre material. Lennon took notice when McCartney released \"Coming Up\" in 1980, which was the year Lennon returned to the studio. \"It's driving me crackers!\" he jokingly complained, because he could not get the tune out of his head. That same year, Lennon was asked whether the group were dreaded enemies or the best of friends, and he replied that they were neither, and that he had not seen any of them in a long time. But he also said, \"I still love those guys. The Beatles are over, but John, Paul, George and Ringo go on.\"",
"title": "Personal relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Lennon and Ono used their honeymoon as a Bed-In for Peace at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel; the March 1969 event attracted worldwide media ridicule. During a second Bed-In three months later at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Lennon wrote and recorded \"Give Peace a Chance\". Released as a single, the song was quickly interpreted as an anti-war anthem and sung by a quarter of a million demonstrators against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC, on 15 November, the second Vietnam Moratorium Day. In December, they paid for billboards in 10 cities around the world which declared, in the national language, \"War Is Over! If You Want It\".",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "During the year, Lennon and Ono began to support efforts by the family of James Hanratty to prove his innocence. Hanratty had been hanged in 1962. According to Lennon, those who had condemned Hanratty were \"the same people who are running guns to South Africa and killing blacks in the streets ... The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it's the whole bullshit bourgeois scene.\" In London, Lennon and Ono staged a \"Britain Murdered Hanratty\" banner march and a \"Silent Protest For James Hanratty\", and produced a 40-minute documentary on the case. At an appeal hearing more than thirty years later, Hanratty's conviction was upheld after DNA evidence was found to match, validating those who condemned him.",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Lennon and Ono showed their solidarity with the Clydeside UCS workers' work-in of 1971 by sending a bouquet of red roses and a cheque for £5,000. On moving to New York City in August that year, they befriended two of the Chicago Seven, Yippie peace activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Another political activist, John Sinclair, poet and co-founder of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for selling two joints of marijuana after previous convictions for possession of the drug. In December 1971 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, 15,000 people attended the \"John Sinclair Freedom Rally\", a protest and benefit concert with contributions from Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, and others. Lennon and Ono, backed by David Peel and Jerry Rubin, performed an acoustic set of four songs from their forthcoming Some Time in New York City album including \"John Sinclair\", whose lyrics called for his release. The day before the rally, the Michigan Senate passed a bill that significantly reduced the penalties for possession of marijuana and four days later Sinclair was released on an appeal bond. The performance was recorded and two of the tracks later appeared on John Lennon Anthology (1998).",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Following the Bloody Sunday incident in Northern Ireland in 1972, Lennon said that given the choice between the British army and the IRA he would side with the latter. Lennon and Ono wrote two songs protesting British presence and actions in Ireland for their Some Time in New York City album: \"The Luck of the Irish\" and \"Sunday Bloody Sunday\". In 2000, David Shayler, a former member of Britain's domestic security service MI5, suggested that Lennon had given money to the IRA, though this was swiftly denied by Ono. Biographer Bill Harry records that following Bloody Sunday, Lennon and Ono financially supported the production of the film The Irish Tapes, a political documentary with an Irish Republican slant. In February 2000 Lennon's cousin Stanley Parkes stated that the singer had given money to the IRA during the 1970s. After the events of Bloody Sunday Lennon and Ono attended a protest in London while displaying a Red Mole newspaper with the headline \"For the IRA, Against British Imperialism\".",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "—John Lennon",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "According to FBI surveillance reports, and confirmed by Tariq Ali in 2006, Lennon was sympathetic to the International Marxist Group, a Trotskyist group formed in Britain in 1968. However, the FBI considered Lennon to have limited effectiveness as a revolutionary, as he was \"constantly under the influence of narcotics\".",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In 1972, Lennon contributed a drawing and limerick titled \"Why Make It Sad to Be Gay?\" to Len Richmond and Gary Noguera's The Gay Liberation Book. Lennon's last act of political activism was a statement in support of the striking minority sanitation workers in San Francisco on 5 December 1980. He and Ono planned to join the workers' protest on 14 December.",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Following the impact of \"Give Peace a Chance\" and \"Happy Xmas (War Is Over)\" on the anti-war movement, the Nixon administration heard rumours of Lennon's involvement in a concert to be held in San Diego at the same time as the Republican National Convention and tried to have him deported. Nixon believed that Lennon's anti-war activities could cost him his reelection; Republican Senator Strom Thurmond suggested in a February 1972 memo that \"deportation would be a strategic counter-measure\" against Lennon. The next month the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began deportation proceedings, arguing that his 1968 misdemeanour conviction for cannabis possession in London had made him ineligible for admission to the United States. Lennon spent the next three-and-a-half years in and out of deportation hearings until 8 October 1975, when a court of appeals barred the deportation attempt, stating \"the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds\". While the legal battle continued, Lennon attended rallies and made television appearances. He and Ono co-hosted The Mike Douglas Show for a week in February 1972, introducing guests such as Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale to mid-America. In 1972, Bob Dylan wrote a letter to the INS defending Lennon, stating:",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to the country's so-called art institution. They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as Artist Art by the overpowering mass media. Hurray for John and Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country's got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "On 23 March 1973, Lennon was ordered to leave the US within 60 days. Ono, meanwhile, was granted permanent residence. In response, Lennon and Ono held a press conference on 1 April 1973 at the New York City Bar Association, where they announced the formation of the state of Nutopia; a place with \"no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people\". Waving the white flag of Nutopia (two handkerchiefs), they asked for political asylum in the US. The press conference was filmed, and appeared in a 2006 documentary, The U.S. vs. John Lennon. Soon after the press conference, Nixon's involvement in a political scandal came to light, and in June the Watergate hearings began in Washington, DC. They led to the president's resignation 14 months later. In December 1974, when he and members of his tour entourage visited the White House, Harrison asked Gerald Ford, Nixon's successor, to intercede in the matter. Ford's administration showed little interest in continuing the battle against Lennon, and the deportation order was overturned in 1975. The following year, Lennon received his green card certifying his permanent residency, and when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, Lennon and Ono attended the Inaugural Ball.",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "After Lennon's death, historian Jon Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files that documented the Bureau's role in the deportation attempt. The FBI admitted it had 281 pages of files on Lennon, but refused to release most of them on the grounds that they contained national security information. In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. It took 14 years of litigation to force the FBI to release the withheld pages. The ACLU, representing Wiener, won a favourable decision in their suit against the FBI in the Ninth Circuit in 1991. The Justice Department appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in April 1992, but the court declined to review the case. In 1997, respecting President Bill Clinton's newly instigated rule that documents should be withheld only if releasing them would involve \"foreseeable harm\", the Justice Department settled most of the outstanding issues outside court by releasing all but 10 of the contested documents.",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Wiener published the results of his 14-year campaign in January 2000. Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files contained facsimiles of the documents, including \"lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges\". The story is told in the documentary The US vs. John Lennon. The final 10 documents in Lennon's FBI file, which reported on his ties with London anti-war activists in 1971 and had been withheld as containing \"national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality\", were released in December 2006. They contained no indication that the British government had regarded Lennon as a serious threat; one example of the released material was a report that two prominent British leftists had hoped Lennon would finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room.",
"title": "Political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Beatles biographer Bill Harry wrote that Lennon began drawing and writing creatively at an early age with the encouragement of his uncle. He collected his stories, poetry, cartoons and caricatures in a Quarry Bank High School exercise book that he called the Daily Howl. The drawings were often of crippled people, and the writings satirical, and throughout the book was an abundance of wordplay. According to classmate Bill Turner, Lennon created the Daily Howl to amuse his best friend and later Quarrymen bandmate Pete Shotton, to whom he would show his work before he let anyone else see it. Turner said that Lennon \"had an obsession for Wigan Pier. It kept cropping up\", and in Lennon's story A Carrot in a Potato Mine, \"the mine was at the end of Wigan Pier.\" Turner described how one of Lennon's cartoons depicted a bus stop sign annotated with the question, \"Why?\" Above was a flying pancake, and below, \"a blind man wearing glasses leading along a blind dog – also wearing glasses\".",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Lennon's love of wordplay and nonsense with a twist found a wider audience when he was 24. Harry writes that In His Own Write (1964) was published after \"Some journalist who was hanging around the Beatles came to me and I ended up showing him the stuff. They said, 'Write a book' and that's how the first one came about\". Like the Daily Howl it contained a mix of formats including short stories, poetry, plays and drawings. One story, \"Good Dog Nigel\", tells the tale of \"a happy dog, urinating on a lamp post, barking, wagging his tail – until he suddenly hears a message that he will be killed at three o'clock\". The Times Literary Supplement considered the poems and stories \"remarkable ... also very funny ... the nonsense runs on, words and images prompting one another in a chain of pure fantasy\". Book Week reported, \"This is nonsense writing, but one has only to review the literature of nonsense to see how well Lennon has brought it off. While some of his homonyms are gratuitous word play, many others have not only double meaning but a double edge.\" Lennon was not only surprised by the positive reception, but that the book was reviewed at all, and suggested that readers \"took the book more seriously than I did myself. It just began as a laugh for me\".",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "In combination with A Spaniard in the Works (1965), In His Own Write formed the basis of the stage play The Lennon Play: In His Own Write, co-adapted by Victor Spinetti and Adrienne Kennedy. After negotiations between Lennon, Spinetti and the artistic director of the National Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier, the play opened at The Old Vic in 1968. Lennon and Ono attended the opening night performance, their second public appearance together. In 1969, Lennon wrote \"Four in Hand\", a skit based on his teenage experiences of group masturbation, for Kenneth Tynan's play Oh! Calcutta! After Lennon's death, further works were published, including Skywriting by Word of Mouth (1986), Ai: Japan Through John Lennon's Eyes: A Personal Sketchbook (1992), with Lennon's illustrations of the definitions of Japanese words, and Real Love: The Drawings for Sean (1999). The Beatles Anthology (2000) also presented examples of his writings and drawings.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "In 1967, Lennon, who had attended art school, funded and anonymously participated in Ono's art exhibition Half-A-Room that was held at Lisson Gallery. Following his collaborating with Ono in the form of The Plastic Ono Band that began in 1968, Lennon became involved with the Fluxus art movement. In the summer of 1968, Lennon began showing his painting and conceptual art at his You Are Here art exhibition held at Robert Fraser Gallery in London. The show, that was dedicated to Ono, included a six foot in diameter round white monochrome painting called You Are Here (1968). Besides the white monochrome paint, its surface contained only the tiny hand written inscription \"you are here\". This painting, and the show in general, was conceived as a response to Ono's conceptual art piece This is Not Here (1966) that was part of her Fluxus installation of wall text pieces called Blue Room Event (1966). Blue Room Event consisted of sentences that Ono wrote directly on her white New York apartment walls and ceiling. Lennon's You Are Here show also included sixty charity collection boxes, a pair of Lennon's shoes with a sign that read \"I take my shoes off to you\", a ready made black bike (an apparent homage to Marcel Duchamp and his 1917 Bicycle Wheel), an overturned white hat labeled For The Artist, and a large glass jar full of free-to-take you are here white pin badges. A hidden camera secretly filmed the public reaction to the show. For the 1 July opening, Lennon, dressed all in white (as was Ono), released 365 white balloons into the city sky. Each ballon had attached to it a small paper card to be mailed back to Lennon at the Robert Fraser Gallery at 69 Duke Street, with the finder's comments.",
"title": "Art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "After moving to New York City, from 18 April to 12 June 1970, Lennon and Ono presented a series of Fluxus conceptual art events and concerts at Joe Jones's Tone Deaf Music Store called GRAPEFRUIT FLUXBANQUET. Performances included Come Impersonating John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Grapefruit Banquet and Portrait of John Lennon as a Young Cloud by Yoko + Everybody. That same year, Lennon also made The Complete Yoko Ono Word Poem Game (1970): a conceptual art poem collage that utilized the cut-up (or découpé) aleatory technique typical of the work of John Cage and many Fluxus artists. The cut-up technique can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs. For The Complete Yoko Ono Word Poem Game, Lennon took the portrait photo of himself that was included in the packaging of the 1968 The Beatles LP (aka The White Album) and cut it into 134 small rectangles. A single word was written on the back of each fragment, to be read in any order. The portrait image was meant to be reassembled in any order. The Complete Yoko Ono Word Poem Game was presented by Lennon to Ono on 28 July in an inscribed envelope for her to randomly assemble and reassemble at will.",
"title": "Art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Lennon made whimsical drawings and fine art prints on occasion until the end of his life. For example, Lennon exhibited at Eugene Schuster's London Arts Gallery his Bag One lithographs in an exhibition that included several depicting erotic imagery. The show opened on 15 January 1970 and 24 hours later it was raided by police officers who confiscated 8 of the 14 lithos on the grounds of indecency. The lithographs had been drawn by Lennon in 1969 chronicling his wedding and honeymoon with Yoko Ono and one of their bed-ins staged in the interests of world peace.",
"title": "Art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "In 1969, Lennon appeared in the Yoko Ono Fluxus art film Self-Portrait, which consisted of a single forty-minute shot of Lennon's penis. The film was premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In 1971, Lennon made an experimental art film called Erection that was edited on 16 mm film by George Maciunas, founder of the Fluxus art movement and avant-garde contemporary of Ono. The film uses the songs \"Airmale\" and \"You\" from Ono's 1971 album Fly, as its soundtrack.",
"title": "Art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Lennon played a mouth organ during a bus journey to visit his cousin in Scotland; the music caught the driver's ear. Impressed, the driver told Lennon of a harmonica he could have if he came to Edinburgh the following day, where one had been stored in the bus depot since a passenger had left it on a bus. The professional instrument quickly replaced Lennon's toy. He would continue to play the harmonica, often using the instrument during the Beatles' Hamburg years, and it became a signature sound in the group's early recordings. His mother taught him how to play the banjo, later buying him an acoustic guitar. At 16, he played rhythm guitar with the Quarrymen.",
"title": "Musicianship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "As his career progressed, he played a variety of electric guitars, predominantly the Rickenbacker 325, Epiphone Casino and Gibson J-160E, and, from the start of his solo career, the Gibson Les Paul Junior. Double Fantasy producer Jack Douglas claimed that since his Beatle days Lennon habitually tuned his D-string slightly flat, so his Aunt Mimi could tell which guitar was his on recordings. Occasionally he played a six-string bass guitar, the Fender Bass VI, providing bass on some Beatles numbers (\"Back in the U.S.S.R.\", \"The Long and Winding Road\", \"Helter Skelter\") that occupied McCartney with another instrument. His other instrument of choice was the piano, on which he composed many songs, including \"Imagine\", described as his best-known solo work. His jamming on a piano with McCartney in 1963 led to the creation of the Beatles' first US number one, \"I Want to Hold Your Hand\". In 1964, he became one of the first British musicians to acquire a Mellotron keyboard, though it was not heard on a Beatles recording until \"Strawberry Fields Forever\" in 1967.",
"title": "Musicianship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "The British critic Nik Cohn observed of Lennon, \"He owned one of the best pop voices ever, rasped and smashed and brooding, always fierce.\" Cohn wrote that Lennon, performing \"Twist and Shout\", would \"rant his way into total incoherence, half rupture himself.\" When the Beatles recorded the song, the final track during the mammoth one-day session that produced the band's 1963 debut album, Please Please Me, Lennon's voice, already compromised by a cold, came close to giving out. Lennon said, \"I couldn't sing the damn thing, I was just screaming.\" In the words of biographer Barry Miles, \"Lennon simply shredded his vocal cords in the interests of rock 'n' roll.\" The Beatles' producer, George Martin, tells how Lennon \"had an inborn dislike of his own voice which I could never understand. He was always saying to me: 'DO something with my voice! ... put something on it ... Make it different.'\" Martin obliged, often using double-tracking and other techniques.",
"title": "Musicianship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "As his Beatles era segued into his solo career, his singing voice found a widening range of expression. Biographer Chris Gregory writes of Lennon \"tentatively beginning to expose his insecurities in a number of acoustic-led 'confessional' ballads, so beginning the process of 'public therapy' that will eventually culminate in the primal screams of 'Cold Turkey' and the cathartic John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.\" Music critic Robert Christgau called this Lennon's \"greatest vocal performance ... from scream to whine, is modulated electronically ... echoed, filtered, and double tracked.\" David Stuart Ryan described Lennon's vocal delivery as ranging from \"extreme vulnerability, sensitivity and even naivety\" to a hard \"rasping\" style. Wiener too described contrasts, saying the singer's voice can be \"at first subdued; soon it almost cracks with despair\". Music historian Ben Urish recalled hearing the Beatles' Ed Sullivan Show performance of \"This Boy\" played on the radio a few days after Lennon's murder: \"As Lennon's vocals reached their peak ... it hurt too much to hear him scream with such anguish and emotion. But it was my emotions I heard in his voice. Just like I always had.\"",
"title": "Musicianship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Music historians Schinder and Schwartz wrote of the transformation in popular music styles that took place between the 1950s and the 1960s. They said that the Beatles' influence cannot be overstated: having \"revolutionised the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and opened rock and roll's doors to a tidal wave of British rock acts\", the group then \"spent the rest of the 1960s expanding rock's stylistic frontiers\". On National Poetry Day in 1999, the BBC conducted a poll to identify the UK's favourite song lyric and announced \"Imagine\" as the winner.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Two home recording demos by Lennon, \"Free as a Bird\" and \"Real Love\", were finished by the three surviving members of the Beatles when they reunited in 1994 and 1995. Both songs were released as Beatles singles in conjunction with the Anthology compilations. A third song, \"Now and Then\", was also worked on but not released until 2023 whereupon it was dubbed \"the last Beatles song\", topping the UK charts.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "In 1997, Yoko Ono and the BMI Foundation established an annual music competition programme for songwriters of contemporary musical genres to honour John Lennon's memory and his large creative legacy. Over $400,000 have been given through BMI Foundation's John Lennon Scholarships to talented young musicians in the United States.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "In a 2006 Guardian article, Jon Wiener wrote: \"For young people in 1972, it was thrilling to see Lennon's courage in standing up to [US President] Nixon. That willingness to take risks with his career, and his life, is one reason why people still admire him today.\" For music historians Urish and Bielen, Lennon's most significant effort was \"the self-portraits ... in his songs [which] spoke to, for, and about, the human condition.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In 2013, Downtown Music Publishing signed a publishing administration agreement for the US with Lenono Music and Ono Music, home to the song catalogues of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, respectively. Under the terms of the agreement, Downtown represents Lennon's solo works, including \"Imagine\", \"Instant Karma (We All Shine On)\", \"Power to the People\", \"Happy Xmas (War Is Over)\", \"Jealous Guy\", \"(Just Like) Starting Over\" and others.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Lennon has been the subject of numerous memorials and tributes. In 2002, the airport in Lennon's home town was renamed the Liverpool John Lennon Airport. On what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday in 2010, Cynthia and Julian Lennon unveiled the John Lennon Peace Monument in Chavasse Park, Liverpool. The sculpture, entitled Peace & Harmony, exhibits peace symbols and carries the inscription \"Peace on Earth for the Conservation of Life · In Honour of John Lennon 1940–1980\". In December 2013, the International Astronomical Union named one of the craters on Mercury after Lennon.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "There is a John Lennon Park in Havana, Cuba which features a statue in his likeness sitting on a bench.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership is regarded as one of the most influential and successful of the 20th century. As performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number one singles in the US Hot 100 chart. His album sales in the US stand at 14 million units. Double Fantasy was his best-selling album, at three million shipments in the US. Released shortly before his death, it won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. That year, the BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music was given to Lennon.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Participants in a 2002 BBC poll voted him eighth of \"100 Greatest Britons\". Between 2003 and 2008, Rolling Stone recognised Lennon in several reviews of artists and music, ranking him fifth of \"100 Greatest Singers of All Time\" and 38th of \"100 Greatest Artists of All Time\", and his albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, 22nd and 76th respectively of \"Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time\". He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) with the other Beatles in 1965, but returned his medal in 1969 because of \"Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts\". Lennon was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "All releases after his death in 1980 use archival footage.",
"title": "Filmography"
}
]
| John Winston Ono Lennon was an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-songwriter, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. His work included music, writing, drawings and film. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history. Born in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager. In 1956, he formed The Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960. Sometimes called "the smart Beatle", Lennon initially was the group's de facto leader, a role he gradually ceded to McCartney. Through his songwriting in the Beatles, he embraced myriad musical influences, initially writing and co-writing rock and pop-oriented hit songs in the band's early years, then later incorporating experimental elements into his compositions in the latter half of the Beatles' career as his songs became known for their increasing innovation. Lennon soon expanded his work into other media by participating in numerous films, including How I Won the War, and authoring In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, both collections of nonsense writings and line drawings. Starting with "All You Need Is Love", his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement and the larger counterculture of the 1960s. In 1969, he started the Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, multimedia artist Yoko Ono, held the two-week-long anti-war demonstration Bed-ins for Peace and left the Beatles to embark on a solo career. Between 1968 and 1972, Lennon and Ono collaborated on many works, including a trilogy of avant-garde albums, several more films, his solo debut John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and the international top-10 singles "Give Peace a Chance", "Instant Karma!", "Imagine", and "Happy Xmas". Moving to New York City in 1971, his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a three-year deportation attempt by the Nixon administration. Lennon and Ono separated from 1973 to 1975, during which time he produced Harry Nilsson's album Pussy Cats. He also had chart-topping collaborations with Elton John and David Bowie ("Fame"). Following a five-year hiatus, Lennon returned to music in 1980 with the Ono collaboration Double Fantasy. He was murdered by a Beatles fan, Mark David Chapman, three weeks after the album's release. As a performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number-one singles in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Double Fantasy, his best-selling album, won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. That year, he won the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. In 2002, Lennon was voted eighth in a BBC history poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer and 38th greatest artist of all time. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. | 2001-10-25T22:19:54Z | 2023-12-24T21:42:52Z | [
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15,854 | June 3 | June 3 is the 154th day of the year (155th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 211 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| June 3 is the 154th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 211 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-08-20T06:36:51Z | 2023-12-21T00:40:04Z | [
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15,855 | June 2 | June 2 is the 153rd day of the year (154th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 212 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,856 | June 1 | June 1 is the 152nd day of the year (153rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 213 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| June 1 is the 152nd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 213 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-08-18T00:55:12Z | 2023-12-15T20:28:34Z | [
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15,857 | June 22 | June 22 is the 173rd day of the year (174th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 192 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,858 | John Cleese | John Marwood Cleese (/kliːz/ KLEEZ; born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, and presenter. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report. In the late 1960s, he cofounded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus. Along with his Python costars Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman, Cleese starred in Monty Python films, which include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and The Meaning of Life (1983).
In the mid-1970s, Cleese and first wife Connie Booth cowrote the sitcom Fawlty Towers, in which he starred as hotel owner Basil Fawlty, for which he won the 1980 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance. In 2000, the show topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes, and in a 2001 Channel 4 poll, Basil was ranked second on its list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters.
Cleese costarred with Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and Fierce Creatures (1997), both of which he also wrote. For A Fish Called Wanda, he received Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award nominations. He has also starred in Time Bandits (1981), Clockwise (1986), and Rat Race (2001) and acted in Silverado (1985), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), two James Bond films (as R and Q), two Harry Potter films (as Nearly Headless Nick), and the last three Shrek films. He received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for Cheers (1987) and was nominated for 3rd Rock from the Sun (1998) and Will & Grace (2004).
Cleese has specialised in political and religious satire, black comedy, sketch comedy, and surreal humour. He was ranked the second best comedian ever in a 2005 Channel 4 poll of fellow comedians. He cofounded Video Arts, a production company making entertaining training films as well as The Secret Policeman's Ball benefit shows to raise funds for the human rights organisation Amnesty International. Formerly a staunch supporter of the Liberal Democrats, in 1999, he turned down an offer from the party to nominate him for a life peerage. In 2023, he began presenting a talk show on GB News.
Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England on 27 October 1939, the only child of Reginald Francis Cleese (1893–1972), an insurance salesman, and his wife Muriel Evelyn (née Cross, 1899–2000), the daughter of an auctioneer. His family's surname was originally Cheese, but his father had thought it was embarrassing and used the name Cleese when he enlisted in the Army during the First World War; he changed it officially by deed poll in 1923. As a child, Cleese supported Bristol City and Somerset County Cricket Club. Cleese was educated at St Peter's Preparatory School (paid for by money his mother inherited), where he received a prize for English and did well at cricket and boxing. When he was 13, he was awarded an exhibition at Clifton College, an English public school in Bristol. By that age, he was more than 6 feet (1.83 m) tall.
The biggest influence was The Goon Show. Kids were devoted to it. It was written by Spike Milligan. It also had Peter Sellers in it, who of course is the greatest voice man of all time. In the morning, we'd be at school and we'd discuss the whole thing and rehash the jokes and talk about it. We were obsessed with it.
—Cleese on his greatest comedic influence growing up, 1950s BBC Radio comedy The Goon Show.
Cleese allegedly defaced the school grounds, as a prank, by painting footprints to suggest that the statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had left its plinth and gone to the toilet. Cleese played cricket in the First XI and did well academically, passing eight O-Levels and three A-Levels in mathematics, physics and chemistry. In his autobiography So, Anyway, he says that discovering, aged 17, he had not been made a house prefect by his housemaster affected his outlook: "It was not fair and therefore it was unworthy of my respect... I believe that this moment changed my perspective on the world."
Cleese could not go straight to the University of Cambridge, as the ending of National Service meant there were twice the usual number of applicants for places, so he returned to his prep school for two years to teach science, English, geography, history, and Latin (he drew on his Latin teaching experience later for a scene in Life of Brian, in which he corrects Brian's badly written Latin graffiti). He then took up a place he had won at Downing College, Cambridge, to read law. He also joined the Cambridge Footlights. He recalled that he went to the Cambridge Guildhall, where each university society had a stall, and went up to the Footlights stall, where he was asked if he could sing or dance. He replied "no" as he was not allowed to sing at his school because he was so bad, and if there was anything worse than his singing, it was his dancing. He was then asked "Well, what do you do?" to which he replied, "I make people laugh."
At the Footlights theatrical club, Cleese spent a lot of time with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie and met his future writing partner Graham Chapman. Cleese wrote extra material for the 1961 Footlights Revue I Thought I Saw It Move, and was registrar for the Footlights Club during 1962. He was also in the cast of the 1962 Footlights Revue Double Take! Cleese graduated from Cambridge in 1963 with an upper second. Despite his successes on The Frost Report, his father sent him cuttings from The Daily Telegraph offering management jobs in places such as Marks & Spencer.
Cleese was a scriptwriter, as well as a cast member, for the 1963 Footlights Revue A Clump of Plinths. The revue was so successful at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that it was renamed Cambridge Circus and taken to the West End in London and then on a tour of New Zealand and Broadway, with the cast also appearing in some of the revue's sketches on The Ed Sullivan Show in October 1964.
After Cambridge Circus, Cleese briefly stayed in America, performing on and off-Broadway. While performing in the musical Half a Sixpence, Cleese met future Python Terry Gilliam as well as American actress Connie Booth, whom he married on 20 February 1968. At their wedding at a Unitarian Church in Manhattan, the couple attempted to ensure an absence of any theistic language. "The only moment of disappointment," Cleese recalled, "came at the very end of the service when I discovered that I'd failed to excise one particular mention of the word 'God.'" Later, Booth became a writing partner. He was soon offered work as a writer with BBC Radio, where he worked on several programmes, most notably as a sketch writer for The Dick Emery Show. The success of the Footlights Revue led to the recording of a short series of half-hour radio programmes, called I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, which were so popular that the BBC commissioned a regular series with the same title that ran from 1965 to 1974. Cleese returned to Britain and joined the cast. In many episodes, he is credited as "John Otto Cleese" (according to Jem Roberts, this may have been due to the embarrassment of his actual middle name Marwood).
Also in 1965, Cleese and Chapman began writing on The Frost Report. The writing staff chosen for The Frost Report consisted of a number of writers and performers who went on to make names for themselves in comedy. They included co-performers from I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again and future Goodies Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor, and also Frank Muir, Barry Cryer, Marty Feldman, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Dick Vosburgh and future Python members Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. While working on The Frost Report, the future Pythons developed the writing styles that would make their collaboration significant. Cleese's and Chapman's sketches often involved authority figures, some of whom were performed by Cleese, while Jones and Palin were both infatuated with filmed scenes that opened with idyllic countryside panoramas. Idle was one of those charged with writing David Frost's monologue. During this period Cleese met and befriended influential British comedian Peter Cook, eventually collaborating with Cook on several projects and forming a close friendship that lasted until Cook's death in 1995.
It was as a performer on The Frost Report that Cleese achieved his breakthrough on British television as a comedy actor, appearing as the tall, upper class patrician figure in the classic "Class" sketch (screened on 7 April 1966), contrasting comically in a line-up with the shorter, middle class Ronnie Barker and the even shorter, working class Ronnie Corbett. The British Film Institute commented, "Its twinning of height and social position, combined with a minimal script, created a classic TV moment." This series was so popular that in 1966 Cleese and Chapman were invited to work as writers and performers with Brooke-Taylor and Feldman on At Last the 1948 Show, during which time the Four Yorkshiremen sketch was written by all four writers/performers (the Four Yorkshiremen sketch is now better known as a Monty Python sketch).
Cleese and Chapman also wrote episodes for the first series of Doctor in the House (and later Cleese wrote six episodes of Doctor at Large on his own in 1971). These series were successful, and in 1969 Cleese and Chapman were offered their very own series. However, owing to Chapman's alcoholism, Cleese found himself bearing an increasing workload in the partnership and was, therefore, unenthusiastic about doing a series with just the two of them. He had found working with Palin on The Frost Report an enjoyable experience and invited him to join the series. Palin had previously been working on Do Not Adjust Your Set with Idle and Jones, with Terry Gilliam creating the animations. The four of them had, on the back of the success of Do Not Adjust Your Set, been offered a series for Thames Television, which they were waiting to begin when Cleese's offer arrived. Palin agreed to work with Cleese and Chapman in the meantime, bringing with him Gilliam, Jones, and Idle.
Monty Python's Flying Circus ran for four series from October 1969 to December 1974 on BBC Television, though Cleese quit the show after the third. Cleese's two primary characterisations were as a sophisticate and a loony. He portrayed the former as a series of announcers, TV show hosts, and government officials (for example, "The Ministry of Silly Walks"). The latter is perhaps best represented in the "Cheese Shop" and by Cleese's Mr Praline character, the man with a dead Norwegian Blue parrot and a menagerie of other animals all named "Eric". He was also known for his working class "Sergeant Major" character, who worked as a Police Sergeant, Roman Centurion, etc. Cleese also appeared during some abrupt scene changes as a radio commentator (usually outfitted in a dinner suit) where, in a rather pompous manner, he would make the formal and determined announcement "And now for something completely different", which later became the title of the first Monty Python film.
Partnership with Graham Chapman
He was the greatest sounding board I've ever had. If Graham thought something was funny, then it almost certainly was funny. You cannot believe how invaluable that is.
— Cleese on Chapman in The Pythons Autobiography by The Pythons (2003).
Along with Gilliam's animations, Cleese's work with Graham Chapman provided Python with its darkest and angriest moments, and many of his characters display the seething suppressed rage that later characterised his portrayal of Basil Fawlty.
Unlike Palin and Jones, Cleese and Chapman wrote together in the same room; Cleese claims that their writing partnership involved him doing most of the work, while Chapman sat back, not speaking for long periods before suddenly coming out with an idea that often elevated the sketch to a new level. A classic example of this is the "Dead Parrot sketch", envisaged by Cleese as a satire on poor customer service, which was originally to have involved a broken toaster and later a broken car (this version was actually performed and broadcast on the pre-Python special How to Irritate People). It was Chapman's suggestion to change the faulty item into a dead parrot, and he also suggested that the parrot be specifically a "Norwegian Blue", giving the sketch a surreal air which made it far more memorable.
Their humour often involved ordinary people in ordinary situations behaving absurdly for no obvious reason. Like Chapman, Cleese's poker face, clipped middle class accent, and intimidating height allowed him to appear convincingly as a variety of authority figures, such as policemen, detectives, Nazi officers or government officials, which he then proceeded to undermine. In the "Ministry of Silly Walks" sketch (written by Palin and Jones), for example, Cleese exploits his stature as the crane-legged civil servant performing a grotesquely elaborate walk to his office. On the Silly Walks sketch, Ben Beaumont-Thomas in The Guardian writes, "Cleese is utterly deadpan as he takes the stereotypical bowler-hatted political drone and ruthlessly skewers him. All the self-importance, bureaucratic inefficiency and laughable circuitousness of Whitehall is summed up in one balletic extension of his slender leg."
Chapman and Cleese also specialised in sketches wherein two characters conducted highly articulate arguments over completely arbitrary subjects, such as in the "cheese shop", the "dead parrot" sketch and "Argument Clinic", where Cleese plays a stone-faced bureaucrat employed to sit behind a desk and engage people in pointless, trivial bickering. All of these roles were opposite Palin (who Cleese often claims is his favourite Python to work with)—the comic contrast between the towering Cleese's crazed aggression and the shorter Palin's shuffling inoffensiveness is a common feature in the series. Occasionally, the typical Cleese–Palin dynamic is reversed, as in "Fish Licence", wherein Palin plays the bureaucrat with whom Cleese is trying to work.
Though Flying Circus lasted four series, by the start of series 3, Cleese was growing tired of dealing with Chapman's alcoholism. He felt, too, that the show's scripts had declined in quality. For these reasons, he became restless and decided to move on. Though he stayed for the third series, he officially left the group before the fourth season. Cleese received a credit on three episodes of the fourth series which used material from these sessions, though he was officially unconnected with the fourth series. He remained friendly with the group, and all six began writing Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Much of his work on Holy Grail remains widely quoted, including the Black Knight scene. Cleese returned to the troupe to co-write and co-star in two further Monty Python films, Monty Python's Life of Brian and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. His attack on Roman rule in Life of Brian–when he asks "What have the Romans ever done for us?", before being met with a string of benefits including sanitation, roads and public order–was ranked the seventh funniest line in film in a 2002 poll. Since the last Python film (Meaning of Life in 1983) Cleese has participated in various live performances with the group over the years.
From 1970 to 1973, Cleese served as rector of the University of St Andrews. His election proved a milestone for the university, revolutionising and modernising the post. For instance, the rector was traditionally entitled to appoint an "assessor", a deputy to sit in his place at important meetings in his absence. Cleese changed this into a position for a student, elected across campus by the student body, resulting in direct access and representation for the student body.
Around this time, Cleese worked with comedian Les Dawson on his sketch/stand-up show Sez Les. The differences between the two physically (the tall, lean Cleese and the short, stout Dawson) and socially (the public school and the Cambridge-educated Cleese vs. the working class, self-educated Mancunian Dawson) were marked, but both worked well together from series 8 onwards until the series ended in 1976.
Cleese appeared on a single, "Superspike", with Bill Oddie and a group of UK athletes, billed the "Superspike Squad", to fund the latter's attendance at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal.
Cleese starred in the low-budget spoof of the Sherlock Holmes detective series The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It (1977) as the grandson of the world's greatest consulting detective. In December 1977, Cleese appeared as a guest star on The Muppet Show. Ranked one of the best guest stars to appear on the show, Cleese was a fan of The Muppet Show and co-wrote much of the episode. In it he is "kidnapped" before the show begins, complains about the number of pigs, and gets roped into doing a closing number with Kermit the Frog, Sweetums, pigs, chickens and monsters. Cleese also made a cameo appearance in their 1981 film The Great Muppet Caper and won the TV Times award for Funniest Man on TV – 1978–79. In 1979, he starred in a TV special, To Norway, Home of Giants, produced by Johnny Bergh.
Throughout the 1970s, Cleese also produced and acted in a number of successful business training films, including Meetings, Bloody Meetings, and More Bloody Meetings. These were produced by his company Video Arts.
Fawlty Towers
Cleese achieved greater prominence in the United Kingdom as the neurotic hotel manager Basil Fawlty in the two series of Fawlty Towers, first broadcast 1975 and 1979, which he co-wrote with his wife Connie Booth. The series won three BAFTA awards when produced, and in 2000 it topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. In a 2001 poll conducted by Channel 4 Basil Fawlty was ranked second (behind Homer Simpson) on their list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters. The series also featured Prunella Scales as Basil's acerbic wife Sybil, Andrew Sachs as the much abused Spanish waiter Manuel, and Booth as waitress Polly, the series' voice of sanity. Cleese based Basil Fawlty on a real person, Donald Sinclair, whom he had encountered in 1970 while the Monty Python team were staying at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay while filming inserts for their television series. Reportedly, Cleese was inspired by Sinclair's mantra, "I could run this hotel just fine if it weren't for the guests." He later described Sinclair as "the most wonderfully rude man I have ever met," although Sinclair's widow has said her husband was totally misrepresented in the series. During the Pythons' stay, Sinclair allegedly threw Idle's briefcase out of the hotel "in case it contained a bomb," complained about Gilliam's "American" table manners, and threw a bus timetable at another guest after he dared to ask the time of the next bus to town.
The first series was screened from 19 September 1975 on BBC 2, initially to poor reviews, but gained momentum when repeated on BBC 1 the following year. Despite this, a second series did not air until 1979, by which time Cleese's marriage to Booth had ended, but they revived their collaboration for the second series. Fawlty Towers consisted of two seasons, each of only six episodes; Cleese and Booth both maintain that this was to avoid compromising the quality of the series. The popularity of Fawlty Towers has endured, and in addition to featuring high in greatest-ever television show polls it is often rebroadcast. In a 2002 poll, Basil's "don't mention the war" comment (said to the waitress Polly about the German guests) was ranked the second funniest line in television.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Cleese focused on film, though he did work with Peter Cook in his one-off TV special Peter Cook and Co. in 1980. In the same year, Cleese played Petruchio, in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew in the BBC Television Shakespeare series. In 1981 he appeared in the Terry Gilliam-directed Time Bandits as Robin Hood. He also participated in Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (filmed 1980, released 1982) and starred in The Secret Policeman's Ball for Amnesty International. In 1985, Cleese had a small dramatic role as a sheriff in the American Western Silverado, which had an all-star cast that included Kevin Kline, with whom he starred in A Fish Called Wanda three years later. In 1986, he starred in the British comedy film Clockwise as an uptight school headmaster obsessed with punctuality and constantly getting into trouble during a journey to speak at the Headmasters' Conference. Written by Michael Frayn, the film was successful in the UK but not in the United States. It earned Cleese the 1987 Peter Sellers Award For Comedy at the Evening Standard British Film Awards.
In 1988, Cleese wrote and starred in A Fish Called Wanda as the lead, Archie Leach, along with Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and Michael Palin. Wanda was a commercial and critical success, becoming one of the top ten films of the year at the US box office, and Cleese was nominated for an Academy Award for his script. Kline won the Oscar for his portrayal of bumbling, violent, narcissistic ex-CIA agent Otto West in the film.
From 1988 to 1992, Cleese appeared in numerous television commercials for Schweppes Ginger Ale. Between 1992 and 1994, he also appeared in some television commercials for Magnavox.
In 1989, Graham Chapman was diagnosed with throat cancer; Cleese, Michael Palin, Peter Cook, and Chapman's partner David Sherlock witnessed Chapman's death. Chapman's death occurred a day before the 20th anniversary of the first broadcast of Flying Circus, with Jones commenting that it was "the worst case of party-pooping in all history." Cleese gave a eulogy at Chapman's memorial service.
Cleese later played a supporting role in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) alongside Branagh himself and Robert De Niro. With Robin Skynner, the English psychiatrist, Cleese wrote two books on relationships: Families and How to Survive Them and Life and How to Survive It. The books are presented as a dialogue between Skynner and Cleese.
The follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda, Fierce Creatures—which again starred Cleese alongside Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Palin—was released in 1997, but was greeted with mixed reception by critics and audiences. Cleese has since often stated that making the second film had been a mistake. When asked by his friend, director and restaurant critic Michael Winner, what he would do differently if he could live his life again, Cleese responded, "I wouldn't have married Alyce Faye Eichelberger and I wouldn't have made Fierce Creatures."
In 1999, Cleese appeared in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough as Q's assistant, referred to by Bond as "R". In 2002, when Cleese reprised his role in Die Another Day, the character was promoted, making Cleese the new quartermaster (Q) of MI6. In 2004, Cleese was featured as Q in the video game James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing, featuring his likeness and voice. Cleese did not appear in the subsequent Bond films, Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall; in the latter film, Ben Whishaw was cast in the role of Q.
Cleese is Provost's visiting professor at Cornell University, after having been Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large from 1999 to 2006. He makes occasional well-received appearances on the Cornell campus. In 2001, Cleese was cast in the comedy Rat Race as the eccentric hotel owner Donald P. Sinclair, the name of the Torquay hotel owner on whom he had based the character of Basil Fawlty. That year he appeared as Nearly Headless Nick in the first Harry Potter film: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001), a role he would reprise in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002). In 2002, Cleese made a cameo appearance in the film The Adventures of Pluto Nash, in which he played "James", a computerised chauffeur of a hover car stolen by the title character (played by Eddie Murphy). The vehicle is subsequently destroyed in a chase, leaving the chauffeur stranded in a remote place on the moon. In 2003, Cleese appeared as Lyle Finster on the US sitcom Will & Grace. His character's daughter, Lorraine, was played by Minnie Driver. In the series, Lyle Finster briefly marries Karen Walker (Megan Mullally). In 2004, Cleese was credited as co-writer of a DC Comics graphic novel titled Superman: True Brit. Part of DC's "Elseworlds" line of imaginary stories, True Brit, mostly written by Kim Howard Johnson, suggests what might have happened had Superman's rocket ship landed on a farm in Britain, not America.
From 10 November to 9 December 2005, Cleese toured New Zealand with his stage show John Cleese—His Life, Times and Current Medical Problems. Cleese described it as "a one-man show with several people in it, which pushes the envelope of acceptable behaviour in new and disgusting ways". The show was developed in New York City with William Goldman and includes Cleese's daughter Camilla as a writer and actor (the shows were directed by Australian Bille Brown). His assistant of many years, Garry Scott-Irvine, also appeared and was listed as a co-producer. The show then played in universities in California and Arizona from 10 January to 25 March 2006 under the title Seven Ways to Skin an Ocelot. His voice can be downloaded for directional guidance purposes as a downloadable option on some personal GPS-navigation device models by company TomTom.
In a 2005 poll of comedians and comedy insiders, The Comedians' Comedian, Cleese was voted second to Peter Cook. In 2006, Cleese hosted a television special of football's greatest kicks, goals, saves, bloopers, plays, and penalties, as well as football's influence on culture (including the Monty Python sketch "Philosophy Football"), featuring interviews with pop culture icons Dave Stewart, Dennis Hopper, and Henry Kissinger, as well as eminent footballers, including Pelé, Mia Hamm, and Thierry Henry. The Art of Soccer with John Cleese was released in North America on DVD in January 2009 by BFS Entertainment & Multimedia. Also in 2006, Cleese released the song "Don't Mention the World Cup".
Cleese lent his voice to the BioWare video game Jade Empire. His role was that of an "outlander" named Sir Roderick Ponce von Fontlebottom the Magnificent Bastard, stranded in the Imperial City of the Jade Empire. His character is essentially a British colonialist stereotype who refers to the people of the Jade Empire as "savages in need of enlightenment". His armour has the design of a fork stuck in a piece of cheese. In 2007, Cleese appeared in ads for Titleist as a golf course designer named "Ian MacCallister", who represents "Golf Designers Against Distance". Also in 2007, he was involved in filming of the sequel to The Pink Panther, titled The Pink Panther 2, with Steve Martin and Aishwarya Rai.
Cleese collaborated with Los Angeles Guitar Quartet member William Kanengiser in 2008 on the text to the performance piece "The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha". Cleese, as narrator, and the LAGQ premiered the work in Santa Barbara. The year 2008 also saw reports of Cleese working on a musical version of A Fish Called Wanda with his daughter Camilla.
At the end of March 2009, Cleese published his first article as "Contributing Editor" to The Spectator: "The real reason I had to join The Spectator". Cleese has also hosted comedy galas at the Montreal Just for Laughs comedy festival in 2006, and again in 2009. Towards the end of 2009 and into 2010, Cleese appeared in a series of television adverts for the Norwegian electric goods shop chain Elkjøp. In March 2010 it was announced that Cleese would be playing Jasper in the video game Fable III.
In 2009 and 2010, Cleese toured Scandinavia and the US with his Alimony Tour Year One and Year Two. In May 2010, it was announced that this tour, set for May 2011, would extend to the UK (his first tour there). The show is dubbed the "Alimony Tour" in reference to the financial implications of Cleese's divorce. The UK tour started in Cambridge on 3 May, visiting Birmingham, Nottingham, Salford, York, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Oxford, Bristol and Bath (the Alimony Tour DVD was recorded on 2 July, the final Bath date). Later in 2011 John took his Alimony Tour to South Africa. He played Cape Town on the 21 & 22 October before moving over to Johannesburg, where he played from 25 to 30 October. In January 2012 he took his one-man show to Australia, starting in Perth on 22 January and throughout the next four months visited Adelaide, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Newcastle, New South Wales, Melbourne, Sydney, and finished up during April in Canberra.
In October 2010, Cleese was featured in the launch of an advertising campaign by The Automobile Association for a new home emergency response product. He appeared as a man who believed the AA could not help him during a series of disasters, including water pouring through his ceiling, with the line "The AA? For faulty showers?" During 2010, Cleese appeared in a series of radio advertisements for the Canadian insurance company Pacific Blue Cross, in which he plays a character called "Dr. Nigel Bilkington, Chief of Medicine for American General Hospital".
In 2012, Cleese was cast in Hunting Elephants, a heist comedy by Israeli filmmaker Reshef Levi. Cleese had to quit just prior to filming due to heart trouble and was replaced by Patrick Stewart. Between September and October 2013, Cleese embarked on his first-ever cross-Canada comedy tour. Entitled "John Cleese: Last Time to See Me Before I Die tour", he visited Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Victoria and finished in Vancouver, performing to mostly sold-out venues. Cleese returned to the stage in Dubai in November 2013, where he performed to a sold-out theatre.
Cleese was interviewed and appears as himself in filmmaker Gracie Otto's 2013 documentary film The Last Impresario, about Cleese's longtime friend and colleague Michael White. White produced Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Cleese's pre-Python comedy production Cambridge Circus. At a comic press conference in November 2013, Cleese and other surviving members of the Monty Python comedy group announced a reuniting performance to be held in July 2014.
Cleese joined with Eric Idle in 2015 and 2016 for a tour of North America, Canada and the ANZUS nations, "John Cleese & Eric Idle: Together Again At Last . . . For The Very First Time," playing small theatres and including interaction with audiences as well as sketches and reminisces. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything interview, Cleese expressed regret that he had turned down the role played by Robin Williams in The Birdcage, the butler played by Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day, and the clergyman played by Peter Cook in The Princess Bride.
In 2017, he wrote Bang Bang! a new adaptation of Georges Feydeau's French play Monsieur Chasse! for the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, before making its American premiere at the Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, New York in 2018 followed by touring the UK in spring 2020.
In 2021, Cleese cancelled an appearance at the Cambridge Union Society after learning that art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon had been blacklisted by the union for impersonating Adolf Hitler. His visit to the university was intended to be part of a documentary on wokeism. Cleese said he was "blacklisting myself before someone else does".
In 2023, he starred in Roman Polanski's drama film The Palace. In October, Cleese starting presenting a new show on GB News called The Dinosaur Hour which airs on Sunday evenings.
In his Alimony Tour Cleese explained the origin of his fondness for black humour, the only thing that he inherited from his mother. Examples of it are the Dead Parrot sketch, "The Kipper and the Corpse" episode of Fawlty Towers, his clip for the 1992 BBC2 mockumentary "A Question of Taste", the Undertakers sketch, and his eulogy at Graham Chapman's memorial service which included the line, "Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard! I hope he fries." On his attitude to life he states, "I can take almost nothing seriously".
Cleese has criticised political correctness, wokeism and cancel culture, saying that despite initial good intentions to "not be mean to people", they have become "a sort of indulgence of the most over-sensitive people in your culture, the people who are most easily upset [...] if you have to keep thinking which words you can use and which you can't, then that will stifle creativity." According to Cleese, "The main thing is to realise that words depend on their context [...] PC people simply don't understand this business about context because they tend to be very literal-minded", and that he imagined a "woke joke [...] might be heart-warming but it's not going to be very funny." He has also argued that political correctness and wokeism are a threat to humour, creativity, and freedom of thought and expression.
In 2020, following a controversy over the content of the Fawlty Towers episode "The Germans", Cleese criticised the BBC, saying "The BBC is now run by a mixture of marketing people and petty bureaucrats. It used to have a large sprinkling of people who'd actually made programmes. Not any more. So BBC decisions are made by persons whose main concern is not losing their jobs... That's why they're so cowardly and gutless and contemptible." He likened the style of humour in Fawlty Towers to the representation of Alf Garnett from another BBC sitcom, Till Death Us Do Part, saying "We laughed at Alf's reactionary views. Thus we discredited them, by laughing at him. Of course, there were people—very stupid people—who said 'Thank God someone is saying these things at last'. We laughed at these people too. Now they're taking decisions about BBC comedy."
Amnesty first started doing these fund-raising shows in 1976. The instigation came from John Cleese who wanted to help out. And he did it in the only way he knew how. Which was to put on a show with what he described as "a few friends". Who of course transpired to be his colleagues in Monty Python and other luminaries of British comedy.
— Martin Lewis, co-founder of The Secret Policeman's Ball, on Cleese instigating the benefit show.
Cleese (and the other members of Python) have contributed their services to charitable endeavours and causes—sometimes as an ensemble, at other times as individuals. The cause that has been the most frequent and consistent beneficiary has been the human rights work of Amnesty International via the Secret Policeman's Ball benefit shows. The idea of the Ball was conceived by Cleese, with Huffington Post stating "in 1976 he "friended" the then-struggling Amnesty International (according to Martin Lewis, the very notion of Human Rights was then not the domain of hipsters and students, but just of foreign-policy wonks) first with a cheque signed "J. Cleese" — and then by rounding up "a few friends" to put on a show." Many musicians have publicly attributed their activism—and the organisation of their own benefit events—to the inspiration of the work in this field of Cleese and the rest of Python, such as Bob Geldof (organiser of Live Aid), U2, Pete Townshend, and Sting. On the impact of the Ball on Geldof, Sting states, "he took the 'Ball' and ran with it."
Cleese, in 2022, spoke at the conference of the revival Social Democratic Party. Previously, he was a long-standing supporter of the Liberal Democrats and before that was a supporter of the original SDP after their formation in 1981. During the 1987 general election he recorded a party political broadcast for the SDP–Liberal Alliance, in which he advocated for the introduction of proportional representation. Cleese subsequently appeared in broadcasts for the Liberal Democrats in the 1997 general election and narrated a radio election broadcast for the party during the 2001 general election.
In 2008, Cleese expressed support for Barack Obama and his presidential candidacy, offering his services as a speech writer. He was an outspoken critic of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, saying that "Michael Palin is no longer the funniest Palin". The same year, he wrote a satirical poem about Fox News commentator Sean Hannity for Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
In 2011, Cleese declared his appreciation for Britain's coalition government between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, saying: "I think what's happening at the moment is rather interesting. The Coalition has made everything a little more courteous and a little more flexible. I think it was quite good that the Liberal Democrats had to compromise a bit with the Tories." He also criticised the previous Labour government, commenting: "Although my inclinations are slightly left-of-centre, I was terribly disappointed with the last Labour government. Gordon Brown lacked emotional intelligence and was never a leader." Cleese also reiterated his support for proportional representation.
In April 2011, Cleese said that he had declined a life peerage for political services in 1999. Outgoing leader of the Liberal Democrats Paddy Ashdown had put forward the suggestion shortly before stepping down, with the idea that Cleese would take the party whip and sit as a working peer, but the actor quipped that he "realised this involved being in England in the winter and I thought that was too much of a price to pay." Cleese also declined a CBE title in 1996 as he thought, "they were silly."
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2014, Cleese expressed political interest about the UK Independence Party, saying that although he was in doubt as to whether he was prepared to vote for it, he was attracted to its challenge to the established political order and the radicalism of its policies on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union. He expressed support for immigration, but also concern about the integration of immigrants into British culture.
Talking to Der Spiegel in 2015, Cleese expressed a critical view on what he saw as a plutocracy that was unhealthily developing control of the governance of the First World's societies, stating that he had reached a point when he "saw that our existence here is absolutely hopeless. I see the rich have got a stranglehold on us. If somebody had said that to me when I was 20, I would have regarded him as a left-wing loony."
In 2016, Cleese publicly supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union. He tweeted: "If I thought there was any chance of major reform in the EU, I'd vote to stay in. But there isn't. Sad." Cleese said that "EU bureaucrats" had taken away "any trace of democratic accountability" and suggested they should "give up the euro, introduce accountability."
During then-Republican nominee Donald Trump's run for the US presidency in 2016, Cleese described Trump as "a narcissist, with no attention span, who doesn't have clear ideas about anything and makes it all up as he goes along". He had previously described the leadership of the Republican Party as "the most cynical, most disgracefully immoral people I've ever come across in a Western civilisation".
In 2017, Cleese stated that he would not vote in that year's general election because "I live in Chelsea and Kensington, so under our present system my vote is utterly worthless." In July 2018, Cleese said that he was leaving the UK to relocate to the Caribbean island of Nevis, partly over frustration around the standard of the Brexit debate, including "dreadful lies" by "the right" and a lack of reform regarding the press and the voting system. He relocated to Nevis on 1 November 2018.
In May 2019, Cleese repeated his previous statement that London was no longer an English city, saying "virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation. So there must be some truth in it... I note also that London was the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU." London Mayor Sadiq Khan responded, "These comments make John Cleese sound like he's in character as Basil Fawlty. Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength. We are proudly the English capital, a European city and a global hub." Cleese added, "I suspect I should apologise for my affection for the Englishness of my upbringing, but in some ways I found it calmer, more polite, more humorous, less tabloid, and less money-oriented than the one that is replacing it."
In 2020, Cleese opposed the BBC's removal of the Fawlty Towers episode "The Germans" from the UKTV streaming service after protests following the murder of George Floyd, stating that the program was mocking prejudice with its use of a character who uttered racial slurs. "If they can't see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say," said Cleese. UKTV later restored the episode with a disclaimer about its content.
In November 2021, Cleese protested against perceived cancel culture by blacklisting himself over a Hitler impersonation controversy at the Cambridge Union.
In 1992, the UK Health Education Authority (subsequently the Health Development Agency, now merged into the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) recruited Cleese—an ex-smoker—to star in a series of anti-smoking public service announcements (PSAs) on British television, which took the form of sketches rife with morbid humour about smoking and were designed to encourage adult smokers to quit. In a controlled study of regions of central and northern England (one region received no intervention) the PSAs were broadcast in two regions, and one region received both the PSAs, plus locally organised anti-tobacco campaigning. The study found:
After 18 months, 9.8% of successfully re-interviewed smokers had stopped and 4.3% of ex-smokers had relapsed. [...] There was no evidence of an extra effect of the local tobacco control network when combined with TV media [...] Applying these results to a typical population where 28% smoke and 28% are ex-smokers, and where there would be an equal number of quitters and relapsers over an 18 month period without the campaign, suggests that the campaign would reduce smoking prevalence by about 1.2%.
Cleese met Connie Booth in the US and they married in 1968. In 1971, Booth gave birth to their only child, Cynthia Cleese, who went on to appear with her father in his films A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures. With Booth, Cleese wrote the scripts for and co-starred in both series of Fawlty Towers, although the two were actually divorced before the second series was finished and aired. Cleese and Booth are said to have remained close friends since. Cleese has two grandchildren, Evan and Olivia, through Cynthia's marriage to writer/director Ed Solomon. Cleese married American actress Barbara Trentham in 1981. Their daughter Camilla, Cleese's second child, was born in 1984. He and Trentham divorced in 1990. During this time, Cleese emigrated to Los Angeles.
In 1992, he married American psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger. They divorced in 2008; the divorce settlement left Eichelberger with £12 million in finance and assets, including £600,000 a year for seven years. Cleese said, "What I find so unfair is that if we both died today, her children would get much more than mine ... I got off lightly. Think what I'd have had to pay Alyce if she had contributed anything to the relationship—such as children, or a conversation".
Less than a year later, he returned to the UK, where he has property in London and a home on the Royal Crescent in Bath, Somerset. In August 2012, Cleese married English jewellery designer and former model Jennifer Wade in a ceremony on the Caribbean island of Mustique.
In an interview in 2014, Cleese blamed his mother, who lived to the age of 101, for his problems in relationships with women, saying: "My ingrained habit of walking on eggshells when dealing with my mother dominated my romantic liaisons for many years." Cleese said that he had spent "a large part of my life in some form of therapy" over his relationships with women.
In March 2015, in an interview with Der Spiegel, he was asked if he was religious. Cleese stated that he did not think much of organised religion and said he was not committed to "anything except the vague feeling that there is something more going on than the materialist reductionist people think".
Cleese has a passion for lemurs. Following the 1997 comedy film Fierce Creatures, in which the ring-tailed lemur played a key role, he hosted the 1998 BBC documentary In the Wild: Operation Lemur with John Cleese, which tracked the progress of a reintroduction of black-and-white ruffed lemurs back into the Betampona Reserve in Madagascar. The project had been partly funded by Cleese's donation of the proceeds from the London premiere of Fierce Creatures. Cleese said "I adore lemurs. They're extremely gentle, well-mannered, pretty and yet great fun ... I should have married one".
The Bemaraha woolly lemur (Avahi cleesei), also known as Cleese's woolly lemur, is native to western Madagascar. The scientist who discovered the species named it after Cleese, mainly because of Cleese's fondness for lemurs and his efforts at protecting and preserving them. The species was first discovered in 1990 by a team of scientists from the University of Zurich led by Urs Thalmann but was not formally described as a species until 11 November 2005. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Marwood Cleese (/kliːz/ KLEEZ; born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, and presenter. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report. In the late 1960s, he cofounded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus. Along with his Python costars Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman, Cleese starred in Monty Python films, which include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and The Meaning of Life (1983).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In the mid-1970s, Cleese and first wife Connie Booth cowrote the sitcom Fawlty Towers, in which he starred as hotel owner Basil Fawlty, for which he won the 1980 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance. In 2000, the show topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes, and in a 2001 Channel 4 poll, Basil was ranked second on its list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Cleese costarred with Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and Fierce Creatures (1997), both of which he also wrote. For A Fish Called Wanda, he received Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award nominations. He has also starred in Time Bandits (1981), Clockwise (1986), and Rat Race (2001) and acted in Silverado (1985), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), two James Bond films (as R and Q), two Harry Potter films (as Nearly Headless Nick), and the last three Shrek films. He received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for Cheers (1987) and was nominated for 3rd Rock from the Sun (1998) and Will & Grace (2004).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Cleese has specialised in political and religious satire, black comedy, sketch comedy, and surreal humour. He was ranked the second best comedian ever in a 2005 Channel 4 poll of fellow comedians. He cofounded Video Arts, a production company making entertaining training films as well as The Secret Policeman's Ball benefit shows to raise funds for the human rights organisation Amnesty International. Formerly a staunch supporter of the Liberal Democrats, in 1999, he turned down an offer from the party to nominate him for a life peerage. In 2023, he began presenting a talk show on GB News.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England on 27 October 1939, the only child of Reginald Francis Cleese (1893–1972), an insurance salesman, and his wife Muriel Evelyn (née Cross, 1899–2000), the daughter of an auctioneer. His family's surname was originally Cheese, but his father had thought it was embarrassing and used the name Cleese when he enlisted in the Army during the First World War; he changed it officially by deed poll in 1923. As a child, Cleese supported Bristol City and Somerset County Cricket Club. Cleese was educated at St Peter's Preparatory School (paid for by money his mother inherited), where he received a prize for English and did well at cricket and boxing. When he was 13, he was awarded an exhibition at Clifton College, an English public school in Bristol. By that age, he was more than 6 feet (1.83 m) tall.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The biggest influence was The Goon Show. Kids were devoted to it. It was written by Spike Milligan. It also had Peter Sellers in it, who of course is the greatest voice man of all time. In the morning, we'd be at school and we'd discuss the whole thing and rehash the jokes and talk about it. We were obsessed with it.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "—Cleese on his greatest comedic influence growing up, 1950s BBC Radio comedy The Goon Show.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Cleese allegedly defaced the school grounds, as a prank, by painting footprints to suggest that the statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had left its plinth and gone to the toilet. Cleese played cricket in the First XI and did well academically, passing eight O-Levels and three A-Levels in mathematics, physics and chemistry. In his autobiography So, Anyway, he says that discovering, aged 17, he had not been made a house prefect by his housemaster affected his outlook: \"It was not fair and therefore it was unworthy of my respect... I believe that this moment changed my perspective on the world.\"",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Cleese could not go straight to the University of Cambridge, as the ending of National Service meant there were twice the usual number of applicants for places, so he returned to his prep school for two years to teach science, English, geography, history, and Latin (he drew on his Latin teaching experience later for a scene in Life of Brian, in which he corrects Brian's badly written Latin graffiti). He then took up a place he had won at Downing College, Cambridge, to read law. He also joined the Cambridge Footlights. He recalled that he went to the Cambridge Guildhall, where each university society had a stall, and went up to the Footlights stall, where he was asked if he could sing or dance. He replied \"no\" as he was not allowed to sing at his school because he was so bad, and if there was anything worse than his singing, it was his dancing. He was then asked \"Well, what do you do?\" to which he replied, \"I make people laugh.\"",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "At the Footlights theatrical club, Cleese spent a lot of time with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie and met his future writing partner Graham Chapman. Cleese wrote extra material for the 1961 Footlights Revue I Thought I Saw It Move, and was registrar for the Footlights Club during 1962. He was also in the cast of the 1962 Footlights Revue Double Take! Cleese graduated from Cambridge in 1963 with an upper second. Despite his successes on The Frost Report, his father sent him cuttings from The Daily Telegraph offering management jobs in places such as Marks & Spencer.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Cleese was a scriptwriter, as well as a cast member, for the 1963 Footlights Revue A Clump of Plinths. The revue was so successful at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that it was renamed Cambridge Circus and taken to the West End in London and then on a tour of New Zealand and Broadway, with the cast also appearing in some of the revue's sketches on The Ed Sullivan Show in October 1964.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "After Cambridge Circus, Cleese briefly stayed in America, performing on and off-Broadway. While performing in the musical Half a Sixpence, Cleese met future Python Terry Gilliam as well as American actress Connie Booth, whom he married on 20 February 1968. At their wedding at a Unitarian Church in Manhattan, the couple attempted to ensure an absence of any theistic language. \"The only moment of disappointment,\" Cleese recalled, \"came at the very end of the service when I discovered that I'd failed to excise one particular mention of the word 'God.'\" Later, Booth became a writing partner. He was soon offered work as a writer with BBC Radio, where he worked on several programmes, most notably as a sketch writer for The Dick Emery Show. The success of the Footlights Revue led to the recording of a short series of half-hour radio programmes, called I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, which were so popular that the BBC commissioned a regular series with the same title that ran from 1965 to 1974. Cleese returned to Britain and joined the cast. In many episodes, he is credited as \"John Otto Cleese\" (according to Jem Roberts, this may have been due to the embarrassment of his actual middle name Marwood).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Also in 1965, Cleese and Chapman began writing on The Frost Report. The writing staff chosen for The Frost Report consisted of a number of writers and performers who went on to make names for themselves in comedy. They included co-performers from I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again and future Goodies Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor, and also Frank Muir, Barry Cryer, Marty Feldman, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Dick Vosburgh and future Python members Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. While working on The Frost Report, the future Pythons developed the writing styles that would make their collaboration significant. Cleese's and Chapman's sketches often involved authority figures, some of whom were performed by Cleese, while Jones and Palin were both infatuated with filmed scenes that opened with idyllic countryside panoramas. Idle was one of those charged with writing David Frost's monologue. During this period Cleese met and befriended influential British comedian Peter Cook, eventually collaborating with Cook on several projects and forming a close friendship that lasted until Cook's death in 1995.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "It was as a performer on The Frost Report that Cleese achieved his breakthrough on British television as a comedy actor, appearing as the tall, upper class patrician figure in the classic \"Class\" sketch (screened on 7 April 1966), contrasting comically in a line-up with the shorter, middle class Ronnie Barker and the even shorter, working class Ronnie Corbett. The British Film Institute commented, \"Its twinning of height and social position, combined with a minimal script, created a classic TV moment.\" This series was so popular that in 1966 Cleese and Chapman were invited to work as writers and performers with Brooke-Taylor and Feldman on At Last the 1948 Show, during which time the Four Yorkshiremen sketch was written by all four writers/performers (the Four Yorkshiremen sketch is now better known as a Monty Python sketch).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Cleese and Chapman also wrote episodes for the first series of Doctor in the House (and later Cleese wrote six episodes of Doctor at Large on his own in 1971). These series were successful, and in 1969 Cleese and Chapman were offered their very own series. However, owing to Chapman's alcoholism, Cleese found himself bearing an increasing workload in the partnership and was, therefore, unenthusiastic about doing a series with just the two of them. He had found working with Palin on The Frost Report an enjoyable experience and invited him to join the series. Palin had previously been working on Do Not Adjust Your Set with Idle and Jones, with Terry Gilliam creating the animations. The four of them had, on the back of the success of Do Not Adjust Your Set, been offered a series for Thames Television, which they were waiting to begin when Cleese's offer arrived. Palin agreed to work with Cleese and Chapman in the meantime, bringing with him Gilliam, Jones, and Idle.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Monty Python's Flying Circus ran for four series from October 1969 to December 1974 on BBC Television, though Cleese quit the show after the third. Cleese's two primary characterisations were as a sophisticate and a loony. He portrayed the former as a series of announcers, TV show hosts, and government officials (for example, \"The Ministry of Silly Walks\"). The latter is perhaps best represented in the \"Cheese Shop\" and by Cleese's Mr Praline character, the man with a dead Norwegian Blue parrot and a menagerie of other animals all named \"Eric\". He was also known for his working class \"Sergeant Major\" character, who worked as a Police Sergeant, Roman Centurion, etc. Cleese also appeared during some abrupt scene changes as a radio commentator (usually outfitted in a dinner suit) where, in a rather pompous manner, he would make the formal and determined announcement \"And now for something completely different\", which later became the title of the first Monty Python film.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Partnership with Graham Chapman",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "He was the greatest sounding board I've ever had. If Graham thought something was funny, then it almost certainly was funny. You cannot believe how invaluable that is.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "— Cleese on Chapman in The Pythons Autobiography by The Pythons (2003).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Along with Gilliam's animations, Cleese's work with Graham Chapman provided Python with its darkest and angriest moments, and many of his characters display the seething suppressed rage that later characterised his portrayal of Basil Fawlty.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Unlike Palin and Jones, Cleese and Chapman wrote together in the same room; Cleese claims that their writing partnership involved him doing most of the work, while Chapman sat back, not speaking for long periods before suddenly coming out with an idea that often elevated the sketch to a new level. A classic example of this is the \"Dead Parrot sketch\", envisaged by Cleese as a satire on poor customer service, which was originally to have involved a broken toaster and later a broken car (this version was actually performed and broadcast on the pre-Python special How to Irritate People). It was Chapman's suggestion to change the faulty item into a dead parrot, and he also suggested that the parrot be specifically a \"Norwegian Blue\", giving the sketch a surreal air which made it far more memorable.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Their humour often involved ordinary people in ordinary situations behaving absurdly for no obvious reason. Like Chapman, Cleese's poker face, clipped middle class accent, and intimidating height allowed him to appear convincingly as a variety of authority figures, such as policemen, detectives, Nazi officers or government officials, which he then proceeded to undermine. In the \"Ministry of Silly Walks\" sketch (written by Palin and Jones), for example, Cleese exploits his stature as the crane-legged civil servant performing a grotesquely elaborate walk to his office. On the Silly Walks sketch, Ben Beaumont-Thomas in The Guardian writes, \"Cleese is utterly deadpan as he takes the stereotypical bowler-hatted political drone and ruthlessly skewers him. All the self-importance, bureaucratic inefficiency and laughable circuitousness of Whitehall is summed up in one balletic extension of his slender leg.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Chapman and Cleese also specialised in sketches wherein two characters conducted highly articulate arguments over completely arbitrary subjects, such as in the \"cheese shop\", the \"dead parrot\" sketch and \"Argument Clinic\", where Cleese plays a stone-faced bureaucrat employed to sit behind a desk and engage people in pointless, trivial bickering. All of these roles were opposite Palin (who Cleese often claims is his favourite Python to work with)—the comic contrast between the towering Cleese's crazed aggression and the shorter Palin's shuffling inoffensiveness is a common feature in the series. Occasionally, the typical Cleese–Palin dynamic is reversed, as in \"Fish Licence\", wherein Palin plays the bureaucrat with whom Cleese is trying to work.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Though Flying Circus lasted four series, by the start of series 3, Cleese was growing tired of dealing with Chapman's alcoholism. He felt, too, that the show's scripts had declined in quality. For these reasons, he became restless and decided to move on. Though he stayed for the third series, he officially left the group before the fourth season. Cleese received a credit on three episodes of the fourth series which used material from these sessions, though he was officially unconnected with the fourth series. He remained friendly with the group, and all six began writing Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Much of his work on Holy Grail remains widely quoted, including the Black Knight scene. Cleese returned to the troupe to co-write and co-star in two further Monty Python films, Monty Python's Life of Brian and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. His attack on Roman rule in Life of Brian–when he asks \"What have the Romans ever done for us?\", before being met with a string of benefits including sanitation, roads and public order–was ranked the seventh funniest line in film in a 2002 poll. Since the last Python film (Meaning of Life in 1983) Cleese has participated in various live performances with the group over the years.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "From 1970 to 1973, Cleese served as rector of the University of St Andrews. His election proved a milestone for the university, revolutionising and modernising the post. For instance, the rector was traditionally entitled to appoint an \"assessor\", a deputy to sit in his place at important meetings in his absence. Cleese changed this into a position for a student, elected across campus by the student body, resulting in direct access and representation for the student body.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Around this time, Cleese worked with comedian Les Dawson on his sketch/stand-up show Sez Les. The differences between the two physically (the tall, lean Cleese and the short, stout Dawson) and socially (the public school and the Cambridge-educated Cleese vs. the working class, self-educated Mancunian Dawson) were marked, but both worked well together from series 8 onwards until the series ended in 1976.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Cleese appeared on a single, \"Superspike\", with Bill Oddie and a group of UK athletes, billed the \"Superspike Squad\", to fund the latter's attendance at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Cleese starred in the low-budget spoof of the Sherlock Holmes detective series The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It (1977) as the grandson of the world's greatest consulting detective. In December 1977, Cleese appeared as a guest star on The Muppet Show. Ranked one of the best guest stars to appear on the show, Cleese was a fan of The Muppet Show and co-wrote much of the episode. In it he is \"kidnapped\" before the show begins, complains about the number of pigs, and gets roped into doing a closing number with Kermit the Frog, Sweetums, pigs, chickens and monsters. Cleese also made a cameo appearance in their 1981 film The Great Muppet Caper and won the TV Times award for Funniest Man on TV – 1978–79. In 1979, he starred in a TV special, To Norway, Home of Giants, produced by Johnny Bergh.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Throughout the 1970s, Cleese also produced and acted in a number of successful business training films, including Meetings, Bloody Meetings, and More Bloody Meetings. These were produced by his company Video Arts.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Fawlty Towers",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Cleese achieved greater prominence in the United Kingdom as the neurotic hotel manager Basil Fawlty in the two series of Fawlty Towers, first broadcast 1975 and 1979, which he co-wrote with his wife Connie Booth. The series won three BAFTA awards when produced, and in 2000 it topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. In a 2001 poll conducted by Channel 4 Basil Fawlty was ranked second (behind Homer Simpson) on their list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters. The series also featured Prunella Scales as Basil's acerbic wife Sybil, Andrew Sachs as the much abused Spanish waiter Manuel, and Booth as waitress Polly, the series' voice of sanity. Cleese based Basil Fawlty on a real person, Donald Sinclair, whom he had encountered in 1970 while the Monty Python team were staying at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay while filming inserts for their television series. Reportedly, Cleese was inspired by Sinclair's mantra, \"I could run this hotel just fine if it weren't for the guests.\" He later described Sinclair as \"the most wonderfully rude man I have ever met,\" although Sinclair's widow has said her husband was totally misrepresented in the series. During the Pythons' stay, Sinclair allegedly threw Idle's briefcase out of the hotel \"in case it contained a bomb,\" complained about Gilliam's \"American\" table manners, and threw a bus timetable at another guest after he dared to ask the time of the next bus to town.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The first series was screened from 19 September 1975 on BBC 2, initially to poor reviews, but gained momentum when repeated on BBC 1 the following year. Despite this, a second series did not air until 1979, by which time Cleese's marriage to Booth had ended, but they revived their collaboration for the second series. Fawlty Towers consisted of two seasons, each of only six episodes; Cleese and Booth both maintain that this was to avoid compromising the quality of the series. The popularity of Fawlty Towers has endured, and in addition to featuring high in greatest-ever television show polls it is often rebroadcast. In a 2002 poll, Basil's \"don't mention the war\" comment (said to the waitress Polly about the German guests) was ranked the second funniest line in television.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "During the 1980s and 1990s, Cleese focused on film, though he did work with Peter Cook in his one-off TV special Peter Cook and Co. in 1980. In the same year, Cleese played Petruchio, in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew in the BBC Television Shakespeare series. In 1981 he appeared in the Terry Gilliam-directed Time Bandits as Robin Hood. He also participated in Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (filmed 1980, released 1982) and starred in The Secret Policeman's Ball for Amnesty International. In 1985, Cleese had a small dramatic role as a sheriff in the American Western Silverado, which had an all-star cast that included Kevin Kline, with whom he starred in A Fish Called Wanda three years later. In 1986, he starred in the British comedy film Clockwise as an uptight school headmaster obsessed with punctuality and constantly getting into trouble during a journey to speak at the Headmasters' Conference. Written by Michael Frayn, the film was successful in the UK but not in the United States. It earned Cleese the 1987 Peter Sellers Award For Comedy at the Evening Standard British Film Awards.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1988, Cleese wrote and starred in A Fish Called Wanda as the lead, Archie Leach, along with Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and Michael Palin. Wanda was a commercial and critical success, becoming one of the top ten films of the year at the US box office, and Cleese was nominated for an Academy Award for his script. Kline won the Oscar for his portrayal of bumbling, violent, narcissistic ex-CIA agent Otto West in the film.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "From 1988 to 1992, Cleese appeared in numerous television commercials for Schweppes Ginger Ale. Between 1992 and 1994, he also appeared in some television commercials for Magnavox.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 1989, Graham Chapman was diagnosed with throat cancer; Cleese, Michael Palin, Peter Cook, and Chapman's partner David Sherlock witnessed Chapman's death. Chapman's death occurred a day before the 20th anniversary of the first broadcast of Flying Circus, with Jones commenting that it was \"the worst case of party-pooping in all history.\" Cleese gave a eulogy at Chapman's memorial service.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Cleese later played a supporting role in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) alongside Branagh himself and Robert De Niro. With Robin Skynner, the English psychiatrist, Cleese wrote two books on relationships: Families and How to Survive Them and Life and How to Survive It. The books are presented as a dialogue between Skynner and Cleese.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda, Fierce Creatures—which again starred Cleese alongside Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Palin—was released in 1997, but was greeted with mixed reception by critics and audiences. Cleese has since often stated that making the second film had been a mistake. When asked by his friend, director and restaurant critic Michael Winner, what he would do differently if he could live his life again, Cleese responded, \"I wouldn't have married Alyce Faye Eichelberger and I wouldn't have made Fierce Creatures.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In 1999, Cleese appeared in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough as Q's assistant, referred to by Bond as \"R\". In 2002, when Cleese reprised his role in Die Another Day, the character was promoted, making Cleese the new quartermaster (Q) of MI6. In 2004, Cleese was featured as Q in the video game James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing, featuring his likeness and voice. Cleese did not appear in the subsequent Bond films, Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall; in the latter film, Ben Whishaw was cast in the role of Q.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Cleese is Provost's visiting professor at Cornell University, after having been Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large from 1999 to 2006. He makes occasional well-received appearances on the Cornell campus. In 2001, Cleese was cast in the comedy Rat Race as the eccentric hotel owner Donald P. Sinclair, the name of the Torquay hotel owner on whom he had based the character of Basil Fawlty. That year he appeared as Nearly Headless Nick in the first Harry Potter film: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001), a role he would reprise in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002). In 2002, Cleese made a cameo appearance in the film The Adventures of Pluto Nash, in which he played \"James\", a computerised chauffeur of a hover car stolen by the title character (played by Eddie Murphy). The vehicle is subsequently destroyed in a chase, leaving the chauffeur stranded in a remote place on the moon. In 2003, Cleese appeared as Lyle Finster on the US sitcom Will & Grace. His character's daughter, Lorraine, was played by Minnie Driver. In the series, Lyle Finster briefly marries Karen Walker (Megan Mullally). In 2004, Cleese was credited as co-writer of a DC Comics graphic novel titled Superman: True Brit. Part of DC's \"Elseworlds\" line of imaginary stories, True Brit, mostly written by Kim Howard Johnson, suggests what might have happened had Superman's rocket ship landed on a farm in Britain, not America.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "From 10 November to 9 December 2005, Cleese toured New Zealand with his stage show John Cleese—His Life, Times and Current Medical Problems. Cleese described it as \"a one-man show with several people in it, which pushes the envelope of acceptable behaviour in new and disgusting ways\". The show was developed in New York City with William Goldman and includes Cleese's daughter Camilla as a writer and actor (the shows were directed by Australian Bille Brown). His assistant of many years, Garry Scott-Irvine, also appeared and was listed as a co-producer. The show then played in universities in California and Arizona from 10 January to 25 March 2006 under the title Seven Ways to Skin an Ocelot. His voice can be downloaded for directional guidance purposes as a downloadable option on some personal GPS-navigation device models by company TomTom.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In a 2005 poll of comedians and comedy insiders, The Comedians' Comedian, Cleese was voted second to Peter Cook. In 2006, Cleese hosted a television special of football's greatest kicks, goals, saves, bloopers, plays, and penalties, as well as football's influence on culture (including the Monty Python sketch \"Philosophy Football\"), featuring interviews with pop culture icons Dave Stewart, Dennis Hopper, and Henry Kissinger, as well as eminent footballers, including Pelé, Mia Hamm, and Thierry Henry. The Art of Soccer with John Cleese was released in North America on DVD in January 2009 by BFS Entertainment & Multimedia. Also in 2006, Cleese released the song \"Don't Mention the World Cup\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Cleese lent his voice to the BioWare video game Jade Empire. His role was that of an \"outlander\" named Sir Roderick Ponce von Fontlebottom the Magnificent Bastard, stranded in the Imperial City of the Jade Empire. His character is essentially a British colonialist stereotype who refers to the people of the Jade Empire as \"savages in need of enlightenment\". His armour has the design of a fork stuck in a piece of cheese. In 2007, Cleese appeared in ads for Titleist as a golf course designer named \"Ian MacCallister\", who represents \"Golf Designers Against Distance\". Also in 2007, he was involved in filming of the sequel to The Pink Panther, titled The Pink Panther 2, with Steve Martin and Aishwarya Rai.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Cleese collaborated with Los Angeles Guitar Quartet member William Kanengiser in 2008 on the text to the performance piece \"The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha\". Cleese, as narrator, and the LAGQ premiered the work in Santa Barbara. The year 2008 also saw reports of Cleese working on a musical version of A Fish Called Wanda with his daughter Camilla.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "At the end of March 2009, Cleese published his first article as \"Contributing Editor\" to The Spectator: \"The real reason I had to join The Spectator\". Cleese has also hosted comedy galas at the Montreal Just for Laughs comedy festival in 2006, and again in 2009. Towards the end of 2009 and into 2010, Cleese appeared in a series of television adverts for the Norwegian electric goods shop chain Elkjøp. In March 2010 it was announced that Cleese would be playing Jasper in the video game Fable III.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In 2009 and 2010, Cleese toured Scandinavia and the US with his Alimony Tour Year One and Year Two. In May 2010, it was announced that this tour, set for May 2011, would extend to the UK (his first tour there). The show is dubbed the \"Alimony Tour\" in reference to the financial implications of Cleese's divorce. The UK tour started in Cambridge on 3 May, visiting Birmingham, Nottingham, Salford, York, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Oxford, Bristol and Bath (the Alimony Tour DVD was recorded on 2 July, the final Bath date). Later in 2011 John took his Alimony Tour to South Africa. He played Cape Town on the 21 & 22 October before moving over to Johannesburg, where he played from 25 to 30 October. In January 2012 he took his one-man show to Australia, starting in Perth on 22 January and throughout the next four months visited Adelaide, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Newcastle, New South Wales, Melbourne, Sydney, and finished up during April in Canberra.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In October 2010, Cleese was featured in the launch of an advertising campaign by The Automobile Association for a new home emergency response product. He appeared as a man who believed the AA could not help him during a series of disasters, including water pouring through his ceiling, with the line \"The AA? For faulty showers?\" During 2010, Cleese appeared in a series of radio advertisements for the Canadian insurance company Pacific Blue Cross, in which he plays a character called \"Dr. Nigel Bilkington, Chief of Medicine for American General Hospital\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In 2012, Cleese was cast in Hunting Elephants, a heist comedy by Israeli filmmaker Reshef Levi. Cleese had to quit just prior to filming due to heart trouble and was replaced by Patrick Stewart. Between September and October 2013, Cleese embarked on his first-ever cross-Canada comedy tour. Entitled \"John Cleese: Last Time to See Me Before I Die tour\", he visited Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Victoria and finished in Vancouver, performing to mostly sold-out venues. Cleese returned to the stage in Dubai in November 2013, where he performed to a sold-out theatre.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Cleese was interviewed and appears as himself in filmmaker Gracie Otto's 2013 documentary film The Last Impresario, about Cleese's longtime friend and colleague Michael White. White produced Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Cleese's pre-Python comedy production Cambridge Circus. At a comic press conference in November 2013, Cleese and other surviving members of the Monty Python comedy group announced a reuniting performance to be held in July 2014.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Cleese joined with Eric Idle in 2015 and 2016 for a tour of North America, Canada and the ANZUS nations, \"John Cleese & Eric Idle: Together Again At Last . . . For The Very First Time,\" playing small theatres and including interaction with audiences as well as sketches and reminisces. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything interview, Cleese expressed regret that he had turned down the role played by Robin Williams in The Birdcage, the butler played by Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day, and the clergyman played by Peter Cook in The Princess Bride.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In 2017, he wrote Bang Bang! a new adaptation of Georges Feydeau's French play Monsieur Chasse! for the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, before making its American premiere at the Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, New York in 2018 followed by touring the UK in spring 2020.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In 2021, Cleese cancelled an appearance at the Cambridge Union Society after learning that art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon had been blacklisted by the union for impersonating Adolf Hitler. His visit to the university was intended to be part of a documentary on wokeism. Cleese said he was \"blacklisting myself before someone else does\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In 2023, he starred in Roman Polanski's drama film The Palace. In October, Cleese starting presenting a new show on GB News called The Dinosaur Hour which airs on Sunday evenings.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In his Alimony Tour Cleese explained the origin of his fondness for black humour, the only thing that he inherited from his mother. Examples of it are the Dead Parrot sketch, \"The Kipper and the Corpse\" episode of Fawlty Towers, his clip for the 1992 BBC2 mockumentary \"A Question of Taste\", the Undertakers sketch, and his eulogy at Graham Chapman's memorial service which included the line, \"Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard! I hope he fries.\" On his attitude to life he states, \"I can take almost nothing seriously\".",
"title": "Style of humour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Cleese has criticised political correctness, wokeism and cancel culture, saying that despite initial good intentions to \"not be mean to people\", they have become \"a sort of indulgence of the most over-sensitive people in your culture, the people who are most easily upset [...] if you have to keep thinking which words you can use and which you can't, then that will stifle creativity.\" According to Cleese, \"The main thing is to realise that words depend on their context [...] PC people simply don't understand this business about context because they tend to be very literal-minded\", and that he imagined a \"woke joke [...] might be heart-warming but it's not going to be very funny.\" He has also argued that political correctness and wokeism are a threat to humour, creativity, and freedom of thought and expression.",
"title": "Style of humour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In 2020, following a controversy over the content of the Fawlty Towers episode \"The Germans\", Cleese criticised the BBC, saying \"The BBC is now run by a mixture of marketing people and petty bureaucrats. It used to have a large sprinkling of people who'd actually made programmes. Not any more. So BBC decisions are made by persons whose main concern is not losing their jobs... That's why they're so cowardly and gutless and contemptible.\" He likened the style of humour in Fawlty Towers to the representation of Alf Garnett from another BBC sitcom, Till Death Us Do Part, saying \"We laughed at Alf's reactionary views. Thus we discredited them, by laughing at him. Of course, there were people—very stupid people—who said 'Thank God someone is saying these things at last'. We laughed at these people too. Now they're taking decisions about BBC comedy.\"",
"title": "Style of humour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Amnesty first started doing these fund-raising shows in 1976. The instigation came from John Cleese who wanted to help out. And he did it in the only way he knew how. Which was to put on a show with what he described as \"a few friends\". Who of course transpired to be his colleagues in Monty Python and other luminaries of British comedy.",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "— Martin Lewis, co-founder of The Secret Policeman's Ball, on Cleese instigating the benefit show.",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Cleese (and the other members of Python) have contributed their services to charitable endeavours and causes—sometimes as an ensemble, at other times as individuals. The cause that has been the most frequent and consistent beneficiary has been the human rights work of Amnesty International via the Secret Policeman's Ball benefit shows. The idea of the Ball was conceived by Cleese, with Huffington Post stating \"in 1976 he \"friended\" the then-struggling Amnesty International (according to Martin Lewis, the very notion of Human Rights was then not the domain of hipsters and students, but just of foreign-policy wonks) first with a cheque signed \"J. Cleese\" — and then by rounding up \"a few friends\" to put on a show.\" Many musicians have publicly attributed their activism—and the organisation of their own benefit events—to the inspiration of the work in this field of Cleese and the rest of Python, such as Bob Geldof (organiser of Live Aid), U2, Pete Townshend, and Sting. On the impact of the Ball on Geldof, Sting states, \"he took the 'Ball' and ran with it.\"",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Cleese, in 2022, spoke at the conference of the revival Social Democratic Party. Previously, he was a long-standing supporter of the Liberal Democrats and before that was a supporter of the original SDP after their formation in 1981. During the 1987 general election he recorded a party political broadcast for the SDP–Liberal Alliance, in which he advocated for the introduction of proportional representation. Cleese subsequently appeared in broadcasts for the Liberal Democrats in the 1997 general election and narrated a radio election broadcast for the party during the 2001 general election.",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In 2008, Cleese expressed support for Barack Obama and his presidential candidacy, offering his services as a speech writer. He was an outspoken critic of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, saying that \"Michael Palin is no longer the funniest Palin\". The same year, he wrote a satirical poem about Fox News commentator Sean Hannity for Countdown with Keith Olbermann.",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In 2011, Cleese declared his appreciation for Britain's coalition government between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, saying: \"I think what's happening at the moment is rather interesting. The Coalition has made everything a little more courteous and a little more flexible. I think it was quite good that the Liberal Democrats had to compromise a bit with the Tories.\" He also criticised the previous Labour government, commenting: \"Although my inclinations are slightly left-of-centre, I was terribly disappointed with the last Labour government. Gordon Brown lacked emotional intelligence and was never a leader.\" Cleese also reiterated his support for proportional representation.",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In April 2011, Cleese said that he had declined a life peerage for political services in 1999. Outgoing leader of the Liberal Democrats Paddy Ashdown had put forward the suggestion shortly before stepping down, with the idea that Cleese would take the party whip and sit as a working peer, but the actor quipped that he \"realised this involved being in England in the winter and I thought that was too much of a price to pay.\" Cleese also declined a CBE title in 1996 as he thought, \"they were silly.\"",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2014, Cleese expressed political interest about the UK Independence Party, saying that although he was in doubt as to whether he was prepared to vote for it, he was attracted to its challenge to the established political order and the radicalism of its policies on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union. He expressed support for immigration, but also concern about the integration of immigrants into British culture.",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Talking to Der Spiegel in 2015, Cleese expressed a critical view on what he saw as a plutocracy that was unhealthily developing control of the governance of the First World's societies, stating that he had reached a point when he \"saw that our existence here is absolutely hopeless. I see the rich have got a stranglehold on us. If somebody had said that to me when I was 20, I would have regarded him as a left-wing loony.\"",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In 2016, Cleese publicly supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union. He tweeted: \"If I thought there was any chance of major reform in the EU, I'd vote to stay in. But there isn't. Sad.\" Cleese said that \"EU bureaucrats\" had taken away \"any trace of democratic accountability\" and suggested they should \"give up the euro, introduce accountability.\"",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "During then-Republican nominee Donald Trump's run for the US presidency in 2016, Cleese described Trump as \"a narcissist, with no attention span, who doesn't have clear ideas about anything and makes it all up as he goes along\". He had previously described the leadership of the Republican Party as \"the most cynical, most disgracefully immoral people I've ever come across in a Western civilisation\".",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In 2017, Cleese stated that he would not vote in that year's general election because \"I live in Chelsea and Kensington, so under our present system my vote is utterly worthless.\" In July 2018, Cleese said that he was leaving the UK to relocate to the Caribbean island of Nevis, partly over frustration around the standard of the Brexit debate, including \"dreadful lies\" by \"the right\" and a lack of reform regarding the press and the voting system. He relocated to Nevis on 1 November 2018.",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In May 2019, Cleese repeated his previous statement that London was no longer an English city, saying \"virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation. So there must be some truth in it... I note also that London was the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU.\" London Mayor Sadiq Khan responded, \"These comments make John Cleese sound like he's in character as Basil Fawlty. Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength. We are proudly the English capital, a European city and a global hub.\" Cleese added, \"I suspect I should apologise for my affection for the Englishness of my upbringing, but in some ways I found it calmer, more polite, more humorous, less tabloid, and less money-oriented than the one that is replacing it.\"",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In 2020, Cleese opposed the BBC's removal of the Fawlty Towers episode \"The Germans\" from the UKTV streaming service after protests following the murder of George Floyd, stating that the program was mocking prejudice with its use of a character who uttered racial slurs. \"If they can't see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say,\" said Cleese. UKTV later restored the episode with a disclaimer about its content.",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In November 2021, Cleese protested against perceived cancel culture by blacklisting himself over a Hitler impersonation controversy at the Cambridge Union.",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In 1992, the UK Health Education Authority (subsequently the Health Development Agency, now merged into the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) recruited Cleese—an ex-smoker—to star in a series of anti-smoking public service announcements (PSAs) on British television, which took the form of sketches rife with morbid humour about smoking and were designed to encourage adult smokers to quit. In a controlled study of regions of central and northern England (one region received no intervention) the PSAs were broadcast in two regions, and one region received both the PSAs, plus locally organised anti-tobacco campaigning. The study found:",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "After 18 months, 9.8% of successfully re-interviewed smokers had stopped and 4.3% of ex-smokers had relapsed. [...] There was no evidence of an extra effect of the local tobacco control network when combined with TV media [...] Applying these results to a typical population where 28% smoke and 28% are ex-smokers, and where there would be an equal number of quitters and relapsers over an 18 month period without the campaign, suggests that the campaign would reduce smoking prevalence by about 1.2%.",
"title": "Activism and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Cleese met Connie Booth in the US and they married in 1968. In 1971, Booth gave birth to their only child, Cynthia Cleese, who went on to appear with her father in his films A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures. With Booth, Cleese wrote the scripts for and co-starred in both series of Fawlty Towers, although the two were actually divorced before the second series was finished and aired. Cleese and Booth are said to have remained close friends since. Cleese has two grandchildren, Evan and Olivia, through Cynthia's marriage to writer/director Ed Solomon. Cleese married American actress Barbara Trentham in 1981. Their daughter Camilla, Cleese's second child, was born in 1984. He and Trentham divorced in 1990. During this time, Cleese emigrated to Los Angeles.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In 1992, he married American psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger. They divorced in 2008; the divorce settlement left Eichelberger with £12 million in finance and assets, including £600,000 a year for seven years. Cleese said, \"What I find so unfair is that if we both died today, her children would get much more than mine ... I got off lightly. Think what I'd have had to pay Alyce if she had contributed anything to the relationship—such as children, or a conversation\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Less than a year later, he returned to the UK, where he has property in London and a home on the Royal Crescent in Bath, Somerset. In August 2012, Cleese married English jewellery designer and former model Jennifer Wade in a ceremony on the Caribbean island of Mustique.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In an interview in 2014, Cleese blamed his mother, who lived to the age of 101, for his problems in relationships with women, saying: \"My ingrained habit of walking on eggshells when dealing with my mother dominated my romantic liaisons for many years.\" Cleese said that he had spent \"a large part of my life in some form of therapy\" over his relationships with women.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In March 2015, in an interview with Der Spiegel, he was asked if he was religious. Cleese stated that he did not think much of organised religion and said he was not committed to \"anything except the vague feeling that there is something more going on than the materialist reductionist people think\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Cleese has a passion for lemurs. Following the 1997 comedy film Fierce Creatures, in which the ring-tailed lemur played a key role, he hosted the 1998 BBC documentary In the Wild: Operation Lemur with John Cleese, which tracked the progress of a reintroduction of black-and-white ruffed lemurs back into the Betampona Reserve in Madagascar. The project had been partly funded by Cleese's donation of the proceeds from the London premiere of Fierce Creatures. Cleese said \"I adore lemurs. They're extremely gentle, well-mannered, pretty and yet great fun ... I should have married one\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The Bemaraha woolly lemur (Avahi cleesei), also known as Cleese's woolly lemur, is native to western Madagascar. The scientist who discovered the species named it after Cleese, mainly because of Cleese's fondness for lemurs and his efforts at protecting and preserving them. The species was first discovered in 1990 by a team of scientists from the University of Zurich led by Urs Thalmann but was not formally described as a species until 11 November 2005.",
"title": "Personal life"
}
]
| John Marwood Cleese is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, and presenter. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report. In the late 1960s, he cofounded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus. Along with his Python costars Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman, Cleese starred in Monty Python films, which include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and The Meaning of Life (1983). In the mid-1970s, Cleese and first wife Connie Booth cowrote the sitcom Fawlty Towers, in which he starred as hotel owner Basil Fawlty, for which he won the 1980 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance. In 2000, the show topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes, and in a 2001 Channel 4 poll, Basil was ranked second on its list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters. Cleese costarred with Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and Fierce Creatures (1997), both of which he also wrote. For A Fish Called Wanda, he received Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award nominations. He has also starred in Time Bandits (1981), Clockwise (1986), and Rat Race (2001) and acted in Silverado (1985), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), two James Bond films, two Harry Potter films, and the last three Shrek films. He received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for Cheers (1987) and was nominated for 3rd Rock from the Sun (1998) and Will & Grace (2004). Cleese has specialised in political and religious satire, black comedy, sketch comedy, and surreal humour. He was ranked the second best comedian ever in a 2005 Channel 4 poll of fellow comedians. He cofounded Video Arts, a production company making entertaining training films as well as The Secret Policeman's Ball benefit shows to raise funds for the human rights organisation Amnesty International. Formerly a staunch supporter of the Liberal Democrats, in 1999, he turned down an offer from the party to nominate him for a life peerage. In 2023, he began presenting a talk show on GB News. | 2001-07-05T12:21:47Z | 2023-12-30T23:29:44Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cleese |
15,861 | July 5 | July 5 is the 186th day of the year (187th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 179 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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"text": "July 5 is the 186th day of the year (187th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 179 days remain until the end of the year.",
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| July 5 is the 186th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 179 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-08-29T03:50:56Z | 2023-11-28T18:38:19Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_5 |
15,862 | July 6 | July 6 is the 187th day of the year (188th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 178 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| July 6 is the 187th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 178 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-07-06T15:31:45Z | 2023-11-27T18:09:18Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_6 |
15,863 | July 7 | July 7 is the 188th day of the year (189th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 177 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| July 7 is the 188th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 177 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-07-06T18:49:27Z | 2023-12-03T18:27:22Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_7 |
15,864 | June 8 | June 8 is the 159th day of the year (160th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 206 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| June 8 is the 159th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 206 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-09-06T06:52:31Z | 2023-11-06T11:07:00Z | [
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15,865 | June 9 | June 9 is the 160th day of the year (161st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 205 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| June 9 is the 160th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 205 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-08-02T21:12:15Z | 2023-10-19T06:51:07Z | [
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15,866 | January 27 | January 27 is the 27th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 338 days remain until the end of the year (339 in leap years). | [
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15,870 | John Lynch (New Hampshire governor) | John Hayden Lynch (born November 25, 1952) is an American attorney, businessman, and politician who served as the 80th governor of New Hampshire from 2005 to 2013. Lynch was first elected governor in 2004, defeating first-term Republican incumbent Craig Benson – the first time a first-term incumbent New Hampshire governor was defeated for re-election in 80 years. Lynch won re-election in landslide victories in 2006 and 2008, and comfortably won a fourth term in 2010.
Lynch is the most popular governor in New Hampshire history and, while in office, consistently ranked among the nation's most popular governors.
Since 2013, Lynch has served as a Senior Lecturer in the MBA program at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
Lynch was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, the fifth of William and Margaret Lynch's six children. Lynch earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1974, a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School, and a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center.
During his business career, Lynch served as Director of Admissions at Harvard Business School and President of The Lynch Group, a business consulting firm in Manchester, New Hampshire. Lynch served as CEO of Knoll Inc., a national furniture manufacturer, where he transformed the company previously losing $50 million a year, to making a profits of nearly $240 million yearly. Under his leadership, Knoll created new jobs, gave factory workers annual bonuses, established a scholarship program for the children of employees, created retirement plans for employees who didn't have any, and gave workers stock in the company. Before announcing his run for governor, Lynch was serving as chairman of the University System of New Hampshire Board of Trustees.
In June 2004, Lynch launched his campaign for Governor of New Hampshire.
Lynch spent the five months preceding the election relentlessly criticizing Governor Craig Benson, the first-term Republican incumbent, for what Lynch claimed was a lack of integrity following a long series of scandals during Benson's tenure. Lynch accused Benson of creating a "culture of corruption" and cronyism at the State House.
On September 15, Lynch won the Democratic primary and on November 2, Lynch defeated Benson 51% to 49%.
Lynch was the first challenger to defeat a first-term incumbent in New Hampshire since 1926. On January 6, 2005, Lynch was inaugurated as the 80th Governor of New Hampshire. On November 7, 2006, Lynch was re-elected governor in a 74% to 26% landslide victory over Republican challenger Jim Coburn. Lynch's 74% of the vote was the largest margin of victory ever in a New Hampshire gubernatorial race.
Lynch's coattails carried his party to control of both chambers of the State Legislature and both of New Hampshire's two U.S. House seats.
On November 4, 2008, he was elected to a third term in another landslide victory. Lynch defeated Republican challenger Joseph Kenney, a New Hampshire state senator and U.S. Marine, 70% to 28%, with 2% of the vote won by the Libertarian candidate. Democrats maintained control of the state legislature and held both U.S. House seats, and gained a U.S. Senate seat.
On November 2, 2010, Lynch was elected to a historic fourth term as Governor of New Hampshire, in a victory over former State Health and Human Service's Commissioner John Stephen, 53% to 45%. Lynch was the only Democrat elected to statewide office. As had happened in many states throughout the U.S. during the 2010 midterm elections, Democrats suffered heavy losses. Democrats lost control of both chambers of the State Legislature, control of the Executive Council and both of the U.S. House seats.
According to the Concord Monitor, when Lynch was inaugurated on January 6, 2011, he became "the state's longest-serving governor in nearly two centuries. John Taylor Gilman was the last governor to serve longer than six years, serving 14 one-year terms as governor between 1794 and 1816. (The state switched to two-year terms in 1877)" New Hampshire and neighboring Vermont are the only two States in the U.S. that use two-year terms.
On September 15, 2011, Lynch announced he would not seek a historic fifth term as governor.
During the announcement Lynch said "I feel like I have the passion and the energy to keep doing this work for a long, long time, but democracy demands periodic change. To refresh and revive itself, democracy needs new leaders and new ideas."
On January 3, 2013, Lynch was succeeded by fellow Democrat Maggie Hassan, marking the first time a Democrat succeeded a Democrat as the state's governor since the 19th century.
As a candidate for governor, Lynch took "The Pledge" not to enact any broad-based taxes, especially a sales or income tax. As governor, Lynch kept his promise. Lynch does not support an amendment to the State Constitution banning an income tax.
In 2007, Lynch signed into law the Research and Development Tax credit, which for the following five years appropriated $1,000,000 for companies to write off qualifying "manufacturing research and development" expenditures. In 2012, during his final State of the State address, Lynch proposed doubling the tax credit, citing its success in creating jobs, and slammed lawmakers for slashing funding to the state's community college system to fund a 10-cent reduction in the tobacco tax.
In June 2010, Lynch signed a budget-balancing measure that repealed the state's LLC tax.
Lynch worked with the state Attorney General, police chiefs, and lawmakers to pass sex offender laws; increase the state police force; and increase the number of state prosecutors. New Hampshire was rated the "Safest State" in the Nation in 2008 and 2009. New Hampshire again boasts the nation's lowest murder rate and the second-lowest rates for aggravated assault, according to CQ Press. Lynch issued the following statement after the announcement of the award in 2009:
I am proud that working together we continue to keep New Hampshire the 'Safest State' in the nation. Our low crime rate has long been a part of what makes this such a great place to live and work, and it is important that we work to maintain our high quality of life. With this recognition, we should take time to thank the hard-working men and women of New Hampshire law enforcement who work every day to help keep us all safe.
Lynch upheld the death penalty while in office, stating "there are crimes so heinous that the death penalty is warranted." The New Hampshire House of Representatives passed legislation in March 2009 to abolish the death penalty, which Lynch threatened to veto. Due to the veto threat, the Senate tabled the legislation in April of that year. In June, Lynch compromised with legislators and signed legislation to form the New Hampshire Commission to Study the Death Penalty.
In December 2010, the Commission recommended, by a 12 to 10 vote, to retain the death penalty. However, the panel unanimously recommended against expanding it. In 2011, Lynch signed legislation to expand the death penalty to include home invasions.
In April 2006, Lynch was awarded the "National Chairman of Volunteers" Award for Volunteer Excellence by the American Red Cross, due to his leadership during the 2005 floods.
On June 3, 2009, Lynch signed a same-sex marriage bill into law, despite being personally opposed to gay marriages, making New Hampshire the fifth state in the United States to allow such unions.
Throughout his eight year tenure, Lynch enjoyed very high approval ratings, often being ranked among the most popular of U.S. governors. According to the WMUR/Granite State Poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire, just three months after taking office in January 2005, Lynch's approval rating surpassed 50% and stayed upwards of 55% throughout his tenure. Likewise, between February 2006 and February 2009 his approval rating was above 70%. In April 2012, Lynch's approval rating was again above 70% making him the second most popular governor in the United States, behind New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Lynch enjoyed bipartisan support and is the most popular governor in the state's history.
During the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, Lynch was one of eight superdelegates from New Hampshire. Lynch remained neutral during the New Hampshire primary because as governor he needed to "focus on being a good host to the primary", according to a statement by spokesman Colin Manning. At an event on June 27, 2008 in Unity, New Hampshire, Lynch formally endorsed Barack Obama for president.
Lynch endorsed President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.
Lynch endorsed former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 presidential election.
Lynch endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
Lynch and his wife, Dr. Susan Lynch, a pediatrician, have three children. | [
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"text": "On November 2, 2010, Lynch was elected to a historic fourth term as Governor of New Hampshire, in a victory over former State Health and Human Service's Commissioner John Stephen, 53% to 45%. Lynch was the only Democrat elected to statewide office. As had happened in many states throughout the U.S. during the 2010 midterm elections, Democrats suffered heavy losses. Democrats lost control of both chambers of the State Legislature, control of the Executive Council and both of the U.S. House seats.",
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"text": "During the announcement Lynch said \"I feel like I have the passion and the energy to keep doing this work for a long, long time, but democracy demands periodic change. To refresh and revive itself, democracy needs new leaders and new ideas.\"",
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"text": "On January 3, 2013, Lynch was succeeded by fellow Democrat Maggie Hassan, marking the first time a Democrat succeeded a Democrat as the state's governor since the 19th century.",
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"text": "As a candidate for governor, Lynch took \"The Pledge\" not to enact any broad-based taxes, especially a sales or income tax. As governor, Lynch kept his promise. Lynch does not support an amendment to the State Constitution banning an income tax.",
"title": "Governor of New Hampshire"
},
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"text": "In 2007, Lynch signed into law the Research and Development Tax credit, which for the following five years appropriated $1,000,000 for companies to write off qualifying \"manufacturing research and development\" expenditures. In 2012, during his final State of the State address, Lynch proposed doubling the tax credit, citing its success in creating jobs, and slammed lawmakers for slashing funding to the state's community college system to fund a 10-cent reduction in the tobacco tax.",
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"text": "In June 2010, Lynch signed a budget-balancing measure that repealed the state's LLC tax.",
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"text": "Lynch worked with the state Attorney General, police chiefs, and lawmakers to pass sex offender laws; increase the state police force; and increase the number of state prosecutors. New Hampshire was rated the \"Safest State\" in the Nation in 2008 and 2009. New Hampshire again boasts the nation's lowest murder rate and the second-lowest rates for aggravated assault, according to CQ Press. Lynch issued the following statement after the announcement of the award in 2009:",
"title": "Governor of New Hampshire"
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"text": "I am proud that working together we continue to keep New Hampshire the 'Safest State' in the nation. Our low crime rate has long been a part of what makes this such a great place to live and work, and it is important that we work to maintain our high quality of life. With this recognition, we should take time to thank the hard-working men and women of New Hampshire law enforcement who work every day to help keep us all safe.",
"title": "Governor of New Hampshire"
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"text": "Lynch upheld the death penalty while in office, stating \"there are crimes so heinous that the death penalty is warranted.\" The New Hampshire House of Representatives passed legislation in March 2009 to abolish the death penalty, which Lynch threatened to veto. Due to the veto threat, the Senate tabled the legislation in April of that year. In June, Lynch compromised with legislators and signed legislation to form the New Hampshire Commission to Study the Death Penalty.",
"title": "Governor of New Hampshire"
},
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"text": "In December 2010, the Commission recommended, by a 12 to 10 vote, to retain the death penalty. However, the panel unanimously recommended against expanding it. In 2011, Lynch signed legislation to expand the death penalty to include home invasions.",
"title": "Governor of New Hampshire"
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"text": "In April 2006, Lynch was awarded the \"National Chairman of Volunteers\" Award for Volunteer Excellence by the American Red Cross, due to his leadership during the 2005 floods.",
"title": "Governor of New Hampshire"
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"text": "On June 3, 2009, Lynch signed a same-sex marriage bill into law, despite being personally opposed to gay marriages, making New Hampshire the fifth state in the United States to allow such unions.",
"title": "Governor of New Hampshire"
},
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"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Throughout his eight year tenure, Lynch enjoyed very high approval ratings, often being ranked among the most popular of U.S. governors. According to the WMUR/Granite State Poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire, just three months after taking office in January 2005, Lynch's approval rating surpassed 50% and stayed upwards of 55% throughout his tenure. Likewise, between February 2006 and February 2009 his approval rating was above 70%. In April 2012, Lynch's approval rating was again above 70% making him the second most popular governor in the United States, behind New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Lynch enjoyed bipartisan support and is the most popular governor in the state's history.",
"title": "Governor of New Hampshire"
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"text": "During the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, Lynch was one of eight superdelegates from New Hampshire. Lynch remained neutral during the New Hampshire primary because as governor he needed to \"focus on being a good host to the primary\", according to a statement by spokesman Colin Manning. At an event on June 27, 2008 in Unity, New Hampshire, Lynch formally endorsed Barack Obama for president.",
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| John Hayden Lynch is an American attorney, businessman, and politician who served as the 80th governor of New Hampshire from 2005 to 2013. Lynch was first elected governor in 2004, defeating first-term Republican incumbent Craig Benson – the first time a first-term incumbent New Hampshire governor was defeated for re-election in 80 years. Lynch won re-election in landslide victories in 2006 and 2008, and comfortably won a fourth term in 2010. Lynch is the most popular governor in New Hampshire history and, while in office, consistently ranked among the nation's most popular governors. Since 2013, Lynch has served as a Senior Lecturer in the MBA program at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. | 2001-07-10T18:14:03Z | 2023-12-07T23:36:53Z | [
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15,872 | J. R. R. Tolkien | John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE FRSL (/ˈruːl ˈtɒlkiːn/, ROOL TOL-keen; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.
After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and, within it, Middle-earth. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.
While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. As a result, he has been popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of all time.
Tolkien was English, and thought of himself as such. His immediate paternal ancestors were middle-class craftsmen who made and sold clocks, watches and pianos in London and Birmingham. The Tolkien family originated in the East Prussian town of Kreuzburg near Königsberg, which had been founded during the medieval German eastward expansion, where his earliest-known paternal ancestor Michel Tolkien was born around 1620. Michel's son Christianus Tolkien (1663–1746) was a wealthy miller in Kreuzburg.
His son, Christian Tolkien (1706–1791), moved from Kreuzburg to nearby Danzig, and his two sons Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien (1747–1813) and Johann (later known as John) Benjamin Tolkien (1752–1819) emigrated to London in the 1770s and became the ancestors of the English family; the younger brother was J. R. R. Tolkien's second great-grandfather. In 1792, John Benjamin Tolkien and William Gravell took over the Erdley Norton manufacture in London, which from then on sold clocks and watches under the name Gravell & Tolkien. Daniel Gottlieb obtained British citizenship in 1794, but John Benjamin apparently never became a British citizen. Other German relatives also joined the two brothers in London. Several people with the surname Tolkien or similar spelling, some of them members of the same family as J. R. R. Tolkien, live in northern Germany, but most of them are descendants of people who evacuated East Prussia in 1945, at the end of World War II.
According to Ryszard Derdziński, the surname Tolkien is of Low Prussian origin and probably means "son/descendant of Tolk". Tolkien mistakenly believed his surname derived from the German word tollkühn, meaning "foolhardy", and jokingly inserted himself as a "cameo" into The Notion Club Papers under the literally translated name Rashbold. However, Derdziński has demonstrated this to be a false etymology. While J. R. R. Tolkien was aware of his family's German origin, his knowledge of the family's history was limited because he was "early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father".
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (later annexed by the British Empire; now Free State Province in the Republic of South Africa), to Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, née Suffield (1870–1904). The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British bank for which he worked. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, who was born on 17 February 1894.
As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden, an event some believe to have been later echoed in his stories, although he admitted no actual memory of the event as an adult. In an earlier incident from Tolkien's infancy, a young family servant took the baby to his homestead, returning him the next morning.
When he was three, he went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Kings Heath, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham. He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent, Lickey and Malvern Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books, along with nearby towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt Jane's farm Bag End, the name of which he used in his fiction.
Mabel Tolkien taught her two children at home. Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany and awakened in him the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees, but his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early.
Tolkien could read by the age of four and could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother allowed him to read many books. He disliked Treasure Island and "The Pied Piper" and thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was "amusing but disturbing". He liked stories about "Red Indians" (the term then used for Native Americans in adventure stories) and works of fantasy by George MacDonald. In addition, the "Fairy Books" of Andrew Lang were particularly important to him and their influence is apparent in some of his later writings.
Mabel Tolkien was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900 despite vehement protests by her Baptist family, which stopped all financial assistance to her. In 1904, when J. R. R. Tolkien was 12, his mother died of acute diabetes at Fern Cottage in Rednal, which she was renting. She was then about 34 years of age, about as old as a person with diabetes mellitus type 1 could survive without treatment—insulin would not be discovered until 1921, two decades later. Nine years after her death, Tolkien wrote, "My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith."
Before her death, Mabel Tolkien had assigned the guardianship of her sons to her close friend, Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, who was assigned to bring them up as good Catholics. In a 1965 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled the influence of the man whom he always called "Father Francis": "He was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old gossip. He was—and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the 'liberal' darkness out of which I came, knowing more about 'Bloody Mary' than the Mother of Jesus—who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists." After his mother's death, Tolkien grew up in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham and attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, and later St Philip's School. In 1903, he won a Foundation Scholarship and returned to King Edward's.
While in his early teens, Tolkien had his first encounter with a constructed language, Animalic, an invention of his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon. At that time, he was studying Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Their interest in Animalic soon died away, but Mary and others, including Tolkien himself, invented a new and more complex language called Nevbosh. The next constructed language he came to work with, Naffarin, would be his own creation. Tolkien learned Esperanto some time before 1909. Around 10 June 1909 he composed "The Book of the Foxrook", a sixteen-page notebook, where the "earliest example of one of his invented alphabets" appears. Short texts in this notebook are written in Esperanto.
In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society they called the T.C.B.S. The initials stood for Tea Club and Barrovian Society, alluding to their fondness for drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, secretly, in the school library. After leaving school, the members stayed in touch and, in December 1914, they held a council in London at Wiseman's home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong dedication to writing poetry.
In 1911, Tolkien went on a summer holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollected vividly in a 1968 letter, noting that Bilbo's journey across the Misty Mountains ("including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods") is directly based on his adventures as their party of 12 hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembered his regret at leaving the view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn, "the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams". They went across the Kleine Scheidegg to Grindelwald and on across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass, through the upper Valais to Brig and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.
In October of the same year, Tolkien began studying at Exeter College, Oxford. He initially read classics but changed his course in 1913 to English language and literature, graduating in 1915 with first-class honours. Among his tutors at Oxford was Joseph Wright, whose Primer of the Gothic Language had inspired Tolkien as a schoolboy.
At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years his senior, when he and his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house where she lived in Duchess Road, Edgbaston. According to Humphrey Carpenter, "Edith and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham teashops, especially one which had a balcony overlooking the pavement. There they would sit and throw sugarlumps into the hats of passers-by, moving to the next table when the sugar bowl was empty. ... With two people of their personalities and in their position, romance was bound to flourish. Both were orphans in need of affection, and they found that they could give it to each other. During the summer of 1909, they decided that they were in love."
His guardian, Father Morgan, considered it "altogether unfortunate" that his surrogate son was romantically involved with an older, Protestant woman; Tolkien wrote that the combined tensions contributed to his having "muffed [his] exams". Morgan prohibited him from meeting, talking to, or even corresponding with Edith until he was 21. Tolkien obeyed this prohibition to the letter, with one notable early exception, over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop.
On the evening of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with family friend C. H. Jessop at Cheltenham. He declared that he had never ceased to love her, and asked her to marry him. Edith replied that she had already accepted the proposal of George Field, the brother of one of her closest school friends. But Edith said she had agreed to marry Field only because she felt "on the shelf" and had begun to doubt that Tolkien still cared for her. She explained that, because of Tolkien's letter, everything had changed.
On 8 January 1913, Tolkien travelled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith. The two took a walk into the countryside, sat under a railway viaduct, and talked. By the end of the day, Edith had agreed to accept Tolkien's proposal. She wrote to Field and returned her engagement ring. Field was "dreadfully upset at first", and the Field family was "insulted and angry". Upon learning of Edith's new plans, Jessop wrote to her guardian, "I have nothing to say against Tolkien, he is a cultured gentleman, but his prospects are poor in the extreme, and when he will be in a position to marry I cannot imagine. Had he adopted a profession it would have been different."
Following their engagement, Edith reluctantly announced that she was converting to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence. Jessop, "like many others of his age and class ... strongly anti-Catholic", was infuriated, and he ordered Edith to find other lodgings.
Edith Bratt and Ronald Tolkien were formally engaged at Birmingham in January 1913, and married at St Mary Immaculate Catholic Church at Warwick, on 22 March 1916. In his 1941 letter to Michael, Tolkien expressed admiration for his wife's willingness to marry a man with no job, little money, and no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in the Great War.
In August 1914, Britain entered the First World War. Tolkien's relatives were shocked when he elected not to volunteer immediately for the British Army. In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled: "In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage." Instead, Tolkien, "endured the obloquy", and entered a programme by which he delayed enlistment until completing his degree. By the time he passed his finals in July 1915, Tolkien recalled that the hints were "becoming outspoken from relatives". He was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers on 15 July 1915. He trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase, Rugeley Camp near to Rugeley, Staffordshire, for 11 months. In a letter to Edith, Tolkien complained: "Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed." Following their wedding, Lieutenant and Mrs. Tolkien took up lodgings near the training camp. On 2 June 1916, Tolkien received a telegram summoning him to Folkestone for posting to France. The Tolkiens spent the night before his departure in a room at the Plough & Harrow Hotel in Edgbaston, Birmingham. He later wrote: "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then... it was like a death."
On 5 June 1916, Tolkien boarded a troop transport for an overnight voyage to Calais. Like other soldiers arriving for the first time, he was sent to the British Expeditionary Force's base depot at Étaples. On 7 June, he was informed that he had been assigned as a signals officer to the 11th (Service) Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers. The battalion was part of the 74th Brigade, 25th Division. While waiting to be summoned to his unit, Tolkien sank into boredom. To pass the time, he composed a poem titled The Lonely Isle, which was inspired by his feelings during the sea crossing to Calais. To evade the British Army's postal censorship, he developed a code of dots by which Edith could track his movements. He left Étaples on 27 June 1916 and joined his battalion at Rubempré, near Amiens. He found himself commanding enlisted men who were drawn mainly from the mining, milling, and weaving towns of Lancashire. According to John Garth, he "felt an affinity for these working class men", but military protocol prohibited friendships with "other ranks". Instead, he was required to "take charge of them, discipline them, train them, and probably censor their letters ... If possible, he was supposed to inspire their love and loyalty." Tolkien later lamented, "The most improper job of any man ... is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity."
Tolkien arrived at the Somme in early July 1916. In between terms behind the lines at Bouzincourt, he participated in the assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig salient. Tolkien's time in combat was a terrible stress for Edith, who feared that every knock on the door might carry news of her husband's death. Edith could track her husband's movements on a map of the Western Front. The Reverend Mervyn S. Evers, Anglican chaplain to the Lancashire Fusiliers, recorded that Tolkien and his fellow officers were eaten by "hordes of lice" which found the Medical Officer's ointment merely "a kind of hors d'oeuvre and the little beggars went at their feast with renewed vigour." On 27 October 1916, as his battalion attacked Regina Trench, Tolkien contracted trench fever, a disease carried by lice. He was invalided to England on 8 November 1916.
According to his children John and Priscilla Tolkien, "In later years, he would occasionally talk of being at the front: of the horrors of the first German gas attack, of the utter exhaustion and ominous quiet after a bombardment, of the whining scream of the shells, and the endless marching, always on foot, through a devastated landscape, sometimes carrying the men's equipment as well as his own to encourage them to keep going. ... Some remarkable relics survive from that time: a trench map he drew himself; pencil-written orders to carry bombs to the 'fighting line.'"
Many of his dearest school friends were killed in the war. Among their number were Rob Gilson of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, who was killed on the first day of the Somme while leading his men in the assault on Beaumont Hamel. Fellow T.C.B.S. member Geoffrey Smith was killed during the battle, when a German artillery shell landed on a first-aid post. Tolkien's battalion was almost completely wiped out following his return to England.
According to John Garth, Kitchener's Army, in which Tolkien served, at once marked existing social boundaries and counteracted the class system by throwing everyone into a desperate situation together. Tolkien was grateful, writing that it had taught him "a deep sympathy and feeling for the Tommy; especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties".
A weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service. During his recovery in a cottage in Little Haywood, Staffordshire, he began to work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin. Lost Tales represented Tolkien's attempt to create a mythology for England, a project he would abandon without ever completing. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps. It was at this time that Edith bore their first child, John Francis Reuel Tolkien. In a 1941 letter, Tolkien described his son John as "(conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-boat campaign) round about the Battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far off as it does now". Tolkien was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant on 6 January 1918. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock. After his wife's death in 1971, Tolkien remembered:
I never called Edith Luthien—but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.
On 16 July 1919, Tolkien was taken off active service, at Fovant, on Salisbury Plain, with a temporary disability pension.
On 3 November 1920, Tolkien was demobilized and left the army, retaining his rank of lieutenant. His first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W. In 1920, he took up a post as reader in English language at the University of Leeds, becoming the youngest member of the academic staff there. While at Leeds, he produced A Middle English Vocabulary and a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E. V. Gordon; both became academic standard works for several decades. He translated Sir Gawain, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. In 1925, he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College.
In mid-1919, he began to tutor undergraduates privately, most importantly those of Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh's College, given that the women's colleges were in great need of good teachers in their early years, and Tolkien as a married professor (then still not common) was considered suitable, as a bachelor don would not have been.
During his time at Pembroke College Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, while living at 20 Northmoor Road in North Oxford. He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name "Nodens", following Sir Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a Roman Asclepeion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928.
In the 1920s, Tolkien undertook a translation of Beowulf, which he finished in 1926, but did not publish. It was later edited by his son Christopher and published in 2014.
Ten years after finishing his translation, Tolkien gave a highly acclaimed lecture on the work, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics", which had a lasting influence on Beowulf research. Lewis E. Nicholson said that the article is "widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism", noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to its purely linguistic elements. At the time, the consensus of scholarship deprecated Beowulf for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare; Tolkien argued that the author of Beowulf was addressing human destiny in general, not as limited by particular tribal politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the poem. Where Beowulf does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements. In the essay, Tolkien also revealed how highly he regarded Beowulf: "Beowulf is among my most valued sources"; this influence may be seen throughout his Middle-earth legendarium.
According to Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien began his series of lectures on Beowulf in a most striking way, entering the room silently, fixing the audience with a look, and suddenly declaiming in Old English the opening lines of the poem, starting "with a great cry of Hwæt!" It was a dramatic impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it made the students realize that Beowulf was not just a set text but "a powerful piece of dramatic poetry". Decades later, W. H. Auden wrote to his former professor, thanking him for the "unforgettable experience" of hearing him recite Beowulf, and stating: "The voice was the voice of Gandalf".
In the run-up to the Second World War, Tolkien was earmarked as a codebreaker. In January 1939, he was asked to serve in the cryptographic department of the Foreign Office in the event of national emergency. Beginning on 27 March, he took an instructional course at the London HQ of the Government Code and Cypher School. He was informed in October that his services would not be required.
In 1945, Tolkien moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. He served as an external examiner for University College, Galway (now NUI Galway), for many years. In 1954 Tolkien received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland (of which University College, Galway, was a constituent college). Tolkien completed The Lord of the Rings in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches.
The Tolkiens had four children: John Francis Reuel Tolkien (17 November 1917 – 22 January 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (22 October 1920 – 27 February 1984), Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020) and Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel Tolkien (18 June 1929 – 28 February 2022). Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young.
During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. In 1961, his friend C. S. Lewis even nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The sales of his books were so profitable that he regretted that he had not chosen early retirement. In a 1972 letter, he deplored having become a cult figure, but admitted that "even the nose of a very modest idol ... cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!"
Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, which was then a seaside resort patronized by the British upper middle class. Tolkien's status as a best-selling author gave them easy entry into polite society, but Tolkien deeply missed the company of his fellow Inklings. Edith, however, was overjoyed to step into the role of a society hostess, which had been the reason that Tolkien selected Bournemouth in the first place. The genuine and deep affection between Ronald and Edith was demonstrated by their care about the other's health, in details like wrapping presents, in the generous way he gave up his life at Oxford so she could retire to Bournemouth, and in her pride in his becoming a famous author. They were tied together, too, by love for their children and grandchildren.
In his retirement Tolkien was a consultant and translator for The Jerusalem Bible, published in 1966. He was initially assigned a larger portion to translate, but, due to other commitments, only managed to offer some criticisms of other contributors and a translation of the Book of Jonah.
Edith died on 29 November 1971, at the age of 82. Ronald returned to Oxford, where Merton College gave him convenient rooms near the High Street. He missed Edith, but enjoyed being back in the city.
Tolkien was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1972 New Year Honours and received the insignia of the Order at Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972. In the same year Oxford University gave him an honorary Doctorate of Letters.
He had the name Luthien [sic] engraved on Edith's tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on 2 September 1973 from a bleeding ulcer and chest infection, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave, with "Beren" added to his name. Tolkien's will was proven on 20 December 1973, with his estate valued at £190,577 (equivalent to £2,452,000 in 2021).
Tolkien's Catholicism was a significant factor in C. S. Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity, although Tolkien was dismayed that Lewis chose to join the Church of England. He once wrote to Rayner Unwin's daughter Camilla, who wished to know the purpose of life, that it was "to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks." He had a special devotion to the blessed sacrament, writing to his son Michael that in "the Blessed Sacrament ... you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that". He accordingly encouraged frequent reception of Holy Communion, again writing to his son Michael that "the only cure for sagging of fainting faith is Communion." He believed the Catholic Church to be true most of all because of the pride of place and the honour in which it holds the Blessed Sacrament. In the last years of his life, Tolkien resisted the liturgical changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council, especially the use of English for the liturgy; he continued to make the responses in Latin, loudly, ignoring the rest of the congregation.
Tolkien's fantasy writings have often been accused of embodying a racist attitude. Scholars have noted that he was influenced by Victorian attitudes to race and to a literary tradition of monsters, and that he was anti-racist in peacetime and during the World Wars. With the late 19th-century background of eugenics and a fear of moral decline, some critics saw the mention of race mixing in The Lord of the Rings as embodying scientific racism. Other commentators saw in Tolkien's orcs a reflection of wartime propaganda caricatures of the Japanese. Critics have noted, too, that the work embodies a moral geography, with good in the West, evil in the East. Against this, scholars have noted that Tolkien was outraged in peacetime by Nazi racial theory, while during the Second World War he was equally disgusted by anti-German racial propaganda. Other scholars have stated that Tolkien's Middle-earth is definitely polycultural and polylingual, and that attacks on Tolkien based on The Lord of the Rings often omit evidence from the text.
During most of his own life, conservationism was not yet on the political agenda, and Tolkien himself did not directly express conservationist views—except in some private letters, in which he tells about his fondness for forests and sadness at tree-felling. In later years, a number of authors of biographies or literary analyses of Tolkien conclude that during his writing of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien gained increased interest in the value of wild and untamed nature, and in protecting what wild nature was left in the industrialized world.
Tolkien's fantasy books on Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, drew on a wide array of influences, including his philological interest in language, Christianity, medievalism, mythology, archaeology, ancient and modern literature, and personal experience. His philological work centred on the study of Old English literature, especially Beowulf, and he acknowledged its importance to his writings. He was a gifted linguist, influenced by Germanic, Celtic, Finnish, and Greek language and mythology. Commentators have attempted to identify many literary and topological antecedents for characters, places and events in Tolkien's writings. Some writers were important to him, including the Arts and Crafts polymath William Morris, and he undoubtedly made use of some real place-names, such as Bag End, the name of his aunt's home. He acknowledged, too, John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard, authors of modern adventure stories that he enjoyed. The effects of some specific experiences have been identified. Tolkien's childhood in the English countryside, and its urbanization by the growth of Birmingham, influenced his creation of the Shire, while his personal experience of fighting in the trenches of the First World War affected his depiction of Mordor.
In addition to writing fiction, Tolkien was an author of academic literary criticism. His seminal 1936 lecture, later published as an article, revolutionized the treatment of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf by literary critics. The essay remains highly influential in the study of Old English literature to this day. Beowulf is one of the most significant influences upon Tolkien's later fiction, with major details of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings being adapted from the poem.
This essay discusses the fairy-story as a literary form. It was initially written as the 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Tolkien focuses on Andrew Lang's work as a folklorist and collector of fairy tales. He disagreed with Lang's broad inclusion, in his Fairy Book collections, of traveller's tales, beast fables, and other types of stories. Tolkien held a narrower perspective, viewing fairy stories as those that took place in Faerie, an enchanted realm, with or without fairies as characters. He viewed them as the natural development of the interaction of human imagination and human language.
In addition to his mythopoeic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, building up a series of short stories (later compiled and published as The Father Christmas Letters). Other works included Mr. Bliss and Roverandom (for children), and Leaf by Niggle (part of Tree and Leaf), The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from his legendarium.
Tolkien never expected his stories to become popular, but by sheer accident a book called The Hobbit, which he had written some years before for his own children, came in 1936 to the attention of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the London publishing firm George Allen & Unwin, who persuaded Tolkien to submit it for publication. When it was published a year later, the book attracted adult readers as well as children, and it became popular enough for the publishers to ask Tolkien to produce a sequel.
The request for a sequel prompted Tolkien to begin what became his most famous work: the epic novel The Lord of the Rings (originally published in three volumes in 1954–1955). Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for The Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set against the background of The Silmarillion, but in a time long after it.
Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings to be a children's tale in the style of The Hobbit, but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Though a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense backstory of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in The Silmarillion and other volumes. Tolkien strongly influenced the fantasy genre that grew up after the book's success.
The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the 1960s and has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the 20th century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the UK's "Best-loved Novel". Australians voted The Lord of the Rings "My Favourite Book" in a 2004 survey conducted by the Australian ABC. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium". In 2002 Tolkien was voted the 92nd "greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted 35th in the SABC3's Great South Africans, the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity is not limited to the English-speaking world: in a 2004 poll inspired by the UK's "Big Read" survey, about 250,000 Germans found The Lord of the Rings to be their favourite work of literature.
Tolkien wrote a brief "Sketch of the Mythology", which included the tales of Beren and Lúthien and of Túrin; and that sketch eventually evolved into the Quenta Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. Tolkien desperately hoped to publish it along with The Lord of the Rings, but publishers (both Allen & Unwin and Collins) declined. Moreover, printing costs were very high in 1950s Britain, requiring The Lord of the Rings to be published in three volumes. The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-earth, edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher Tolkien. From around 1936, Tolkien began to extend this framework to include the tale of The Fall of Númenor, which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis.
Tolkien appointed his son Christopher to be his literary executor, and he (with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay, later a well-known fantasy author in his own right) organized some of this material into a single coherent volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977. It received the Locus Award for Best Fantasy novel in 1978.
In 1980, Christopher Tolkien published a collection of more fragmentary material, under the title Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. In subsequent years (1983–1996), he published a large amount of the remaining unpublished materials, together with notes and extensive commentary, in a series of twelve volumes called The History of Middle-earth. They contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative, and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress for Tolkien and he only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not complete consistency between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the two most closely related works, because Tolkien never fully integrated all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing The Hobbit for a third edition, that he would have preferred to rewrite the book completely because of the style of its prose.
Before his death, Tolkien negotiated the sale of the manuscripts, drafts, proofs and other materials related to his then-published works—including The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham—to the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Marquette University's John P. Raynor, S.J., Library in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After his death his estate donated the papers containing Tolkien's Silmarillion mythology and his academic work to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. The Bodleian Library held an exhibition of his work in 2018, including more than 60 items which had never been seen in public before.
In 2009, a partial draft of Language and Human Nature, which Tolkien had begun co-writing with C. S. Lewis but had never completed, was discovered at the Bodleian Library.
Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialized in English philology at university and in 1915 graduated with Old Norse as his special subject. He worked on the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918 and is credited with having worked on a number of words starting with the letter W, including walrus, over which he struggled mightily. In 1920, he became Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club". He also had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of Finnish.
Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he entertained notions of "inherent linguistic predilections", which he termed the "native language" as opposed to the "cradle-tongue" which a person first learns to speak. He considered the West Midlands dialect of Middle English to be his own "native language", and, as he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955, "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)."
Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for constructing languages. The most developed of these are Quenya and Sindarin, the etymological connection between which formed the core of much of Tolkien's legendarium. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in particular was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an "Elven-latin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish, Welsh, English, and Greek.
Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages: in 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lecture A Secret Vice, "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he had concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c, &c, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends".
The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's idiosyncratic spellings dwarves and dwarvish (alongside dwarfs and dwarfish), which had been little used since the mid-19th century and earlier. (In fact, according to Tolkien, had the Old English plural survived, it would have been dwarrows or dwerrows.) He coined the term eucatastrophe, used mainly in connection with his own work.
Tolkien learnt to paint and draw as a child and continued to do so all his adult life. From early in his writing career, the development of his stories was accompanied by drawings and paintings, especially of landscapes, and by maps of the lands in which the tales were set. He also produced pictures to accompany the stories told to his own children, including those later published in Mr Bliss and Roverandom, and sent them elaborately illustrated letters purporting to come from Father Christmas. Although he regarded himself as an amateur, the publisher used the author's own cover art, his maps, and full-page illustrations for the early editions of The Hobbit. He prepared maps and illustrations for The Lord of the Rings, but the first edition contained only the maps, his calligraphy for the inscription on the One Ring, and his ink drawing of the Doors of Durin. Much of his artwork was collected and published in 1995 as a book: J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. The book discusses Tolkien's paintings, drawings, and sketches, and reproduces approximately 200 examples of his work. Catherine McIlwaine curated a major exhibition of Tolkien's artwork at the Bodleian Library, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, accompanied by a book of the same name that analyses Tolkien's achievement and illustrates the full range of the types of artwork that he created.
While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence and the shaping of the modern fantasy genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy, as in the work of authors such as Ursula Le Guin and her Earthsea series. In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". His influence has extended to music, including the Danish group the Tolkien Ensemble's setting of all the poetry in The Lord of the Rings to their vocal music; and to a broad range of games set in Middle-earth. Among literary allusions to Tolkien, he appears as the elderly "Professor J. B. Timbermill" in all five novels in J. I. M. Stewart's series A Staircase in Surrey. Scholar Tom Shippey refers to Tolkien as one of the authors of the 20th century and one of the most influential authors of all time, and states that "I do not think any modern writer of epic fantasy has managed to escape the mark of Tolkien, no matter how hard many of them have tried". His work has also had a massive impact on western pop culture, and remains extremely influential.
In a 1951 letter to publisher Milton Waldman (1895–1976), Tolkien wrote about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which "[t]he cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama". The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who set the music to The Road Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to The Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity they bore in style to his own drawings. Tolkien was not implacably opposed to the idea of a dramatic adaptation, however, and sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968. United Artists never made a film, although director John Boorman was planning a live-action film in the early 1970s. In 1976, the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was released in 1978 as an animated rotoscoping film directed by Ralph Bakshi with screenplay by the fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle. It covered only the first half of the story of The Lord of the Rings.
In 1977, an animated musical television film of The Hobbit was made by Rankin-Bass, and in 1980, they produced the animated musical television film The Return of the King, which covered some of the portions of The Lord of the Rings that Bakshi was unable to complete. From 2001 to 2003, New Line Cinema released The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of live-action films that were filmed in New Zealand and directed by Peter Jackson. The series was successful, performing extremely well commercially and winning numerous Oscars. From 2012 to 2014, Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema released The Hobbit, a series of three films based on The Hobbit, with Peter Jackson serving as executive producer, director, and co-writer. The first instalment, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, was released in December 2012; the second, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, in December 2013; and the last instalment, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, in December 2014. In 2017, Amazon acquired the global television rights to The Lord of the Rings, for a series of new stories set before The Fellowship of the Ring.
Tolkien and the characters and places from his works have become eponyms of many real-world objects. These include geographical features on Titan (Saturn's largest moon), street names such as There and Back Again Lane, inspired by The Hobbit, mountains such as Mount Shadowfax, Mount Gandalf and Mount Aragorn in Canada, companies such as Palantir Technologies, and species including the wasp Shireplitis tolkieni, 37 new species of Elachista moths, and many fossils.
Since 2003, The Tolkien Society has organized Tolkien Reading Day, which takes place on 25 March in schools around the world. In 2013, Pembroke College, Oxford University, established an annual lecture on fantasy literature in Tolkien's honour. In 2012, Tolkien was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork—the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover—to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admired. A 2019 biographical film, Tolkien, focused on Tolkien's early life and war experiences. The Tolkien family and estate stated that they did not "approve of, authorise or participate in the making of" the film.
Several blue plaques in England commemorate places associated with Tolkien, including for his childhood, his workplaces, and places he visited.
The Royal Mint is producing a commemorative £2 coin in 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of Tolkien's death.
On 2 September 2017, the Oxford Oratory, Tolkien's parish church during his time in Oxford, offered its first Mass for the intention of Tolkien's cause for beatification to be opened. A prayer was written for his cause.
A small selection of books about Tolkien and his works: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE FRSL (/ˈruːl ˈtɒlkiːn/, ROOL TOL-keen; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and, within it, Middle-earth. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. As a result, he has been popularly identified as the \"father\" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of all time.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Tolkien was English, and thought of himself as such. His immediate paternal ancestors were middle-class craftsmen who made and sold clocks, watches and pianos in London and Birmingham. The Tolkien family originated in the East Prussian town of Kreuzburg near Königsberg, which had been founded during the medieval German eastward expansion, where his earliest-known paternal ancestor Michel Tolkien was born around 1620. Michel's son Christianus Tolkien (1663–1746) was a wealthy miller in Kreuzburg.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "His son, Christian Tolkien (1706–1791), moved from Kreuzburg to nearby Danzig, and his two sons Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien (1747–1813) and Johann (later known as John) Benjamin Tolkien (1752–1819) emigrated to London in the 1770s and became the ancestors of the English family; the younger brother was J. R. R. Tolkien's second great-grandfather. In 1792, John Benjamin Tolkien and William Gravell took over the Erdley Norton manufacture in London, which from then on sold clocks and watches under the name Gravell & Tolkien. Daniel Gottlieb obtained British citizenship in 1794, but John Benjamin apparently never became a British citizen. Other German relatives also joined the two brothers in London. Several people with the surname Tolkien or similar spelling, some of them members of the same family as J. R. R. Tolkien, live in northern Germany, but most of them are descendants of people who evacuated East Prussia in 1945, at the end of World War II.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "According to Ryszard Derdziński, the surname Tolkien is of Low Prussian origin and probably means \"son/descendant of Tolk\". Tolkien mistakenly believed his surname derived from the German word tollkühn, meaning \"foolhardy\", and jokingly inserted himself as a \"cameo\" into The Notion Club Papers under the literally translated name Rashbold. However, Derdziński has demonstrated this to be a false etymology. While J. R. R. Tolkien was aware of his family's German origin, his knowledge of the family's history was limited because he was \"early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (later annexed by the British Empire; now Free State Province in the Republic of South Africa), to Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, née Suffield (1870–1904). The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British bank for which he worked. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, who was born on 17 February 1894.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden, an event some believe to have been later echoed in his stories, although he admitted no actual memory of the event as an adult. In an earlier incident from Tolkien's infancy, a young family servant took the baby to his homestead, returning him the next morning.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "When he was three, he went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Kings Heath, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham. He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent, Lickey and Malvern Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books, along with nearby towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt Jane's farm Bag End, the name of which he used in his fiction.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Mabel Tolkien taught her two children at home. Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany and awakened in him the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees, but his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Tolkien could read by the age of four and could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother allowed him to read many books. He disliked Treasure Island and \"The Pied Piper\" and thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was \"amusing but disturbing\". He liked stories about \"Red Indians\" (the term then used for Native Americans in adventure stories) and works of fantasy by George MacDonald. In addition, the \"Fairy Books\" of Andrew Lang were particularly important to him and their influence is apparent in some of his later writings.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Mabel Tolkien was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900 despite vehement protests by her Baptist family, which stopped all financial assistance to her. In 1904, when J. R. R. Tolkien was 12, his mother died of acute diabetes at Fern Cottage in Rednal, which she was renting. She was then about 34 years of age, about as old as a person with diabetes mellitus type 1 could survive without treatment—insulin would not be discovered until 1921, two decades later. Nine years after her death, Tolkien wrote, \"My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Before her death, Mabel Tolkien had assigned the guardianship of her sons to her close friend, Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, who was assigned to bring them up as good Catholics. In a 1965 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled the influence of the man whom he always called \"Father Francis\": \"He was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old gossip. He was—and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the 'liberal' darkness out of which I came, knowing more about 'Bloody Mary' than the Mother of Jesus—who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists.\" After his mother's death, Tolkien grew up in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham and attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, and later St Philip's School. In 1903, he won a Foundation Scholarship and returned to King Edward's.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "While in his early teens, Tolkien had his first encounter with a constructed language, Animalic, an invention of his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon. At that time, he was studying Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Their interest in Animalic soon died away, but Mary and others, including Tolkien himself, invented a new and more complex language called Nevbosh. The next constructed language he came to work with, Naffarin, would be his own creation. Tolkien learned Esperanto some time before 1909. Around 10 June 1909 he composed \"The Book of the Foxrook\", a sixteen-page notebook, where the \"earliest example of one of his invented alphabets\" appears. Short texts in this notebook are written in Esperanto.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society they called the T.C.B.S. The initials stood for Tea Club and Barrovian Society, alluding to their fondness for drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, secretly, in the school library. After leaving school, the members stayed in touch and, in December 1914, they held a council in London at Wiseman's home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong dedication to writing poetry.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1911, Tolkien went on a summer holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollected vividly in a 1968 letter, noting that Bilbo's journey across the Misty Mountains (\"including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods\") is directly based on his adventures as their party of 12 hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembered his regret at leaving the view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn, \"the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams\". They went across the Kleine Scheidegg to Grindelwald and on across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass, through the upper Valais to Brig and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In October of the same year, Tolkien began studying at Exeter College, Oxford. He initially read classics but changed his course in 1913 to English language and literature, graduating in 1915 with first-class honours. Among his tutors at Oxford was Joseph Wright, whose Primer of the Gothic Language had inspired Tolkien as a schoolboy.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years his senior, when he and his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house where she lived in Duchess Road, Edgbaston. According to Humphrey Carpenter, \"Edith and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham teashops, especially one which had a balcony overlooking the pavement. There they would sit and throw sugarlumps into the hats of passers-by, moving to the next table when the sugar bowl was empty. ... With two people of their personalities and in their position, romance was bound to flourish. Both were orphans in need of affection, and they found that they could give it to each other. During the summer of 1909, they decided that they were in love.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "His guardian, Father Morgan, considered it \"altogether unfortunate\" that his surrogate son was romantically involved with an older, Protestant woman; Tolkien wrote that the combined tensions contributed to his having \"muffed [his] exams\". Morgan prohibited him from meeting, talking to, or even corresponding with Edith until he was 21. Tolkien obeyed this prohibition to the letter, with one notable early exception, over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On the evening of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with family friend C. H. Jessop at Cheltenham. He declared that he had never ceased to love her, and asked her to marry him. Edith replied that she had already accepted the proposal of George Field, the brother of one of her closest school friends. But Edith said she had agreed to marry Field only because she felt \"on the shelf\" and had begun to doubt that Tolkien still cared for her. She explained that, because of Tolkien's letter, everything had changed.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "On 8 January 1913, Tolkien travelled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith. The two took a walk into the countryside, sat under a railway viaduct, and talked. By the end of the day, Edith had agreed to accept Tolkien's proposal. She wrote to Field and returned her engagement ring. Field was \"dreadfully upset at first\", and the Field family was \"insulted and angry\". Upon learning of Edith's new plans, Jessop wrote to her guardian, \"I have nothing to say against Tolkien, he is a cultured gentleman, but his prospects are poor in the extreme, and when he will be in a position to marry I cannot imagine. Had he adopted a profession it would have been different.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Following their engagement, Edith reluctantly announced that she was converting to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence. Jessop, \"like many others of his age and class ... strongly anti-Catholic\", was infuriated, and he ordered Edith to find other lodgings.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Edith Bratt and Ronald Tolkien were formally engaged at Birmingham in January 1913, and married at St Mary Immaculate Catholic Church at Warwick, on 22 March 1916. In his 1941 letter to Michael, Tolkien expressed admiration for his wife's willingness to marry a man with no job, little money, and no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in the Great War.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In August 1914, Britain entered the First World War. Tolkien's relatives were shocked when he elected not to volunteer immediately for the British Army. In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled: \"In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.\" Instead, Tolkien, \"endured the obloquy\", and entered a programme by which he delayed enlistment until completing his degree. By the time he passed his finals in July 1915, Tolkien recalled that the hints were \"becoming outspoken from relatives\". He was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers on 15 July 1915. He trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase, Rugeley Camp near to Rugeley, Staffordshire, for 11 months. In a letter to Edith, Tolkien complained: \"Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed.\" Following their wedding, Lieutenant and Mrs. Tolkien took up lodgings near the training camp. On 2 June 1916, Tolkien received a telegram summoning him to Folkestone for posting to France. The Tolkiens spent the night before his departure in a room at the Plough & Harrow Hotel in Edgbaston, Birmingham. He later wrote: \"Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then... it was like a death.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "On 5 June 1916, Tolkien boarded a troop transport for an overnight voyage to Calais. Like other soldiers arriving for the first time, he was sent to the British Expeditionary Force's base depot at Étaples. On 7 June, he was informed that he had been assigned as a signals officer to the 11th (Service) Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers. The battalion was part of the 74th Brigade, 25th Division. While waiting to be summoned to his unit, Tolkien sank into boredom. To pass the time, he composed a poem titled The Lonely Isle, which was inspired by his feelings during the sea crossing to Calais. To evade the British Army's postal censorship, he developed a code of dots by which Edith could track his movements. He left Étaples on 27 June 1916 and joined his battalion at Rubempré, near Amiens. He found himself commanding enlisted men who were drawn mainly from the mining, milling, and weaving towns of Lancashire. According to John Garth, he \"felt an affinity for these working class men\", but military protocol prohibited friendships with \"other ranks\". Instead, he was required to \"take charge of them, discipline them, train them, and probably censor their letters ... If possible, he was supposed to inspire their love and loyalty.\" Tolkien later lamented, \"The most improper job of any man ... is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Tolkien arrived at the Somme in early July 1916. In between terms behind the lines at Bouzincourt, he participated in the assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig salient. Tolkien's time in combat was a terrible stress for Edith, who feared that every knock on the door might carry news of her husband's death. Edith could track her husband's movements on a map of the Western Front. The Reverend Mervyn S. Evers, Anglican chaplain to the Lancashire Fusiliers, recorded that Tolkien and his fellow officers were eaten by \"hordes of lice\" which found the Medical Officer's ointment merely \"a kind of hors d'oeuvre and the little beggars went at their feast with renewed vigour.\" On 27 October 1916, as his battalion attacked Regina Trench, Tolkien contracted trench fever, a disease carried by lice. He was invalided to England on 8 November 1916.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "According to his children John and Priscilla Tolkien, \"In later years, he would occasionally talk of being at the front: of the horrors of the first German gas attack, of the utter exhaustion and ominous quiet after a bombardment, of the whining scream of the shells, and the endless marching, always on foot, through a devastated landscape, sometimes carrying the men's equipment as well as his own to encourage them to keep going. ... Some remarkable relics survive from that time: a trench map he drew himself; pencil-written orders to carry bombs to the 'fighting line.'\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Many of his dearest school friends were killed in the war. Among their number were Rob Gilson of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, who was killed on the first day of the Somme while leading his men in the assault on Beaumont Hamel. Fellow T.C.B.S. member Geoffrey Smith was killed during the battle, when a German artillery shell landed on a first-aid post. Tolkien's battalion was almost completely wiped out following his return to England.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "According to John Garth, Kitchener's Army, in which Tolkien served, at once marked existing social boundaries and counteracted the class system by throwing everyone into a desperate situation together. Tolkien was grateful, writing that it had taught him \"a deep sympathy and feeling for the Tommy; especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "A weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service. During his recovery in a cottage in Little Haywood, Staffordshire, he began to work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin. Lost Tales represented Tolkien's attempt to create a mythology for England, a project he would abandon without ever completing. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps. It was at this time that Edith bore their first child, John Francis Reuel Tolkien. In a 1941 letter, Tolkien described his son John as \"(conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-boat campaign) round about the Battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far off as it does now\". Tolkien was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant on 6 January 1918. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock. After his wife's death in 1971, Tolkien remembered:",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "I never called Edith Luthien—but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On 16 July 1919, Tolkien was taken off active service, at Fovant, on Salisbury Plain, with a temporary disability pension.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "On 3 November 1920, Tolkien was demobilized and left the army, retaining his rank of lieutenant. His first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W. In 1920, he took up a post as reader in English language at the University of Leeds, becoming the youngest member of the academic staff there. While at Leeds, he produced A Middle English Vocabulary and a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E. V. Gordon; both became academic standard works for several decades. He translated Sir Gawain, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. In 1925, he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In mid-1919, he began to tutor undergraduates privately, most importantly those of Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh's College, given that the women's colleges were in great need of good teachers in their early years, and Tolkien as a married professor (then still not common) was considered suitable, as a bachelor don would not have been.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "During his time at Pembroke College Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, while living at 20 Northmoor Road in North Oxford. He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name \"Nodens\", following Sir Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a Roman Asclepeion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the 1920s, Tolkien undertook a translation of Beowulf, which he finished in 1926, but did not publish. It was later edited by his son Christopher and published in 2014.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Ten years after finishing his translation, Tolkien gave a highly acclaimed lecture on the work, \"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics\", which had a lasting influence on Beowulf research. Lewis E. Nicholson said that the article is \"widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism\", noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to its purely linguistic elements. At the time, the consensus of scholarship deprecated Beowulf for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare; Tolkien argued that the author of Beowulf was addressing human destiny in general, not as limited by particular tribal politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the poem. Where Beowulf does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements. In the essay, Tolkien also revealed how highly he regarded Beowulf: \"Beowulf is among my most valued sources\"; this influence may be seen throughout his Middle-earth legendarium.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "According to Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien began his series of lectures on Beowulf in a most striking way, entering the room silently, fixing the audience with a look, and suddenly declaiming in Old English the opening lines of the poem, starting \"with a great cry of Hwæt!\" It was a dramatic impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it made the students realize that Beowulf was not just a set text but \"a powerful piece of dramatic poetry\". Decades later, W. H. Auden wrote to his former professor, thanking him for the \"unforgettable experience\" of hearing him recite Beowulf, and stating: \"The voice was the voice of Gandalf\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In the run-up to the Second World War, Tolkien was earmarked as a codebreaker. In January 1939, he was asked to serve in the cryptographic department of the Foreign Office in the event of national emergency. Beginning on 27 March, he took an instructional course at the London HQ of the Government Code and Cypher School. He was informed in October that his services would not be required.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In 1945, Tolkien moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. He served as an external examiner for University College, Galway (now NUI Galway), for many years. In 1954 Tolkien received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland (of which University College, Galway, was a constituent college). Tolkien completed The Lord of the Rings in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The Tolkiens had four children: John Francis Reuel Tolkien (17 November 1917 – 22 January 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (22 October 1920 – 27 February 1984), Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020) and Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel Tolkien (18 June 1929 – 28 February 2022). Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. In 1961, his friend C. S. Lewis even nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The sales of his books were so profitable that he regretted that he had not chosen early retirement. In a 1972 letter, he deplored having become a cult figure, but admitted that \"even the nose of a very modest idol ... cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, which was then a seaside resort patronized by the British upper middle class. Tolkien's status as a best-selling author gave them easy entry into polite society, but Tolkien deeply missed the company of his fellow Inklings. Edith, however, was overjoyed to step into the role of a society hostess, which had been the reason that Tolkien selected Bournemouth in the first place. The genuine and deep affection between Ronald and Edith was demonstrated by their care about the other's health, in details like wrapping presents, in the generous way he gave up his life at Oxford so she could retire to Bournemouth, and in her pride in his becoming a famous author. They were tied together, too, by love for their children and grandchildren.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In his retirement Tolkien was a consultant and translator for The Jerusalem Bible, published in 1966. He was initially assigned a larger portion to translate, but, due to other commitments, only managed to offer some criticisms of other contributors and a translation of the Book of Jonah.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Edith died on 29 November 1971, at the age of 82. Ronald returned to Oxford, where Merton College gave him convenient rooms near the High Street. He missed Edith, but enjoyed being back in the city.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Tolkien was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1972 New Year Honours and received the insignia of the Order at Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972. In the same year Oxford University gave him an honorary Doctorate of Letters.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "He had the name Luthien [sic] engraved on Edith's tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on 2 September 1973 from a bleeding ulcer and chest infection, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave, with \"Beren\" added to his name. Tolkien's will was proven on 20 December 1973, with his estate valued at £190,577 (equivalent to £2,452,000 in 2021).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Tolkien's Catholicism was a significant factor in C. S. Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity, although Tolkien was dismayed that Lewis chose to join the Church of England. He once wrote to Rayner Unwin's daughter Camilla, who wished to know the purpose of life, that it was \"to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.\" He had a special devotion to the blessed sacrament, writing to his son Michael that in \"the Blessed Sacrament ... you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that\". He accordingly encouraged frequent reception of Holy Communion, again writing to his son Michael that \"the only cure for sagging of fainting faith is Communion.\" He believed the Catholic Church to be true most of all because of the pride of place and the honour in which it holds the Blessed Sacrament. In the last years of his life, Tolkien resisted the liturgical changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council, especially the use of English for the liturgy; he continued to make the responses in Latin, loudly, ignoring the rest of the congregation.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Tolkien's fantasy writings have often been accused of embodying a racist attitude. Scholars have noted that he was influenced by Victorian attitudes to race and to a literary tradition of monsters, and that he was anti-racist in peacetime and during the World Wars. With the late 19th-century background of eugenics and a fear of moral decline, some critics saw the mention of race mixing in The Lord of the Rings as embodying scientific racism. Other commentators saw in Tolkien's orcs a reflection of wartime propaganda caricatures of the Japanese. Critics have noted, too, that the work embodies a moral geography, with good in the West, evil in the East. Against this, scholars have noted that Tolkien was outraged in peacetime by Nazi racial theory, while during the Second World War he was equally disgusted by anti-German racial propaganda. Other scholars have stated that Tolkien's Middle-earth is definitely polycultural and polylingual, and that attacks on Tolkien based on The Lord of the Rings often omit evidence from the text.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "During most of his own life, conservationism was not yet on the political agenda, and Tolkien himself did not directly express conservationist views—except in some private letters, in which he tells about his fondness for forests and sadness at tree-felling. In later years, a number of authors of biographies or literary analyses of Tolkien conclude that during his writing of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien gained increased interest in the value of wild and untamed nature, and in protecting what wild nature was left in the industrialized world.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Tolkien's fantasy books on Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, drew on a wide array of influences, including his philological interest in language, Christianity, medievalism, mythology, archaeology, ancient and modern literature, and personal experience. His philological work centred on the study of Old English literature, especially Beowulf, and he acknowledged its importance to his writings. He was a gifted linguist, influenced by Germanic, Celtic, Finnish, and Greek language and mythology. Commentators have attempted to identify many literary and topological antecedents for characters, places and events in Tolkien's writings. Some writers were important to him, including the Arts and Crafts polymath William Morris, and he undoubtedly made use of some real place-names, such as Bag End, the name of his aunt's home. He acknowledged, too, John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard, authors of modern adventure stories that he enjoyed. The effects of some specific experiences have been identified. Tolkien's childhood in the English countryside, and its urbanization by the growth of Birmingham, influenced his creation of the Shire, while his personal experience of fighting in the trenches of the First World War affected his depiction of Mordor.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In addition to writing fiction, Tolkien was an author of academic literary criticism. His seminal 1936 lecture, later published as an article, revolutionized the treatment of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf by literary critics. The essay remains highly influential in the study of Old English literature to this day. Beowulf is one of the most significant influences upon Tolkien's later fiction, with major details of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings being adapted from the poem.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "This essay discusses the fairy-story as a literary form. It was initially written as the 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Tolkien focuses on Andrew Lang's work as a folklorist and collector of fairy tales. He disagreed with Lang's broad inclusion, in his Fairy Book collections, of traveller's tales, beast fables, and other types of stories. Tolkien held a narrower perspective, viewing fairy stories as those that took place in Faerie, an enchanted realm, with or without fairies as characters. He viewed them as the natural development of the interaction of human imagination and human language.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In addition to his mythopoeic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, building up a series of short stories (later compiled and published as The Father Christmas Letters). Other works included Mr. Bliss and Roverandom (for children), and Leaf by Niggle (part of Tree and Leaf), The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from his legendarium.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Tolkien never expected his stories to become popular, but by sheer accident a book called The Hobbit, which he had written some years before for his own children, came in 1936 to the attention of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the London publishing firm George Allen & Unwin, who persuaded Tolkien to submit it for publication. When it was published a year later, the book attracted adult readers as well as children, and it became popular enough for the publishers to ask Tolkien to produce a sequel.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The request for a sequel prompted Tolkien to begin what became his most famous work: the epic novel The Lord of the Rings (originally published in three volumes in 1954–1955). Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for The Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set against the background of The Silmarillion, but in a time long after it.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings to be a children's tale in the style of The Hobbit, but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Though a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense backstory of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in The Silmarillion and other volumes. Tolkien strongly influenced the fantasy genre that grew up after the book's success.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the 1960s and has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the 20th century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 \"Big Read\" survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the UK's \"Best-loved Novel\". Australians voted The Lord of the Rings \"My Favourite Book\" in a 2004 survey conducted by the Australian ABC. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite \"book of the millennium\". In 2002 Tolkien was voted the 92nd \"greatest Briton\" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted 35th in the SABC3's Great South Africans, the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity is not limited to the English-speaking world: in a 2004 poll inspired by the UK's \"Big Read\" survey, about 250,000 Germans found The Lord of the Rings to be their favourite work of literature.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Tolkien wrote a brief \"Sketch of the Mythology\", which included the tales of Beren and Lúthien and of Túrin; and that sketch eventually evolved into the Quenta Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. Tolkien desperately hoped to publish it along with The Lord of the Rings, but publishers (both Allen & Unwin and Collins) declined. Moreover, printing costs were very high in 1950s Britain, requiring The Lord of the Rings to be published in three volumes. The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-earth, edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher Tolkien. From around 1936, Tolkien began to extend this framework to include the tale of The Fall of Númenor, which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Tolkien appointed his son Christopher to be his literary executor, and he (with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay, later a well-known fantasy author in his own right) organized some of this material into a single coherent volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977. It received the Locus Award for Best Fantasy novel in 1978.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In 1980, Christopher Tolkien published a collection of more fragmentary material, under the title Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. In subsequent years (1983–1996), he published a large amount of the remaining unpublished materials, together with notes and extensive commentary, in a series of twelve volumes called The History of Middle-earth. They contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative, and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress for Tolkien and he only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not complete consistency between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the two most closely related works, because Tolkien never fully integrated all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing The Hobbit for a third edition, that he would have preferred to rewrite the book completely because of the style of its prose.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Before his death, Tolkien negotiated the sale of the manuscripts, drafts, proofs and other materials related to his then-published works—including The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham—to the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Marquette University's John P. Raynor, S.J., Library in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After his death his estate donated the papers containing Tolkien's Silmarillion mythology and his academic work to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. The Bodleian Library held an exhibition of his work in 2018, including more than 60 items which had never been seen in public before.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In 2009, a partial draft of Language and Human Nature, which Tolkien had begun co-writing with C. S. Lewis but had never completed, was discovered at the Bodleian Library.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialized in English philology at university and in 1915 graduated with Old Norse as his special subject. He worked on the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918 and is credited with having worked on a number of words starting with the letter W, including walrus, over which he struggled mightily. In 1920, he became Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a \"Viking Club\". He also had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of Finnish.",
"title": "Languages and philology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Privately, Tolkien was attracted to \"things of racial and linguistic significance\", and in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he entertained notions of \"inherent linguistic predilections\", which he termed the \"native language\" as opposed to the \"cradle-tongue\" which a person first learns to speak. He considered the West Midlands dialect of Middle English to be his own \"native language\", and, as he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955, \"I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it).\"",
"title": "Languages and philology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for constructing languages. The most developed of these are Quenya and Sindarin, the etymological connection between which formed the core of much of Tolkien's legendarium. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in particular was designed from \"phonaesthetic\" considerations; it was intended as an \"Elven-latin\", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish, Welsh, English, and Greek.",
"title": "Languages and philology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages: in 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lecture A Secret Vice, \"Your language construction will breed a mythology\", but by 1956 he had concluded that \"Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c, &c, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends\".",
"title": "Languages and philology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's idiosyncratic spellings dwarves and dwarvish (alongside dwarfs and dwarfish), which had been little used since the mid-19th century and earlier. (In fact, according to Tolkien, had the Old English plural survived, it would have been dwarrows or dwerrows.) He coined the term eucatastrophe, used mainly in connection with his own work.",
"title": "Languages and philology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Tolkien learnt to paint and draw as a child and continued to do so all his adult life. From early in his writing career, the development of his stories was accompanied by drawings and paintings, especially of landscapes, and by maps of the lands in which the tales were set. He also produced pictures to accompany the stories told to his own children, including those later published in Mr Bliss and Roverandom, and sent them elaborately illustrated letters purporting to come from Father Christmas. Although he regarded himself as an amateur, the publisher used the author's own cover art, his maps, and full-page illustrations for the early editions of The Hobbit. He prepared maps and illustrations for The Lord of the Rings, but the first edition contained only the maps, his calligraphy for the inscription on the One Ring, and his ink drawing of the Doors of Durin. Much of his artwork was collected and published in 1995 as a book: J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. The book discusses Tolkien's paintings, drawings, and sketches, and reproduces approximately 200 examples of his work. Catherine McIlwaine curated a major exhibition of Tolkien's artwork at the Bodleian Library, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, accompanied by a book of the same name that analyses Tolkien's achievement and illustrates the full range of the types of artwork that he created.",
"title": "Artwork"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence and the shaping of the modern fantasy genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the \"father\" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy, as in the work of authors such as Ursula Le Guin and her Earthsea series. In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of \"The 50 greatest British writers since 1945\". His influence has extended to music, including the Danish group the Tolkien Ensemble's setting of all the poetry in The Lord of the Rings to their vocal music; and to a broad range of games set in Middle-earth. Among literary allusions to Tolkien, he appears as the elderly \"Professor J. B. Timbermill\" in all five novels in J. I. M. Stewart's series A Staircase in Surrey. Scholar Tom Shippey refers to Tolkien as one of the authors of the 20th century and one of the most influential authors of all time, and states that \"I do not think any modern writer of epic fantasy has managed to escape the mark of Tolkien, no matter how hard many of them have tried\". His work has also had a massive impact on western pop culture, and remains extremely influential.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In a 1951 letter to publisher Milton Waldman (1895–1976), Tolkien wrote about his intentions to create a \"body of more or less connected legend\", of which \"[t]he cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama\". The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who set the music to The Road Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to The Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity they bore in style to his own drawings. Tolkien was not implacably opposed to the idea of a dramatic adaptation, however, and sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968. United Artists never made a film, although director John Boorman was planning a live-action film in the early 1970s. In 1976, the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was released in 1978 as an animated rotoscoping film directed by Ralph Bakshi with screenplay by the fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle. It covered only the first half of the story of The Lord of the Rings.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In 1977, an animated musical television film of The Hobbit was made by Rankin-Bass, and in 1980, they produced the animated musical television film The Return of the King, which covered some of the portions of The Lord of the Rings that Bakshi was unable to complete. From 2001 to 2003, New Line Cinema released The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of live-action films that were filmed in New Zealand and directed by Peter Jackson. The series was successful, performing extremely well commercially and winning numerous Oscars. From 2012 to 2014, Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema released The Hobbit, a series of three films based on The Hobbit, with Peter Jackson serving as executive producer, director, and co-writer. The first instalment, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, was released in December 2012; the second, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, in December 2013; and the last instalment, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, in December 2014. In 2017, Amazon acquired the global television rights to The Lord of the Rings, for a series of new stories set before The Fellowship of the Ring.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Tolkien and the characters and places from his works have become eponyms of many real-world objects. These include geographical features on Titan (Saturn's largest moon), street names such as There and Back Again Lane, inspired by The Hobbit, mountains such as Mount Shadowfax, Mount Gandalf and Mount Aragorn in Canada, companies such as Palantir Technologies, and species including the wasp Shireplitis tolkieni, 37 new species of Elachista moths, and many fossils.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Since 2003, The Tolkien Society has organized Tolkien Reading Day, which takes place on 25 March in schools around the world. In 2013, Pembroke College, Oxford University, established an annual lecture on fantasy literature in Tolkien's honour. In 2012, Tolkien was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork—the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover—to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admired. A 2019 biographical film, Tolkien, focused on Tolkien's early life and war experiences. The Tolkien family and estate stated that they did not \"approve of, authorise or participate in the making of\" the film.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Several blue plaques in England commemorate places associated with Tolkien, including for his childhood, his workplaces, and places he visited.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The Royal Mint is producing a commemorative £2 coin in 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of Tolkien's death.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "On 2 September 2017, the Oxford Oratory, Tolkien's parish church during his time in Oxford, offered its first Mass for the intention of Tolkien's cause for beatification to be opened. A prayer was written for his cause.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "A small selection of books about Tolkien and his works:",
"title": "Further reading"
}
]
| John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972. After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and, within it, Middle-earth. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings. While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. As a result, he has been popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of all time. | 2001-11-08T06:59:58Z | 2023-12-30T15:02:31Z | [
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15,873 | July 11 | July 11 is the 192nd day of the year (193rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 173 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,874 | July 8 | July 8 is the 189th day of the year (190th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 176 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,878 | July 13 | July 13 is the 194th day of the year (195th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 171 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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15,879 | James Branch Cabell | James Branch Cabell (/ˈkæbəl/; April 14, 1879 – May 5, 1958) was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles-lettres. Cabell was well-regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare."
Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and satirical. Mencken disputed Cabell's claim to romanticism and characterized him as "really the most acidulous of all the anti-romantics. His gaudy heroes ... chase dragons precisely as stockbrockers play golf." According to Louis D. Rubin, Cabell saw art as an escape from life, but found that, once the artist creates his ideal world, it is made up of the same elements that make the real one.
Interest in Cabell declined in the 1930s, a decline that has been attributed in part to his failure to move out of his fantasy niche despite the onset of World War II. Alfred Kazin said that "Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe".
The library at Virginia Commonwealth University is named after Cabell.
Cabell was born into an affluent and well-connected Virginian family, and lived most of his life in Richmond. The first Cabell settled in Virginia in 1664; Cabell's paternal great-grandfather, William H. Cabell, was Governor of the Commonwealth from 1805 to 1808. Cabell County in West Virginia is named after the Governor. James Branch Cabell's grandfather, Robert Gamble Cabell, was a physician; his father, Robert Gamble Cabell II (1847–1922), had an MD, but practiced as a druggist; his mother, Anne Harris (1859–1915), was the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel James R. Branch, of the Army of the Confederate States of America. James was the oldest of three boys—his brothers were Robert Gamble Cabell III (1881–1968) and John Lottier Cabell (1883–1946). His parents separated and were later divorced in 1907. His aunt was the suffragist and educationist Mary-Cooke Branch Munford.
Although Cabell's surname is often mispronounced "Ka-BELL", he himself pronounced it "CAB-ble". To remind an editor of the correct pronunciation, Cabell composed this rhyme: "Tell the rabble my name is Cabell."
Cabell matriculated at the College of William and Mary in 1894 at the age of fifteen and graduated in June 1898. While an undergraduate, Cabell taught French and Greek at the college. According to his close friend and fellow author Ellen Glasgow, Cabell developed a friendship with a professor at the college which was considered by some to be "too intimate" and, as a result Cabell was dismissed, although he was subsequently readmitted and finished his degree. Following his graduation, he worked from 1898 to 1900 as a newspaper reporter in New York City, but returned to Richmond in 1901, where he worked several months on the staff of the Richmond News.
1901 was an eventful year for Cabell: his first stories were accepted for publication, and he was suspected of the murder of John Scott, a wealthy Richmonder. It was rumored that Scott was involved romantically with Cabell's mother. Cabell's supposed involvement in the Scott murder and his college "scandal" were both mentioned in Ellen Glasgow's posthumously published (1954) autobiography The Woman Within. In 1902, seven of Cabell's first stories appeared in national magazines and over the next decade he wrote many short stories and articles, contributing to nationally published magazines including Harper's Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as carrying out extensive research on his family's genealogy.
Between 1911 and 1913, he was employed by his uncle in the office of the Branch coal mines in West Virginia. On November 8, 1913, he married Priscilla Bradley Shepherd, a widow with five children from her previous marriage. In 1915, son Ballard Hartwell Cabell was born. Priscilla died in March 1949; Cabell was remarried in June 1950 to Margaret Waller Freeman.
During his life, Cabell published fifty-two books, including novels, genealogies, collections of short stories, poetry, and miscellanea. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1937.
Cabell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1958 in Richmond, and was buried in the graveyard of the Emmanuel Church at Brook Hill. The following year the remains of Cabell and his first wife were reinterred in Hollywood Cemetery.
Significant Cabell collections are housed at various repositories, including Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Virginia.
In 1970, Virginia Commonwealth University, also located in Richmond, named its main campus library "James Branch Cabell Library" in his honor. In the 1970s, Cabell's personal library and personal papers were moved from his home on Monument Avenue to the James Branch Cabell Library. Consisting of some 3,000 volumes, the collection includes manuscripts; notebooks and scrapbooks; periodicals in which Cabell's essays, reviews and fiction were published; his correspondence with noted writers including H. L. Mencken, Ellen Glasgow, Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser; correspondence with family, friends, editors and publishers, newspaper clippings, photographs, periodicals, criticisms, printed material; publishers' agreements; and statements of sales. The collection resides in the Special Collections and Archives department of the library. The VCU undergraduate literary journal at the university is named Poictesme after the fictional province in his cycle Biography of the Life of Manuel.
More recently, VCU spent over $50 million to expand and modernize the James Branch Cabell Library to further entrench it as the premier library in the Greater Richmond Area and one of the top landmark libraries in the United States. In 2016 Cabell Library won the New Landmark Library Award. The Library Journal's website provides a virtual walking tour of the new James Branch Cabell Library.
Cabell's best-known book, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919), was the subject of a celebrated obscenity case shortly after its publication. The eponymous hero, who considers himself a "monstrous clever fellow", embarks on a journey through ever more fantastic realms, even to hell and heaven. Everywhere he goes, he winds up seducing the local women, even the Devil's wife.
The novel was denounced by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; they attempted to bring a prosecution for obscenity. The case went on for two years before Cabell and his publisher, Robert M. McBride, won: the "indecencies" were double entendres that also had a perfectly decent interpretation, though it appeared that what had actually offended the prosecution most was a joke about papal infallibility. The presiding judge, Charles Cooper Nott Jr., wrote in his decision that "... the most that can be said against the book is that certain passages therein may be considered suggestive in a veiled and subtle way of immorality, but such suggestions are delicately conveyed" and that because of Cabell's writing style "it is doubtful if the book could be read or understood at all by more than a very limited number of readers."
Cabell took an author's revenge: the revised edition of 1926 included a previously "lost" passage in which the hero is placed on trial by the Philistines, with a large dung-beetle as the chief prosecutor. He also wrote a short book, Taboo, in which he thanks John H. Sumner and the Society for Suppression of Vice for generating the publicity that gave his career a boost. Due to the notoriety of the suppression of Jurgen, Cabell became a figure of international fame. In the early 1920s, he became associated by some critics with a group of writers referred to as "The James Branch Cabell School", which included such figures as Mencken, Carl Van Vechten and Elinor Wylie.
A great deal of Cabell's work consists of the Biography of the Life of Manuel, the story of a character named Dom Manuel and his descendants through many generations. The biography includes a total of 25 works that were written over a 23-year period. Cabell stated that he considered the Biography to be a single work, and supervised its publication in a single uniform edition of 18 volumes, known as the Storisende Edition, published from 1927 to 1930. A number of the volumes of the Biography were also published in editions illustrated by Frank C. Papé between 1921 and 1926.
The themes and characters from Jurgen make appearances in many works included in the Biography. Figures of Earth tells the story of Manuel the swineherd, a morally ambiguous protagonist who rises to conquer a realm by playing on others' expectations—his motto being Mundus Vult Decipi, meaning "the world wishes to be deceived." The Silver Stallion is a loose sequel to Figures of Earth that deals with the creation of the legend of Manuel the Redeemer, in which Manuel is pictured as an infallible hero, an example to which all others should aspire; the story is told by Manuel's former knights, who remember how things really were and take different approaches to reconciling the mythology with the actuality of Manuel.
Many of these books take place in the fictional country eventually ruled by Manuel, known as "Poictesme", (pronounced "pwa-tem"). It was the author's intention to situate Poictesme roughly in the south of France. The name suggests the two real French cities of Poitiers (medieval Poictiers) and Angoulême (medieval Angoulesme). Several other books take place in the fictional town of Lichfield, Virginia.
After concluding the Biography in 1932, Cabell shortened his professional name to Branch Cabell. The truncated name was used for all his new, "post-Biography" publications until the printing of There Were Two Pirates (1946).
Though Cabell is best known as a fantasist, the plots and characters of his first few novels, The Eagle's Shadow (1904), The Cords of Vanity (1909), and The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck (1915) (later all adapted for inclusion into the Biography), do not wander out of the everyday society of Virginia's gentry. But Cabell's signature droll style is clearly in evidence, and in later printings each book would bear a characteristically Cabellian subtitle: A Comedy of Purse-Strings, A Comedy of Shirking, and A Comedy of Limitations, respectively.
His later novel, The First Gentleman of America: A Comedy of Conquest (1942), retells the strange career of an American Indian from the shores of the Potomac who sailed away with Spanish explorers, later to return, be made chief of his tribe, and kill all the Spaniards in the new Virginia settlement. Cabell delivered a more concise, historical treatment of the novel's events in The First Virginian, part one of his 1947 work of non-fiction, Let Me Lie, a book on the history of Virginia.
Other works include:
Cabell also wrote a number of autobiographical and genealogical works.
Source:
Cabell's work was highly regarded by a number of his peers, including Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Joseph Hergesheimer, and Jack Woodford. Although now largely forgotten by the general public, his work was remarkably influential on later authors of fantasy fiction. James Blish was a fan of Cabell's works, and for a time edited Kalki, the journal of the Cabell Society. Robert A. Heinlein was greatly inspired by Cabell's boldness, and originally described his own book Stranger in a Strange Land as "a Cabellesque satire". A later work, Job: A Comedy of Justice, derived its title from Jurgen and contains appearances by Jurgen and the Slavic god Koschei. Charles G. Finney's fantasy The Circus of Dr. Lao was influenced by Cabell's work. The Averoigne stories of Clark Ashton Smith are, in background, close to those of Cabell's Poictesme. Jack Vance's Dying Earth books show considerable stylistic resemblances to Cabell; Cugel the Clever in those books bears a strong resemblance, not least in his opinion of himself, to Jurgen. Cabell was also a major influence on Neil Gaiman, acknowledged as such in the rear of Gaiman's novels Stardust and American Gods.
Cabell maintained a close and lifelong friendship with well-known Richmond writer Ellen Glasgow, whose house on West Main Street was only a few blocks from Cabell's family home on East Franklin Street. They corresponded extensively between 1923 and Glasgow's death in 1945 and over 200 of their letters survive. Cabell dedicated his 1927 novel Something About Eve to her, and she in turn dedicated her book They Stooped to Folly: A Comedy of Morals (1929) to Cabell. In her autobiography, Glasgow also gave considerable thanks to Cabell for his help in the editing of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book In This Our Life (1941). However, late in their lives, friction developed between the two writers as a result of Cabell's critical 1943 review of Glasgow's novel A Certain Measure.
Cabell also admired the work of the Atlanta-based writer Frances Newman, though their correspondence was cut short by her death in 1928. In 1929, Cabell supplied the preface to Newman's collected letters.
From 1969 through 1972, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series returned six of Cabell's novels to print, and elevated his profile in the fantasy genre. Today, many more of his works are available from Wildside Press.
Cabell's three-character one-act play The Jewel Merchants was used for the libretto of an opera by Louis Cheslock which premiered in 1940.
Michael Swanwick published a critical monograph on Cabell's work, which argues for the continued value of a few of Cabell's works—notably Jurgen, The Cream of the Jest, and The Silver Stallion—while acknowledging that some of his writing has dated badly. Swanwick places much of the blame for Cabell's obscurity on Cabell himself, for authorizing the 18-volume Storisende uniform edition of the Biography of the Life of Manuel, including much that was of poor quality and ephemeral. This alienated admirers and scared off potential new readers. "There are, alas, an infinite number of ways for a writer to destroy himself," Swanwick wrote. "James Branch Cabell chose one of the more interesting. Standing at the helm of the single most successful literary career of any fantasist of the twentieth century, he drove the great ship of his career straight and unerringly onto the rocks."
Other book-length studies on Cabell were written during the period of his fame by Hugh Walpole, W. A. McNeill, and Carl van Doren. Edmund Wilson tried to rehabilitate his reputation with a long essay in The New Yorker.
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "James Branch Cabell (/ˈkæbəl/; April 14, 1879 – May 5, 1958) was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles-lettres. Cabell was well-regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was \"the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and satirical. Mencken disputed Cabell's claim to romanticism and characterized him as \"really the most acidulous of all the anti-romantics. His gaudy heroes ... chase dragons precisely as stockbrockers play golf.\" According to Louis D. Rubin, Cabell saw art as an escape from life, but found that, once the artist creates his ideal world, it is made up of the same elements that make the real one.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Interest in Cabell declined in the 1930s, a decline that has been attributed in part to his failure to move out of his fantasy niche despite the onset of World War II. Alfred Kazin said that \"Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The library at Virginia Commonwealth University is named after Cabell.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Cabell was born into an affluent and well-connected Virginian family, and lived most of his life in Richmond. The first Cabell settled in Virginia in 1664; Cabell's paternal great-grandfather, William H. Cabell, was Governor of the Commonwealth from 1805 to 1808. Cabell County in West Virginia is named after the Governor. James Branch Cabell's grandfather, Robert Gamble Cabell, was a physician; his father, Robert Gamble Cabell II (1847–1922), had an MD, but practiced as a druggist; his mother, Anne Harris (1859–1915), was the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel James R. Branch, of the Army of the Confederate States of America. James was the oldest of three boys—his brothers were Robert Gamble Cabell III (1881–1968) and John Lottier Cabell (1883–1946). His parents separated and were later divorced in 1907. His aunt was the suffragist and educationist Mary-Cooke Branch Munford.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Although Cabell's surname is often mispronounced \"Ka-BELL\", he himself pronounced it \"CAB-ble\". To remind an editor of the correct pronunciation, Cabell composed this rhyme: \"Tell the rabble my name is Cabell.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Cabell matriculated at the College of William and Mary in 1894 at the age of fifteen and graduated in June 1898. While an undergraduate, Cabell taught French and Greek at the college. According to his close friend and fellow author Ellen Glasgow, Cabell developed a friendship with a professor at the college which was considered by some to be \"too intimate\" and, as a result Cabell was dismissed, although he was subsequently readmitted and finished his degree. Following his graduation, he worked from 1898 to 1900 as a newspaper reporter in New York City, but returned to Richmond in 1901, where he worked several months on the staff of the Richmond News.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "1901 was an eventful year for Cabell: his first stories were accepted for publication, and he was suspected of the murder of John Scott, a wealthy Richmonder. It was rumored that Scott was involved romantically with Cabell's mother. Cabell's supposed involvement in the Scott murder and his college \"scandal\" were both mentioned in Ellen Glasgow's posthumously published (1954) autobiography The Woman Within. In 1902, seven of Cabell's first stories appeared in national magazines and over the next decade he wrote many short stories and articles, contributing to nationally published magazines including Harper's Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as carrying out extensive research on his family's genealogy.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Between 1911 and 1913, he was employed by his uncle in the office of the Branch coal mines in West Virginia. On November 8, 1913, he married Priscilla Bradley Shepherd, a widow with five children from her previous marriage. In 1915, son Ballard Hartwell Cabell was born. Priscilla died in March 1949; Cabell was remarried in June 1950 to Margaret Waller Freeman.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "During his life, Cabell published fifty-two books, including novels, genealogies, collections of short stories, poetry, and miscellanea. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1937.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Cabell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1958 in Richmond, and was buried in the graveyard of the Emmanuel Church at Brook Hill. The following year the remains of Cabell and his first wife were reinterred in Hollywood Cemetery.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Significant Cabell collections are housed at various repositories, including Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Virginia.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1970, Virginia Commonwealth University, also located in Richmond, named its main campus library \"James Branch Cabell Library\" in his honor. In the 1970s, Cabell's personal library and personal papers were moved from his home on Monument Avenue to the James Branch Cabell Library. Consisting of some 3,000 volumes, the collection includes manuscripts; notebooks and scrapbooks; periodicals in which Cabell's essays, reviews and fiction were published; his correspondence with noted writers including H. L. Mencken, Ellen Glasgow, Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser; correspondence with family, friends, editors and publishers, newspaper clippings, photographs, periodicals, criticisms, printed material; publishers' agreements; and statements of sales. The collection resides in the Special Collections and Archives department of the library. The VCU undergraduate literary journal at the university is named Poictesme after the fictional province in his cycle Biography of the Life of Manuel.",
"title": "Honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "More recently, VCU spent over $50 million to expand and modernize the James Branch Cabell Library to further entrench it as the premier library in the Greater Richmond Area and one of the top landmark libraries in the United States. In 2016 Cabell Library won the New Landmark Library Award. The Library Journal's website provides a virtual walking tour of the new James Branch Cabell Library.",
"title": "Honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Cabell's best-known book, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919), was the subject of a celebrated obscenity case shortly after its publication. The eponymous hero, who considers himself a \"monstrous clever fellow\", embarks on a journey through ever more fantastic realms, even to hell and heaven. Everywhere he goes, he winds up seducing the local women, even the Devil's wife.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The novel was denounced by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; they attempted to bring a prosecution for obscenity. The case went on for two years before Cabell and his publisher, Robert M. McBride, won: the \"indecencies\" were double entendres that also had a perfectly decent interpretation, though it appeared that what had actually offended the prosecution most was a joke about papal infallibility. The presiding judge, Charles Cooper Nott Jr., wrote in his decision that \"... the most that can be said against the book is that certain passages therein may be considered suggestive in a veiled and subtle way of immorality, but such suggestions are delicately conveyed\" and that because of Cabell's writing style \"it is doubtful if the book could be read or understood at all by more than a very limited number of readers.\"",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Cabell took an author's revenge: the revised edition of 1926 included a previously \"lost\" passage in which the hero is placed on trial by the Philistines, with a large dung-beetle as the chief prosecutor. He also wrote a short book, Taboo, in which he thanks John H. Sumner and the Society for Suppression of Vice for generating the publicity that gave his career a boost. Due to the notoriety of the suppression of Jurgen, Cabell became a figure of international fame. In the early 1920s, he became associated by some critics with a group of writers referred to as \"The James Branch Cabell School\", which included such figures as Mencken, Carl Van Vechten and Elinor Wylie.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "A great deal of Cabell's work consists of the Biography of the Life of Manuel, the story of a character named Dom Manuel and his descendants through many generations. The biography includes a total of 25 works that were written over a 23-year period. Cabell stated that he considered the Biography to be a single work, and supervised its publication in a single uniform edition of 18 volumes, known as the Storisende Edition, published from 1927 to 1930. A number of the volumes of the Biography were also published in editions illustrated by Frank C. Papé between 1921 and 1926.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The themes and characters from Jurgen make appearances in many works included in the Biography. Figures of Earth tells the story of Manuel the swineherd, a morally ambiguous protagonist who rises to conquer a realm by playing on others' expectations—his motto being Mundus Vult Decipi, meaning \"the world wishes to be deceived.\" The Silver Stallion is a loose sequel to Figures of Earth that deals with the creation of the legend of Manuel the Redeemer, in which Manuel is pictured as an infallible hero, an example to which all others should aspire; the story is told by Manuel's former knights, who remember how things really were and take different approaches to reconciling the mythology with the actuality of Manuel.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Many of these books take place in the fictional country eventually ruled by Manuel, known as \"Poictesme\", (pronounced \"pwa-tem\"). It was the author's intention to situate Poictesme roughly in the south of France. The name suggests the two real French cities of Poitiers (medieval Poictiers) and Angoulême (medieval Angoulesme). Several other books take place in the fictional town of Lichfield, Virginia.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "After concluding the Biography in 1932, Cabell shortened his professional name to Branch Cabell. The truncated name was used for all his new, \"post-Biography\" publications until the printing of There Were Two Pirates (1946).",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Though Cabell is best known as a fantasist, the plots and characters of his first few novels, The Eagle's Shadow (1904), The Cords of Vanity (1909), and The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck (1915) (later all adapted for inclusion into the Biography), do not wander out of the everyday society of Virginia's gentry. But Cabell's signature droll style is clearly in evidence, and in later printings each book would bear a characteristically Cabellian subtitle: A Comedy of Purse-Strings, A Comedy of Shirking, and A Comedy of Limitations, respectively.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "His later novel, The First Gentleman of America: A Comedy of Conquest (1942), retells the strange career of an American Indian from the shores of the Potomac who sailed away with Spanish explorers, later to return, be made chief of his tribe, and kill all the Spaniards in the new Virginia settlement. Cabell delivered a more concise, historical treatment of the novel's events in The First Virginian, part one of his 1947 work of non-fiction, Let Me Lie, a book on the history of Virginia.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Other works include:",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Cabell also wrote a number of autobiographical and genealogical works.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Source:",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Cabell's work was highly regarded by a number of his peers, including Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Joseph Hergesheimer, and Jack Woodford. Although now largely forgotten by the general public, his work was remarkably influential on later authors of fantasy fiction. James Blish was a fan of Cabell's works, and for a time edited Kalki, the journal of the Cabell Society. Robert A. Heinlein was greatly inspired by Cabell's boldness, and originally described his own book Stranger in a Strange Land as \"a Cabellesque satire\". A later work, Job: A Comedy of Justice, derived its title from Jurgen and contains appearances by Jurgen and the Slavic god Koschei. Charles G. Finney's fantasy The Circus of Dr. Lao was influenced by Cabell's work. The Averoigne stories of Clark Ashton Smith are, in background, close to those of Cabell's Poictesme. Jack Vance's Dying Earth books show considerable stylistic resemblances to Cabell; Cugel the Clever in those books bears a strong resemblance, not least in his opinion of himself, to Jurgen. Cabell was also a major influence on Neil Gaiman, acknowledged as such in the rear of Gaiman's novels Stardust and American Gods.",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Cabell maintained a close and lifelong friendship with well-known Richmond writer Ellen Glasgow, whose house on West Main Street was only a few blocks from Cabell's family home on East Franklin Street. They corresponded extensively between 1923 and Glasgow's death in 1945 and over 200 of their letters survive. Cabell dedicated his 1927 novel Something About Eve to her, and she in turn dedicated her book They Stooped to Folly: A Comedy of Morals (1929) to Cabell. In her autobiography, Glasgow also gave considerable thanks to Cabell for his help in the editing of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book In This Our Life (1941). However, late in their lives, friction developed between the two writers as a result of Cabell's critical 1943 review of Glasgow's novel A Certain Measure.",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Cabell also admired the work of the Atlanta-based writer Frances Newman, though their correspondence was cut short by her death in 1928. In 1929, Cabell supplied the preface to Newman's collected letters.",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "From 1969 through 1972, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series returned six of Cabell's novels to print, and elevated his profile in the fantasy genre. Today, many more of his works are available from Wildside Press.",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Cabell's three-character one-act play The Jewel Merchants was used for the libretto of an opera by Louis Cheslock which premiered in 1940.",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Michael Swanwick published a critical monograph on Cabell's work, which argues for the continued value of a few of Cabell's works—notably Jurgen, The Cream of the Jest, and The Silver Stallion—while acknowledging that some of his writing has dated badly. Swanwick places much of the blame for Cabell's obscurity on Cabell himself, for authorizing the 18-volume Storisende uniform edition of the Biography of the Life of Manuel, including much that was of poor quality and ephemeral. This alienated admirers and scared off potential new readers. \"There are, alas, an infinite number of ways for a writer to destroy himself,\" Swanwick wrote. \"James Branch Cabell chose one of the more interesting. Standing at the helm of the single most successful literary career of any fantasist of the twentieth century, he drove the great ship of his career straight and unerringly onto the rocks.\"",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Other book-length studies on Cabell were written during the period of his fame by Hugh Walpole, W. A. McNeill, and Carl van Doren. Edmund Wilson tried to rehabilitate his reputation with a long essay in The New Yorker.",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Notes",
"title": "References"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Bibliography",
"title": "References"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Further reading",
"title": "References"
}
]
| James Branch Cabell was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles-lettres. Cabell was well-regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare." Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and satirical. Mencken disputed Cabell's claim to romanticism and characterized him as "really the most acidulous of all the anti-romantics. His gaudy heroes ... chase dragons precisely as stockbrockers play golf." According to Louis D. Rubin, Cabell saw art as an escape from life, but found that, once the artist creates his ideal world, it is made up of the same elements that make the real one. Interest in Cabell declined in the 1930s, a decline that has been attributed in part to his failure to move out of his fantasy niche despite the onset of World War II. Alfred Kazin said that "Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe". The library at Virginia Commonwealth University is named after Cabell. | 2001-07-19T11:47:47Z | 2023-11-21T16:16:57Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Branch_Cabell |
15,881 | Java (programming language) | Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers write once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need to recompile. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. The Java runtime provides dynamic capabilities (such as reflection and runtime code modification) that are typically not available in traditional compiled languages.
Java gained popularity shortly after its release, and has been a very popular programming language since then. Java was the third most popular programming language in 2022 according to GitHub and it is ranked fourth on TIOBE index as of October 2023. Although still widely popular, there has been a gradual decline in use of Java in recent years with other languages using JVM gaining popularity.
Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. It was released in May 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The original and reference implementation Java compilers, virtual machines, and class libraries were originally released by Sun under proprietary licenses. As of May 2007, in compliance with the specifications of the Java Community Process, Sun had relicensed most of its Java technologies under the GPL-2.0-only license. Oracle offers its own HotSpot Java Virtual Machine, however the official reference implementation is the OpenJDK JVM which is free open-source software and used by most developers and is the default JVM for almost all Linux distributions.
As of September 2023, Java 21 is the latest version, which is also a long-term support (LTS) version. Java 8, 11, and 17 are previous LTS versions still officially supported.
James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton initiated the Java language project in June 1991. Java was originally designed for interactive television, but it was too advanced for the digital cable television industry at the time. The language was initially called Oak after an oak tree that stood outside Gosling's office. Later the project went by the name Green and was finally renamed Java, from Java coffee, a type of coffee from Indonesia. Gosling designed Java with a C/C++-style syntax that system and application programmers would find familiar.
Sun Microsystems released the first public implementation as Java 1.0 in 1996. It promised write once, run anywhere (WORA) functionality, providing no-cost run-times on popular platforms. Fairly secure and featuring configurable security, it allowed network- and file-access restrictions. Major web browsers soon incorporated the ability to run Java applets within web pages, and Java quickly became popular. The Java 1.0 compiler was re-written in Java by Arthur van Hoff to comply strictly with the Java 1.0 language specification. With the advent of Java 2 (released initially as J2SE 1.2 in December 1998 – 1999), new versions had multiple configurations built for different types of platforms. J2EE included technologies and APIs for enterprise applications typically run in server environments, while J2ME featured APIs optimized for mobile applications. The desktop version was renamed J2SE. In 2006, for marketing purposes, Sun renamed new J2 versions as Java EE, Java ME, and Java SE, respectively.
In 1997, Sun Microsystems approached the ISO/IEC JTC 1 standards body and later the Ecma International to formalize Java, but it soon withdrew from the process. Java remains a de facto standard, controlled through the Java Community Process. At one time, Sun made most of its Java implementations available without charge, despite their proprietary software status. Sun generated revenue from Java through the selling of licenses for specialized products such as the Java Enterprise System.
On November 13, 2006, Sun released much of its Java virtual machine (JVM) as free and open-source software (FOSS), under the terms of the GPL-2.0-only license. On May 8, 2007, Sun finished the process, making all of its JVM's core code available under free software/open-source distribution terms, aside from a small portion of code to which Sun did not hold the copyright.
Sun's vice-president Rich Green said that Sun's ideal role with regard to Java was as an evangelist. Following Oracle Corporation's acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009–10, Oracle has described itself as the steward of Java technology with a relentless commitment to fostering a community of participation and transparency. This did not prevent Oracle from filing a lawsuit against Google shortly after that for using Java inside the Android SDK (see the Android section).
On April 2, 2010, James Gosling resigned from Oracle.
In January 2016, Oracle announced that Java run-time environments based on JDK 9 will discontinue the browser plugin.
Java software runs on everything from laptops to data centers, game consoles to scientific supercomputers.
Oracle (and others) highly recommend uninstalling outdated and unsupported versions of Java, due to unresolved security issues in older versions.
There were five primary goals in the creation of the Java language:
As of September 2023, Java 8, 11, 17 and 21 are supported as Long-Term Support (LTS) versions.
Oracle released the last zero-cost public update for the legacy version Java 8 LTS in January 2019 for commercial use, although it will otherwise still support Java 8 with public updates for personal use indefinitely. Other vendors have begun to offer zero-cost builds of OpenJDK 18 and 8, 11 and 17 that are still receiving security and other upgrades.
Major release versions of Java, along with their release dates:
Sun has defined and supports four editions of Java targeting different application environments and segmented many of its APIs so that they belong to one of the platforms. The platforms are:
The classes in the Java APIs are organized into separate groups called packages. Each package contains a set of related interfaces, classes, subpackages and exceptions.
Sun also provided an edition called Personal Java that has been superseded by later, standards-based Java ME configuration-profile pairings.
One design goal of Java is portability, which means that programs written for the Java platform must run similarly on any combination of hardware and operating system with adequate run time support. This is achieved by compiling the Java language code to an intermediate representation called Java bytecode, instead of directly to architecture-specific machine code. Java bytecode instructions are analogous to machine code, but they are intended to be executed by a virtual machine (VM) written specifically for the host hardware. End-users commonly use a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on their device for standalone Java applications or a web browser for Java applets.
Standard libraries provide a generic way to access host-specific features such as graphics, threading, and networking.
The use of universal bytecode makes porting simple. However, the overhead of interpreting bytecode into machine instructions made interpreted programs almost always run more slowly than native executables. Just-in-time (JIT) compilers that compile byte-codes to machine code during runtime were introduced from an early stage. Java's Hotspot compiler is actually two compilers in one; and with GraalVM (included in e.g. Java 11, but removed as of Java 16) allowing tiered compilation. Java itself is platform-independent and is adapted to the particular platform it is to run on by a Java virtual machine (JVM), which translates the Java bytecode into the platform's machine language.
Programs written in Java have a reputation for being slower and requiring more memory than those written in C++. However, Java programs' execution speed improved significantly with the introduction of just-in-time compilation in 1997/1998 for Java 1.1, the addition of language features supporting better code analysis (such as inner classes, the StringBuilder class, optional assertions, etc.), and optimizations in the Java virtual machine, such as HotSpot becoming Sun's default JVM in 2000. With Java 1.5, the performance was improved with the addition of the java.util.concurrent package, including lock-free implementations of the ConcurrentMaps and other multi-core collections, and it was improved further with Java 1.6.
Some platforms offer direct hardware support for Java; there are micro controllers that can run Java bytecode in hardware instead of a software Java virtual machine, and some ARM-based processors could have hardware support for executing Java bytecode through their Jazelle option, though support has mostly been dropped in current implementations of ARM.
Java uses an automatic garbage collector to manage memory in the object lifecycle. The programmer determines when objects are created, and the Java runtime is responsible for recovering the memory once objects are no longer in use. Once no references to an object remain, the unreachable memory becomes eligible to be freed automatically by the garbage collector. Something similar to a memory leak may still occur if a programmer's code holds a reference to an object that is no longer needed, typically when objects that are no longer needed are stored in containers that are still in use. If methods for a non-existent object are called, a null pointer exception is thrown.
One of the ideas behind Java's automatic memory management model is that programmers can be spared the burden of having to perform manual memory management. In some languages, memory for the creation of objects is implicitly allocated on the stack or explicitly allocated and deallocated from the heap. In the latter case, the responsibility of managing memory resides with the programmer. If the program does not deallocate an object, a memory leak occurs. If the program attempts to access or deallocate memory that has already been deallocated, the result is undefined and difficult to predict, and the program is likely to become unstable or crash. This can be partially remedied by the use of smart pointers, but these add overhead and complexity. Garbage collection does not prevent logical memory leaks, i.e. those where the memory is still referenced but never used.
Garbage collection may happen at any time. Ideally, it will occur when a program is idle. It is guaranteed to be triggered if there is insufficient free memory on the heap to allocate a new object; this can cause a program to stall momentarily. Explicit memory management is not possible in Java.
Java does not support C/C++ style pointer arithmetic, where object addresses can be arithmetically manipulated (e.g. by adding or subtracting an offset). This allows the garbage collector to relocate referenced objects and ensures type safety and security.
As in C++ and some other object-oriented languages, variables of Java's primitive data types are either stored directly in fields (for objects) or on the stack (for methods) rather than on the heap, as is commonly true for non-primitive data types (but see escape analysis). This was a conscious decision by Java's designers for performance reasons.
Java contains multiple types of garbage collectors. Since Java 9, HotSpot uses the Garbage First Garbage Collector (G1GC) as the default. However, there are also several other garbage collectors that can be used to manage the heap. For most applications in Java, G1GC is sufficient. Previously, the Parallel Garbage Collector was used in Java 8.
Having solved the memory management problem does not relieve the programmer of the burden of handling properly other kinds of resources, like network or database connections, file handles, etc., especially in the presence of exceptions.
The syntax of Java is largely influenced by C++ and C. Unlike C++, which combines the syntax for structured, generic, and object-oriented programming, Java was built almost exclusively as an object-oriented language. All code is written inside classes, and every data item is an object, with the exception of the primitive data types, (i.e. integers, floating-point numbers, boolean values, and characters), which are not objects for performance reasons. Java reuses some popular aspects of C++ (such as the printf method).
Unlike C++, Java does not support operator overloading or multiple inheritance for classes, though multiple inheritance is supported for interfaces.
Java uses comments similar to those of C++. There are three different styles of comments: a single line style marked with two slashes (//), a multiple line style opened with /* and closed with */, and the Javadoc commenting style opened with /** and closed with */. The Javadoc style of commenting allows the user to run the Javadoc executable to create documentation for the program and can be read by some integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Eclipse to allow developers to access documentation within the IDE.
The traditional Hello world program can be written in Java as:
All source files must be named after the public class they contain, appending the suffix .java, for example, HelloWorldApp.java. It must first be compiled into bytecode, using a Java compiler, producing a file with the .class suffix (Main.class, in this case). Only then can it be executed or launched. The Java source file may only contain one public class, but it can contain multiple classes with a non-public access modifier and any number of public inner classes. When the source file contains multiple classes, it is necessary to make one class (introduced by the class keyword) public (preceded by the public keyword) and name the source file with that public class name.
A class that is not declared public may be stored in any .java file. The compiler will generate a class file for each class defined in the source file. The name of the class file is the name of the class, with .class appended. For class file generation, anonymous classes are treated as if their name were the concatenation of the name of their enclosing class, a $, and an integer.
The keyword public denotes that a method can be called from code in other classes, or that a class may be used by classes outside the class hierarchy. The class hierarchy is related to the name of the directory in which the .java file is located. This is called an access level modifier. Other access level modifiers include the keywords private (a method that can only be accessed in the same class) and protected (which allows code from the same package to access). If a piece of code attempts to access private methods or protected methods, the JVM will throw a SecurityException.
The keyword static in front of a method indicates a static method, which is associated only with the class and not with any specific instance of that class. Only static methods can be invoked without a reference to an object. Static methods cannot access any class members that are not also static. Methods that are not designated static are instance methods and require a specific instance of a class to operate.
The keyword void indicates that the main method does not return any value to the caller. If a Java program is to exit with an error code, it must call System.exit() explicitly.
The method name main is not a keyword in the Java language. It is simply the name of the method the Java launcher calls to pass control to the program. Java classes that run in managed environments such as applets and Enterprise JavaBeans do not use or need a main() method. A Java program may contain multiple classes that have main methods, which means that the VM needs to be explicitly told which class to launch from.
The main method must accept an array of String objects. By convention, it is referenced as args although any other legal identifier name can be used. Since Java 5, the main method can also use variable arguments, in the form of public static void main(String... args), allowing the main method to be invoked with an arbitrary number of String arguments. The effect of this alternate declaration is semantically identical (to the args parameter which is still an array of String objects), but it allows an alternative syntax for creating and passing the array.
The Java launcher launches Java by loading a given class (specified on the command line or as an attribute in a JAR) and starting its public static void main(String[]) method. Stand-alone programs must declare this method explicitly. The String[] args parameter is an array of String objects containing any arguments passed to the class. The parameters to main are often passed by means of a command line.
Printing is part of a Java standard library: The System class defines a public static field called out. The out object is an instance of the PrintStream class and provides many methods for printing data to standard out, including println(String) which also appends a new line to the passed string.
The string "Hello World!" is automatically converted to a String object by the compiler.
Java applets were programs that were embedded in other applications, typically in a Web page displayed in a web browser. The Java applet API is now deprecated since Java 9 in 2017.
Java servlet technology provides Web developers with a simple, consistent mechanism for extending the functionality of a Web server and for accessing existing business systems. Servlets are server-side Java EE components that generate responses to requests from clients. Most of the time, this means generating HTML pages in response to HTTP requests, although there are a number of other standard servlet classes available, for example for WebSocket communication.
The Java servlet API has to some extent been superseded (but still used under the hood) by two standard Java technologies for web services:
Typical implementations of these APIs on Application Servers or Servlet Containers use a standard servlet for handling all interactions with the HTTP requests and responses that delegate to the web service methods for the actual business logic.
JavaServer Pages (JSP) are server-side Java EE components that generate responses, typically HTML pages, to HTTP requests from clients. JSPs embed Java code in an HTML page by using the special delimiters <% and %>. A JSP is compiled to a Java servlet, a Java application in its own right, the first time it is accessed. After that, the generated servlet creates the response.
Swing is a graphical user interface library for the Java SE platform. It is possible to specify a different look and feel through the pluggable look and feel system of Swing. Clones of Windows, GTK+, and Motif are supplied by Sun. Apple also provides an Aqua look and feel for macOS. Where prior implementations of these looks and feels may have been considered lacking, Swing in Java SE 6 addresses this problem by using more native GUI widget drawing routines of the underlying platforms.
JavaFX is a software platform for creating and delivering desktop applications, as well as rich web applications that can run across a wide variety of devices. JavaFX is intended to replace Swing as the standard GUI library for Java SE, but since JDK 11 JavaFX has not been in the core JDK and instead in a separate module. JavaFX has support for desktop computers and web browsers on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS. JavaFX does not have support for native OS look and feels.
In 2004, generics were added to the Java language, as part of J2SE 5.0. Prior to the introduction of generics, each variable declaration had to be of a specific type. For container classes, for example, this is a problem because there is no easy way to create a container that accepts only specific types of objects. Either the container operates on all subtypes of a class or interface, usually Object, or a different container class has to be created for each contained class. Generics allow compile-time type checking without having to create many container classes, each containing almost identical code. In addition to enabling more efficient code, certain runtime exceptions are prevented from occurring, by issuing compile-time errors. If Java prevented all runtime type errors (ClassCastExceptions) from occurring, it would be type safe.
In 2016, the type system of Java was proven unsound in that it is possible to use generics to construct classes and methods that allow assignment of an instance one class to a variable of another unrelated class. Such code is accepted by the compiler, but fails at run time with a class cast exception.
Criticisms directed at Java include the implementation of generics, speed, the handling of unsigned numbers, the implementation of floating-point arithmetic, and a history of security vulnerabilities in the primary Java VM implementation HotSpot.
The Java Class Library is the standard library, developed to support application development in Java. It is controlled by Oracle in cooperation with others through the Java Community Process program. Companies or individuals participating in this process can influence the design and development of the APIs. This process has been a subject of controversy during the 2010s. The class library contains features such as:
Javadoc is a comprehensive documentation system, created by Sun Microsystems. It provides developers with an organized system for documenting their code. Javadoc comments have an extra asterisk at the beginning, i.e. the delimiters are /** and */, whereas the normal multi-line comments in Java are delimited by /* and */, and single-line comments start with //.
Oracle Corporation is the current owner of the official implementation of the Java SE platform, following their acquisition of Sun Microsystems on January 27, 2010. This implementation is based on the original implementation of Java by Sun. The Oracle implementation is available for Microsoft Windows (still works for XP, while only later versions are currently officially supported), macOS, Linux, and Solaris. Because Java lacks any formal standardization recognized by Ecma International, ISO/IEC, ANSI, or other third-party standards organizations, the Oracle implementation is the de facto standard.
The Oracle implementation is packaged into two different distributions: The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) which contains the parts of the Java SE platform required to run Java programs and is intended for end users, and the Java Development Kit (JDK), which is intended for software developers and includes development tools such as the Java compiler, Javadoc, Jar, and a debugger. Oracle has also released GraalVM, a high performance Java dynamic compiler and interpreter.
OpenJDK is another notable Java SE implementation that is licensed under the GNU GPL. The implementation started when Sun began releasing the Java source code under the GPL. As of Java SE 7, OpenJDK is the official Java reference implementation.
The goal of Java is to make all implementations of Java compatible. Historically, Sun's trademark license for usage of the Java brand insists that all implementations be compatible. This resulted in a legal dispute with Microsoft after Sun claimed that the Microsoft implementation did not support Java remote method invocation (RMI) or Java Native Interface (JNI) and had added platform-specific features of their own. Sun sued in 1997, and, in 2001, won a settlement of US$20 million, as well as a court order enforcing the terms of the license from Sun. As a result, Microsoft no longer ships Java with Windows.
Platform-independent Java is essential to Java EE, and an even more rigorous validation is required to certify an implementation. This environment enables portable server-side applications.
The Java programming language requires the presence of a software platform in order for compiled programs to be executed.
Oracle supplies the Java platform for use with Java. The Android SDK is an alternative software platform, used primarily for developing Android applications with its own GUI system.
The Java language is a key pillar in Android, an open source mobile operating system. Although Android, built on the Linux kernel, is written largely in C, the Android SDK uses the Java language as the basis for Android applications but does not use any of its standard GUI, SE, ME or other established Java standards. The bytecode language supported by the Android SDK is incompatible with Java bytecode and runs on its own virtual machine, optimized for low-memory devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Depending on the Android version, the bytecode is either interpreted by the Dalvik virtual machine or compiled into native code by the Android Runtime.
Android does not provide the full Java SE standard library, although the Android SDK does include an independent implementation of a large subset of it. It supports Java 6 and some Java 7 features, offering an implementation compatible with the standard library (Apache Harmony).
The use of Java-related technology in Android led to a legal dispute between Oracle and Google. On May 7, 2012, a San Francisco jury found that if APIs could be copyrighted, then Google had infringed Oracle's copyrights by the use of Java in Android devices. District Judge William Alsup ruled on May 31, 2012, that APIs cannot be copyrighted, but this was reversed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in May 2014. On May 26, 2016, the district court decided in favor of Google, ruling the copyright infringement of the Java API in Android constitutes fair use. In March 2018, this ruling was overturned by the Appeals Court, which sent down the case of determining the damages to federal court in San Francisco. Google filed a petition for writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court of the United States in January 2019 to challenge the two rulings that were made by the Appeals Court in Oracle's favor. On April 5, 2021, the Court ruled 6-2 in Google's favor, that its use of Java APIs should be considered fair use. However, the court refused to rule on the copyrightability of APIs, choosing instead to determine their ruling by considering Java's API copyrightable "purely for argument’s sake." | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers write once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need to recompile. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. The Java runtime provides dynamic capabilities (such as reflection and runtime code modification) that are typically not available in traditional compiled languages.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Java gained popularity shortly after its release, and has been a very popular programming language since then. Java was the third most popular programming language in 2022 according to GitHub and it is ranked fourth on TIOBE index as of October 2023. Although still widely popular, there has been a gradual decline in use of Java in recent years with other languages using JVM gaining popularity.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. It was released in May 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The original and reference implementation Java compilers, virtual machines, and class libraries were originally released by Sun under proprietary licenses. As of May 2007, in compliance with the specifications of the Java Community Process, Sun had relicensed most of its Java technologies under the GPL-2.0-only license. Oracle offers its own HotSpot Java Virtual Machine, however the official reference implementation is the OpenJDK JVM which is free open-source software and used by most developers and is the default JVM for almost all Linux distributions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "As of September 2023, Java 21 is the latest version, which is also a long-term support (LTS) version. Java 8, 11, and 17 are previous LTS versions still officially supported.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton initiated the Java language project in June 1991. Java was originally designed for interactive television, but it was too advanced for the digital cable television industry at the time. The language was initially called Oak after an oak tree that stood outside Gosling's office. Later the project went by the name Green and was finally renamed Java, from Java coffee, a type of coffee from Indonesia. Gosling designed Java with a C/C++-style syntax that system and application programmers would find familiar.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Sun Microsystems released the first public implementation as Java 1.0 in 1996. It promised write once, run anywhere (WORA) functionality, providing no-cost run-times on popular platforms. Fairly secure and featuring configurable security, it allowed network- and file-access restrictions. Major web browsers soon incorporated the ability to run Java applets within web pages, and Java quickly became popular. The Java 1.0 compiler was re-written in Java by Arthur van Hoff to comply strictly with the Java 1.0 language specification. With the advent of Java 2 (released initially as J2SE 1.2 in December 1998 – 1999), new versions had multiple configurations built for different types of platforms. J2EE included technologies and APIs for enterprise applications typically run in server environments, while J2ME featured APIs optimized for mobile applications. The desktop version was renamed J2SE. In 2006, for marketing purposes, Sun renamed new J2 versions as Java EE, Java ME, and Java SE, respectively.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1997, Sun Microsystems approached the ISO/IEC JTC 1 standards body and later the Ecma International to formalize Java, but it soon withdrew from the process. Java remains a de facto standard, controlled through the Java Community Process. At one time, Sun made most of its Java implementations available without charge, despite their proprietary software status. Sun generated revenue from Java through the selling of licenses for specialized products such as the Java Enterprise System.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "On November 13, 2006, Sun released much of its Java virtual machine (JVM) as free and open-source software (FOSS), under the terms of the GPL-2.0-only license. On May 8, 2007, Sun finished the process, making all of its JVM's core code available under free software/open-source distribution terms, aside from a small portion of code to which Sun did not hold the copyright.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Sun's vice-president Rich Green said that Sun's ideal role with regard to Java was as an evangelist. Following Oracle Corporation's acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009–10, Oracle has described itself as the steward of Java technology with a relentless commitment to fostering a community of participation and transparency. This did not prevent Oracle from filing a lawsuit against Google shortly after that for using Java inside the Android SDK (see the Android section).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "On April 2, 2010, James Gosling resigned from Oracle.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In January 2016, Oracle announced that Java run-time environments based on JDK 9 will discontinue the browser plugin.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Java software runs on everything from laptops to data centers, game consoles to scientific supercomputers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Oracle (and others) highly recommend uninstalling outdated and unsupported versions of Java, due to unresolved security issues in older versions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "There were five primary goals in the creation of the Java language:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "As of September 2023, Java 8, 11, 17 and 21 are supported as Long-Term Support (LTS) versions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Oracle released the last zero-cost public update for the legacy version Java 8 LTS in January 2019 for commercial use, although it will otherwise still support Java 8 with public updates for personal use indefinitely. Other vendors have begun to offer zero-cost builds of OpenJDK 18 and 8, 11 and 17 that are still receiving security and other upgrades.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Major release versions of Java, along with their release dates:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Sun has defined and supports four editions of Java targeting different application environments and segmented many of its APIs so that they belong to one of the platforms. The platforms are:",
"title": "Editions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The classes in the Java APIs are organized into separate groups called packages. Each package contains a set of related interfaces, classes, subpackages and exceptions.",
"title": "Editions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Sun also provided an edition called Personal Java that has been superseded by later, standards-based Java ME configuration-profile pairings.",
"title": "Editions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "One design goal of Java is portability, which means that programs written for the Java platform must run similarly on any combination of hardware and operating system with adequate run time support. This is achieved by compiling the Java language code to an intermediate representation called Java bytecode, instead of directly to architecture-specific machine code. Java bytecode instructions are analogous to machine code, but they are intended to be executed by a virtual machine (VM) written specifically for the host hardware. End-users commonly use a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on their device for standalone Java applications or a web browser for Java applets.",
"title": "Execution system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Standard libraries provide a generic way to access host-specific features such as graphics, threading, and networking.",
"title": "Execution system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The use of universal bytecode makes porting simple. However, the overhead of interpreting bytecode into machine instructions made interpreted programs almost always run more slowly than native executables. Just-in-time (JIT) compilers that compile byte-codes to machine code during runtime were introduced from an early stage. Java's Hotspot compiler is actually two compilers in one; and with GraalVM (included in e.g. Java 11, but removed as of Java 16) allowing tiered compilation. Java itself is platform-independent and is adapted to the particular platform it is to run on by a Java virtual machine (JVM), which translates the Java bytecode into the platform's machine language.",
"title": "Execution system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Programs written in Java have a reputation for being slower and requiring more memory than those written in C++. However, Java programs' execution speed improved significantly with the introduction of just-in-time compilation in 1997/1998 for Java 1.1, the addition of language features supporting better code analysis (such as inner classes, the StringBuilder class, optional assertions, etc.), and optimizations in the Java virtual machine, such as HotSpot becoming Sun's default JVM in 2000. With Java 1.5, the performance was improved with the addition of the java.util.concurrent package, including lock-free implementations of the ConcurrentMaps and other multi-core collections, and it was improved further with Java 1.6.",
"title": "Execution system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Some platforms offer direct hardware support for Java; there are micro controllers that can run Java bytecode in hardware instead of a software Java virtual machine, and some ARM-based processors could have hardware support for executing Java bytecode through their Jazelle option, though support has mostly been dropped in current implementations of ARM.",
"title": "Execution system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Java uses an automatic garbage collector to manage memory in the object lifecycle. The programmer determines when objects are created, and the Java runtime is responsible for recovering the memory once objects are no longer in use. Once no references to an object remain, the unreachable memory becomes eligible to be freed automatically by the garbage collector. Something similar to a memory leak may still occur if a programmer's code holds a reference to an object that is no longer needed, typically when objects that are no longer needed are stored in containers that are still in use. If methods for a non-existent object are called, a null pointer exception is thrown.",
"title": "Execution system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "One of the ideas behind Java's automatic memory management model is that programmers can be spared the burden of having to perform manual memory management. In some languages, memory for the creation of objects is implicitly allocated on the stack or explicitly allocated and deallocated from the heap. In the latter case, the responsibility of managing memory resides with the programmer. If the program does not deallocate an object, a memory leak occurs. If the program attempts to access or deallocate memory that has already been deallocated, the result is undefined and difficult to predict, and the program is likely to become unstable or crash. This can be partially remedied by the use of smart pointers, but these add overhead and complexity. Garbage collection does not prevent logical memory leaks, i.e. those where the memory is still referenced but never used.",
"title": "Execution system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Garbage collection may happen at any time. Ideally, it will occur when a program is idle. It is guaranteed to be triggered if there is insufficient free memory on the heap to allocate a new object; this can cause a program to stall momentarily. Explicit memory management is not possible in Java.",
"title": "Execution system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Java does not support C/C++ style pointer arithmetic, where object addresses can be arithmetically manipulated (e.g. by adding or subtracting an offset). This allows the garbage collector to relocate referenced objects and ensures type safety and security.",
"title": "Execution system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "As in C++ and some other object-oriented languages, variables of Java's primitive data types are either stored directly in fields (for objects) or on the stack (for methods) rather than on the heap, as is commonly true for non-primitive data types (but see escape analysis). This was a conscious decision by Java's designers for performance reasons.",
"title": "Execution system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Java contains multiple types of garbage collectors. Since Java 9, HotSpot uses the Garbage First Garbage Collector (G1GC) as the default. However, there are also several other garbage collectors that can be used to manage the heap. For most applications in Java, G1GC is sufficient. Previously, the Parallel Garbage Collector was used in Java 8.",
"title": "Execution system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Having solved the memory management problem does not relieve the programmer of the burden of handling properly other kinds of resources, like network or database connections, file handles, etc., especially in the presence of exceptions.",
"title": "Execution system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The syntax of Java is largely influenced by C++ and C. Unlike C++, which combines the syntax for structured, generic, and object-oriented programming, Java was built almost exclusively as an object-oriented language. All code is written inside classes, and every data item is an object, with the exception of the primitive data types, (i.e. integers, floating-point numbers, boolean values, and characters), which are not objects for performance reasons. Java reuses some popular aspects of C++ (such as the printf method).",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Unlike C++, Java does not support operator overloading or multiple inheritance for classes, though multiple inheritance is supported for interfaces.",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Java uses comments similar to those of C++. There are three different styles of comments: a single line style marked with two slashes (//), a multiple line style opened with /* and closed with */, and the Javadoc commenting style opened with /** and closed with */. The Javadoc style of commenting allows the user to run the Javadoc executable to create documentation for the program and can be read by some integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Eclipse to allow developers to access documentation within the IDE.",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The traditional Hello world program can be written in Java as:",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "All source files must be named after the public class they contain, appending the suffix .java, for example, HelloWorldApp.java. It must first be compiled into bytecode, using a Java compiler, producing a file with the .class suffix (Main.class, in this case). Only then can it be executed or launched. The Java source file may only contain one public class, but it can contain multiple classes with a non-public access modifier and any number of public inner classes. When the source file contains multiple classes, it is necessary to make one class (introduced by the class keyword) public (preceded by the public keyword) and name the source file with that public class name.",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "A class that is not declared public may be stored in any .java file. The compiler will generate a class file for each class defined in the source file. The name of the class file is the name of the class, with .class appended. For class file generation, anonymous classes are treated as if their name were the concatenation of the name of their enclosing class, a $, and an integer.",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The keyword public denotes that a method can be called from code in other classes, or that a class may be used by classes outside the class hierarchy. The class hierarchy is related to the name of the directory in which the .java file is located. This is called an access level modifier. Other access level modifiers include the keywords private (a method that can only be accessed in the same class) and protected (which allows code from the same package to access). If a piece of code attempts to access private methods or protected methods, the JVM will throw a SecurityException.",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The keyword static in front of a method indicates a static method, which is associated only with the class and not with any specific instance of that class. Only static methods can be invoked without a reference to an object. Static methods cannot access any class members that are not also static. Methods that are not designated static are instance methods and require a specific instance of a class to operate.",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The keyword void indicates that the main method does not return any value to the caller. If a Java program is to exit with an error code, it must call System.exit() explicitly.",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The method name main is not a keyword in the Java language. It is simply the name of the method the Java launcher calls to pass control to the program. Java classes that run in managed environments such as applets and Enterprise JavaBeans do not use or need a main() method. A Java program may contain multiple classes that have main methods, which means that the VM needs to be explicitly told which class to launch from.",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The main method must accept an array of String objects. By convention, it is referenced as args although any other legal identifier name can be used. Since Java 5, the main method can also use variable arguments, in the form of public static void main(String... args), allowing the main method to be invoked with an arbitrary number of String arguments. The effect of this alternate declaration is semantically identical (to the args parameter which is still an array of String objects), but it allows an alternative syntax for creating and passing the array.",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Java launcher launches Java by loading a given class (specified on the command line or as an attribute in a JAR) and starting its public static void main(String[]) method. Stand-alone programs must declare this method explicitly. The String[] args parameter is an array of String objects containing any arguments passed to the class. The parameters to main are often passed by means of a command line.",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Printing is part of a Java standard library: The System class defines a public static field called out. The out object is an instance of the PrintStream class and provides many methods for printing data to standard out, including println(String) which also appends a new line to the passed string.",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The string \"Hello World!\" is automatically converted to a String object by the compiler.",
"title": "Syntax"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Java applets were programs that were embedded in other applications, typically in a Web page displayed in a web browser. The Java applet API is now deprecated since Java 9 in 2017.",
"title": "Special classes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Java servlet technology provides Web developers with a simple, consistent mechanism for extending the functionality of a Web server and for accessing existing business systems. Servlets are server-side Java EE components that generate responses to requests from clients. Most of the time, this means generating HTML pages in response to HTTP requests, although there are a number of other standard servlet classes available, for example for WebSocket communication.",
"title": "Special classes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Java servlet API has to some extent been superseded (but still used under the hood) by two standard Java technologies for web services:",
"title": "Special classes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Typical implementations of these APIs on Application Servers or Servlet Containers use a standard servlet for handling all interactions with the HTTP requests and responses that delegate to the web service methods for the actual business logic.",
"title": "Special classes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "JavaServer Pages (JSP) are server-side Java EE components that generate responses, typically HTML pages, to HTTP requests from clients. JSPs embed Java code in an HTML page by using the special delimiters <% and %>. A JSP is compiled to a Java servlet, a Java application in its own right, the first time it is accessed. After that, the generated servlet creates the response.",
"title": "Special classes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Swing is a graphical user interface library for the Java SE platform. It is possible to specify a different look and feel through the pluggable look and feel system of Swing. Clones of Windows, GTK+, and Motif are supplied by Sun. Apple also provides an Aqua look and feel for macOS. Where prior implementations of these looks and feels may have been considered lacking, Swing in Java SE 6 addresses this problem by using more native GUI widget drawing routines of the underlying platforms.",
"title": "Special classes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "JavaFX is a software platform for creating and delivering desktop applications, as well as rich web applications that can run across a wide variety of devices. JavaFX is intended to replace Swing as the standard GUI library for Java SE, but since JDK 11 JavaFX has not been in the core JDK and instead in a separate module. JavaFX has support for desktop computers and web browsers on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS. JavaFX does not have support for native OS look and feels.",
"title": "Special classes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In 2004, generics were added to the Java language, as part of J2SE 5.0. Prior to the introduction of generics, each variable declaration had to be of a specific type. For container classes, for example, this is a problem because there is no easy way to create a container that accepts only specific types of objects. Either the container operates on all subtypes of a class or interface, usually Object, or a different container class has to be created for each contained class. Generics allow compile-time type checking without having to create many container classes, each containing almost identical code. In addition to enabling more efficient code, certain runtime exceptions are prevented from occurring, by issuing compile-time errors. If Java prevented all runtime type errors (ClassCastExceptions) from occurring, it would be type safe.",
"title": "Special classes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In 2016, the type system of Java was proven unsound in that it is possible to use generics to construct classes and methods that allow assignment of an instance one class to a variable of another unrelated class. Such code is accepted by the compiler, but fails at run time with a class cast exception.",
"title": "Special classes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Criticisms directed at Java include the implementation of generics, speed, the handling of unsigned numbers, the implementation of floating-point arithmetic, and a history of security vulnerabilities in the primary Java VM implementation HotSpot.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The Java Class Library is the standard library, developed to support application development in Java. It is controlled by Oracle in cooperation with others through the Java Community Process program. Companies or individuals participating in this process can influence the design and development of the APIs. This process has been a subject of controversy during the 2010s. The class library contains features such as:",
"title": "Class libraries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Javadoc is a comprehensive documentation system, created by Sun Microsystems. It provides developers with an organized system for documenting their code. Javadoc comments have an extra asterisk at the beginning, i.e. the delimiters are /** and */, whereas the normal multi-line comments in Java are delimited by /* and */, and single-line comments start with //.",
"title": "Documentation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Oracle Corporation is the current owner of the official implementation of the Java SE platform, following their acquisition of Sun Microsystems on January 27, 2010. This implementation is based on the original implementation of Java by Sun. The Oracle implementation is available for Microsoft Windows (still works for XP, while only later versions are currently officially supported), macOS, Linux, and Solaris. Because Java lacks any formal standardization recognized by Ecma International, ISO/IEC, ANSI, or other third-party standards organizations, the Oracle implementation is the de facto standard.",
"title": "Implementations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The Oracle implementation is packaged into two different distributions: The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) which contains the parts of the Java SE platform required to run Java programs and is intended for end users, and the Java Development Kit (JDK), which is intended for software developers and includes development tools such as the Java compiler, Javadoc, Jar, and a debugger. Oracle has also released GraalVM, a high performance Java dynamic compiler and interpreter.",
"title": "Implementations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "OpenJDK is another notable Java SE implementation that is licensed under the GNU GPL. The implementation started when Sun began releasing the Java source code under the GPL. As of Java SE 7, OpenJDK is the official Java reference implementation.",
"title": "Implementations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The goal of Java is to make all implementations of Java compatible. Historically, Sun's trademark license for usage of the Java brand insists that all implementations be compatible. This resulted in a legal dispute with Microsoft after Sun claimed that the Microsoft implementation did not support Java remote method invocation (RMI) or Java Native Interface (JNI) and had added platform-specific features of their own. Sun sued in 1997, and, in 2001, won a settlement of US$20 million, as well as a court order enforcing the terms of the license from Sun. As a result, Microsoft no longer ships Java with Windows.",
"title": "Implementations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Platform-independent Java is essential to Java EE, and an even more rigorous validation is required to certify an implementation. This environment enables portable server-side applications.",
"title": "Implementations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The Java programming language requires the presence of a software platform in order for compiled programs to be executed.",
"title": "Use outside the Java platform"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Oracle supplies the Java platform for use with Java. The Android SDK is an alternative software platform, used primarily for developing Android applications with its own GUI system.",
"title": "Use outside the Java platform"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The Java language is a key pillar in Android, an open source mobile operating system. Although Android, built on the Linux kernel, is written largely in C, the Android SDK uses the Java language as the basis for Android applications but does not use any of its standard GUI, SE, ME or other established Java standards. The bytecode language supported by the Android SDK is incompatible with Java bytecode and runs on its own virtual machine, optimized for low-memory devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Depending on the Android version, the bytecode is either interpreted by the Dalvik virtual machine or compiled into native code by the Android Runtime.",
"title": "Use outside the Java platform"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Android does not provide the full Java SE standard library, although the Android SDK does include an independent implementation of a large subset of it. It supports Java 6 and some Java 7 features, offering an implementation compatible with the standard library (Apache Harmony).",
"title": "Use outside the Java platform"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The use of Java-related technology in Android led to a legal dispute between Oracle and Google. On May 7, 2012, a San Francisco jury found that if APIs could be copyrighted, then Google had infringed Oracle's copyrights by the use of Java in Android devices. District Judge William Alsup ruled on May 31, 2012, that APIs cannot be copyrighted, but this was reversed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in May 2014. On May 26, 2016, the district court decided in favor of Google, ruling the copyright infringement of the Java API in Android constitutes fair use. In March 2018, this ruling was overturned by the Appeals Court, which sent down the case of determining the damages to federal court in San Francisco. Google filed a petition for writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court of the United States in January 2019 to challenge the two rulings that were made by the Appeals Court in Oracle's favor. On April 5, 2021, the Court ruled 6-2 in Google's favor, that its use of Java APIs should be considered fair use. However, the court refused to rule on the copyrightability of APIs, choosing instead to determine their ruling by considering Java's API copyrightable \"purely for argument’s sake.\"",
"title": "Use outside the Java platform"
}
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| Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers write once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need to recompile. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. The Java runtime provides dynamic capabilities that are typically not available in traditional compiled languages. Java gained popularity shortly after its release, and has been a very popular programming language since then. Java was the third most popular programming language in 2022 according to GitHub and it is ranked fourth on TIOBE index as of October 2023. Although still widely popular, there has been a gradual decline in use of Java in recent years with other languages using JVM gaining popularity. Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. It was released in May 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The original and reference implementation Java compilers, virtual machines, and class libraries were originally released by Sun under proprietary licenses. As of May 2007, in compliance with the specifications of the Java Community Process, Sun had relicensed most of its Java technologies under the GPL-2.0-only license. Oracle offers its own HotSpot Java Virtual Machine, however the official reference implementation is the OpenJDK JVM which is free open-source software and used by most developers and is the default JVM for almost all Linux distributions. As of September 2023, Java 21 is the latest version, which is also a long-term support (LTS) version. Java 8, 11, and 17 are previous LTS versions still officially supported. | 2001-11-13T00:09:10Z | 2023-12-08T17:14:39Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language) |
15,883 | July 9 | July 9 is the 190th day of the year (191st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 175 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| July 9 is the 190th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 175 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-07-23T20:48:13Z | 2023-11-27T22:08:21Z | [
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15,885 | Jason | Jason (/ˈdʒeɪsən/ JAY-sən; Greek: Ἰάσων, translit. Iásōn [i.ǎːsɔːn]) was an ancient Greek mythological hero and leader of the Argonauts, whose quest for the Golden Fleece featured in Greek literature. He was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcos. He was married to the sorceress Medea. He was also the great-grandson of the messenger god Hermes, through his mother's side.
Jason appeared in various literary works in the classical world of Greece and Rome, including the epic poem Argonautica and the tragedy Medea. In the modern world, Jason has emerged as a character in various adaptations of his myths, such as the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts and the 2000 TV miniseries of the same name.
Pelias (Aeson's half-brother) was power-hungry and sought to gain dominion over all of Thessaly. Pelias was the progeny of a union between their shared mother, Tyro ("high born Tyro"), the daughter of Salmoneus, and the sea god Poseidon. In a bitter feud, he overthrew Aeson (the rightful king), killing all the descendants of Aeson that he could. He spared his half-brother for unknown reasons.
Aeson's wife Alcimede I had a newborn son named Jason, whom she saved from Pelias by having female attendants cluster around the infant and cry as if he were stillborn. Fearing that Pelias would eventually notice and kill her son, Alcimede sent him away to be reared by the centaur Chiron. She claimed that she had been having an affair with him all along. Pelias, fearing that his ill-gotten kingship might be challenged, consulted an oracle, who warned him to beware of a man wearing only one sandal.
Many years later, Pelias was holding games in honor of Poseidon when the grown Jason arrived in Iolcus, having lost one of his sandals in the river Anauros ("wintry Anauros") while helping an old woman (actually the goddess Hera in disguise) to cross. She blessed him, for she knew what Pelias had planned. When Jason entered Iolcus (present-day city of Volos), he was announced as a man wearing only one sandal. Jason, aware that he was the rightful king, so informed Pelias. Pelias replied, "To take my throne, which you shall, you must go on a quest to find the Golden Fleece." Jason readily accepted this condition.
Jason assembled for his crew, a number of heroes, known as the Argonauts after their ship, the Argo. The group of heroes included:
The isle of Lemnos is situated in the north Aegean Sea, near the Western coast of Asia Minor (modern day Turkey).
The island was inhabited by a race of women who had killed their husbands. The women had neglected their worship of Aphrodite, and as a punishment the goddess made the women so foul in stench that their husbands could not bear to be near them. The men then took concubines from the Thracian mainland opposite, and the spurned women, angry at Aphrodite, killed all the male inhabitants while they slept. The king, Thoas, was saved by Hypsipyle, his daughter, who put him out to sea sealed in a chest from which he was later rescued. The women of Lemnos lived for a while without men, with Hypsipyle as their queen.
During the visit of the Argonauts the women mingled with the men creating a new "race" called Minyae. Jason fathered twins with the queen. Heracles pressured them to leave as he was disgusted by the antics of the Argonauts. He had not taken part, which is truly unusual considering the numerous affairs he had with other women.
After Lemnos the Argonauts landed among the Doliones, whose king Cyzicus treated them graciously. He told them about the land beyond Bear Mountain, but forgot to mention what lived there. What lived in the land beyond Bear Mountain were the Gegeines, which are a tribe of Earthborn giants with six arms who wore leather loincloths.
While most of the crew went into the forest to search for supplies, the Gegeines saw that few Argonauts were guarding the ship and raided it. Heracles was among those guarding the ship at the time and managed to kill most of them before Jason and the others returned. Once some of the other Gegeines were killed, Jason and the Argonauts set sail.
The Argonauts departed, losing their bearings and landing again at the same spot that night. In the darkness, the Doliones took them for enemies and they started fighting each other. The Argonauts killed many of the Doliones, among them the king Cyzicus. Cyzicus' wife killed herself. The Argonauts realized their horrible mistake when dawn came and held a funeral for him.
Soon, Jason reached the court of Phineus of Salmydessus in Thrace. Zeus had sent the harpies to steal the food put out for Phineus each day. Jason took pity on the emaciated king and killed the Harpies when they returned; in other versions, Calais and Zetes chase the harpies away. In return for this favor, Phineus revealed to Jason the location of Colchis and how to pass the Symplegades, or The Clashing Rocks, and then they parted.
The only way to reach Colchis was to sail through the Symplegades (Clashing Rocks), huge rock cliffs that came together and crushed anything that traveled between them. Phineus told Jason to release a dove when they approached these islands, and if the dove made it through, to row with all their might. If the dove was crushed, he was doomed to fail. Jason released the dove as advised, which made it through, losing only a few tail feathers. Seeing this, they rowed strongly and made it through with minor damage at the extreme stern of the ship. From that time on, the clashing rocks were forever joined leaving free passage for others to pass.
Jason arrived in Colchis (modern Black Sea coast of Georgia) to claim the fleece as his own. It was owned by King Aeetes of Colchis. The fleece was given to him by Phrixus. Aeetes promised to give it to Jason only if he could perform three certain tasks. Presented with the tasks, Jason became discouraged and fell into depression. However, Hera had persuaded Aphrodite to convince her son Eros to make Aeetes' daughter, Medea, fall in love with Jason. As a result, Medea aided Jason in his tasks.
First, Jason had to plow a field with fire-breathing oxen, the Khalkotauroi, that he had to yoke himself. Medea provided an ointment that protected him from the oxen's flames. Then, Jason sowed the teeth of a dragon into a field. The teeth sprouted into an army of warriors (spartoi). Medea had previously warned Jason of this and told him how to defeat this foe.
Before they attacked him, he threw a rock into the crowd. Unable to discover where the rock had come from, the soldiers attacked and defeated one another. His last task was to overcome the sleepless dragon which guarded the Golden Fleece. Jason sprayed the dragon with a potion, given by Medea, distilled from herbs. The dragon fell asleep, and Jason was able to seize the Golden Fleece.
He then sailed away with Medea. Medea distracted her father, who chased them as they fled, by killing her brother Apsyrtus and throwing pieces of his body into the sea; Aeetes stopped to gather them. In another version, Medea lured Apsyrtus into a trap. Jason killed him, chopped off his fingers and toes, and buried the corpse. In any case, Jason and Medea escaped.
On the way back to Iolcus, Medea prophesied to Euphemus, the Argo's helmsman, that one day he would rule Cyrene. This came true through Battus, a descendant of Euphemus. Zeus, as punishment for the slaughter of Medea's own brother, sent a series of storms at the Argo and blew it off course. The Argo then spoke and said that they should seek purification with Circe, a nymph living on the island of Aeaea. After being cleansed, they continued their journey home.
Chiron had told Jason that without the aid of Orpheus, the Argonauts would never be able to pass the Sirens—the same Sirens encountered by Odysseus in Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. The Sirens lived on three small, rocky islands called Sirenum scopuli and sang beautiful songs that enticed sailors to come to them, which resulted in the crashing of their ship into the islands. When Orpheus heard their voices, he drew his lyre and played music that was more beautiful and louder, drowning out the Sirens' bewitching songs.
The Argo then came to the island of Crete, guarded by the bronze man, Talos. As the ship approached, Talos hurled huge stones at the ship, keeping it at bay. Talos had one ichor vessel which went from his neck to his ankle, bound shut by only one bronze nail (as in metal casting by the lost wax method). Medea cast a spell on Talos to calm him; she removed the bronze nail and Talos bled to death. The Argo was then able to sail on.
Thomas Bulfinch has an antecedent to the interaction of Medea and the daughters of Pelias. Jason, celebrating his return with the Golden Fleece, noted that his father was too aged and infirm to participate in the celebrations. He had seen and been served by Medea's magical powers. He asked Medea to take some years from his life and add them to the life of his father. She did so, but at no such cost to Jason's life. Medea withdrew the blood from Aeson's body and infused it with certain herbs; putting it back into his veins, returning vigor to him. Pelias' daughters saw this and wanted the same service for their father.
Medea, using her sorcery, claimed to Pelias' daughters that she could make their father smooth and vigorous as a child by chopping him up into pieces and boiling the pieces in a cauldron of water and magical herbs. She demonstrated this remarkable feat with the oldest ram in the flock, which leapt out of the cauldron as a lamb. The girls, rather naively, sliced and diced their father and put him in the cauldron. Medea did not add the magical herbs, and Pelias was dead. Pelias' son, Acastus, drove Jason and Medea into exile for the murder, and the couple settled in Corinth.
In Corinth, Jason became engaged to marry Creusa (sometimes referred to as Glauce), a daughter of the King of Corinth, to strengthen his political ties. When Medea confronted Jason about the engagement and cited all the help she had given him, he retorted that it was not she that he should thank, but Aphrodite who made Medea fall in love with him. Infuriated with Jason for breaking his vow that he would be hers forever, Medea took her revenge by presenting to Creusa a cursed dress, as a wedding gift, that stuck to her body and burned her to death as soon as she put it on.
Creusa's father, Creon, burned to death with his daughter as he tried to save her. Then Medea killed the two boys that she bore to Jason, fearing that they would be murdered or enslaved as a result of their mother's actions. When Jason learned of this, Medea was already gone. She fled to Athens in a chariot of dragons sent by her grandfather, the sun-god Helios.
Although Jason calls Medea most hateful to gods and men, the fact that the chariot is given to her by Helios indicates that she still has the gods on her side. As Bernard Knox points out, Medea's last scene with concluding appearances parallels that of a number of indisputably divine beings in other plays by Euripides. Just like these gods, Medea "interrupts and puts a stop to the violent action of the human being on the lower level, ... justifies her savage revenge on the grounds that she has been treated with disrespect and mockery, ... takes measures and gives orders for the burial of the dead, prophesies the future", and "announces the foundation of a cult".
Later Jason and Peleus, father of the hero Achilles, attacked and defeated Acastus, reclaiming the throne of Iolcus for himself once more. Jason's son, Thessalus, then became king.
As a result of breaking his vow to love Medea forever, Jason lost his favor with Hera and died lonely and unhappy. He was asleep under the stern of the rotting Argo when it fell on him, killing him instantly.
Jason's father is invariably Aeson, but there is great variation as to his mother's name. According to various authors, she could be:
Jason was also said to have had a younger brother, Promachus.
Children by Medea:
Children by Hypsipyle:
Though some of the episodes of Jason's story draw on ancient material, the definitive telling, on which this account relies, is that of Apollonius of Rhodes in his epic poem Argonautica, written in Alexandria in the late 3rd century BC.
Another Argonautica was written by Gaius Valerius Flaccus in the late 1st century AD, eight books in length. The poem ends abruptly with the request of Medea to accompany Jason on his homeward voyage. It is unclear if part of the epic poem has been lost, or if it was never finished. A third version is the Argonautica Orphica, which emphasizes the role of Orpheus in the story.
Jason is briefly mentioned in Dante's Divine Comedy in the poem Inferno. He appears in the Canto XVIII. In it, he is seen by Dante and his guide Virgil being punished in Hell's Eighth Circle (Bolgia 1) by being driven to march through the circle for all eternity while being whipped by devils. He is included among the panderers and seducers (possibly for his seduction and subsequent abandoning of Medea).
The story of Medea's revenge on Jason is told with devastating effect by Euripides in his tragedy Medea.
William Morris wrote an English epic poem, The Life and Death of Jason, published in 1867.
Padraic Colum wrote an adaptation for children, The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, illustrated by Willy Pogany and published in 1921.
The mythical geography of the voyage of the Argonauts has been connected to specific geographic locations by Livio Stecchini but his theories have not been widely adopted.
Jason appeared in the Hercules episode "Hercules and the Argonauts" voiced by William Shatner. He is shown to have been a student of Philoctetes and takes his advice to let Hercules travel with him.
In the series The Heroes of Olympus's first novel The Lost Hero, there was a reference to the mythical Jason when Jason Grace and his friends encounter Medea.
The BBC series Atlantis, which premiered in 2013, featured Jason as the protagonist. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jason (/ˈdʒeɪsən/ JAY-sən; Greek: Ἰάσων, translit. Iásōn [i.ǎːsɔːn]) was an ancient Greek mythological hero and leader of the Argonauts, whose quest for the Golden Fleece featured in Greek literature. He was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcos. He was married to the sorceress Medea. He was also the great-grandson of the messenger god Hermes, through his mother's side.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Jason appeared in various literary works in the classical world of Greece and Rome, including the epic poem Argonautica and the tragedy Medea. In the modern world, Jason has emerged as a character in various adaptations of his myths, such as the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts and the 2000 TV miniseries of the same name.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Pelias (Aeson's half-brother) was power-hungry and sought to gain dominion over all of Thessaly. Pelias was the progeny of a union between their shared mother, Tyro (\"high born Tyro\"), the daughter of Salmoneus, and the sea god Poseidon. In a bitter feud, he overthrew Aeson (the rightful king), killing all the descendants of Aeson that he could. He spared his half-brother for unknown reasons.",
"title": "Persecution by Pelias"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Aeson's wife Alcimede I had a newborn son named Jason, whom she saved from Pelias by having female attendants cluster around the infant and cry as if he were stillborn. Fearing that Pelias would eventually notice and kill her son, Alcimede sent him away to be reared by the centaur Chiron. She claimed that she had been having an affair with him all along. Pelias, fearing that his ill-gotten kingship might be challenged, consulted an oracle, who warned him to beware of a man wearing only one sandal.",
"title": "Persecution by Pelias"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Many years later, Pelias was holding games in honor of Poseidon when the grown Jason arrived in Iolcus, having lost one of his sandals in the river Anauros (\"wintry Anauros\") while helping an old woman (actually the goddess Hera in disguise) to cross. She blessed him, for she knew what Pelias had planned. When Jason entered Iolcus (present-day city of Volos), he was announced as a man wearing only one sandal. Jason, aware that he was the rightful king, so informed Pelias. Pelias replied, \"To take my throne, which you shall, you must go on a quest to find the Golden Fleece.\" Jason readily accepted this condition.",
"title": "Persecution by Pelias"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Jason assembled for his crew, a number of heroes, known as the Argonauts after their ship, the Argo. The group of heroes included:",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The isle of Lemnos is situated in the north Aegean Sea, near the Western coast of Asia Minor (modern day Turkey).",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The island was inhabited by a race of women who had killed their husbands. The women had neglected their worship of Aphrodite, and as a punishment the goddess made the women so foul in stench that their husbands could not bear to be near them. The men then took concubines from the Thracian mainland opposite, and the spurned women, angry at Aphrodite, killed all the male inhabitants while they slept. The king, Thoas, was saved by Hypsipyle, his daughter, who put him out to sea sealed in a chest from which he was later rescued. The women of Lemnos lived for a while without men, with Hypsipyle as their queen.",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "During the visit of the Argonauts the women mingled with the men creating a new \"race\" called Minyae. Jason fathered twins with the queen. Heracles pressured them to leave as he was disgusted by the antics of the Argonauts. He had not taken part, which is truly unusual considering the numerous affairs he had with other women.",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "After Lemnos the Argonauts landed among the Doliones, whose king Cyzicus treated them graciously. He told them about the land beyond Bear Mountain, but forgot to mention what lived there. What lived in the land beyond Bear Mountain were the Gegeines, which are a tribe of Earthborn giants with six arms who wore leather loincloths.",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "While most of the crew went into the forest to search for supplies, the Gegeines saw that few Argonauts were guarding the ship and raided it. Heracles was among those guarding the ship at the time and managed to kill most of them before Jason and the others returned. Once some of the other Gegeines were killed, Jason and the Argonauts set sail.",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Argonauts departed, losing their bearings and landing again at the same spot that night. In the darkness, the Doliones took them for enemies and they started fighting each other. The Argonauts killed many of the Doliones, among them the king Cyzicus. Cyzicus' wife killed herself. The Argonauts realized their horrible mistake when dawn came and held a funeral for him.",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Soon, Jason reached the court of Phineus of Salmydessus in Thrace. Zeus had sent the harpies to steal the food put out for Phineus each day. Jason took pity on the emaciated king and killed the Harpies when they returned; in other versions, Calais and Zetes chase the harpies away. In return for this favor, Phineus revealed to Jason the location of Colchis and how to pass the Symplegades, or The Clashing Rocks, and then they parted.",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The only way to reach Colchis was to sail through the Symplegades (Clashing Rocks), huge rock cliffs that came together and crushed anything that traveled between them. Phineus told Jason to release a dove when they approached these islands, and if the dove made it through, to row with all their might. If the dove was crushed, he was doomed to fail. Jason released the dove as advised, which made it through, losing only a few tail feathers. Seeing this, they rowed strongly and made it through with minor damage at the extreme stern of the ship. From that time on, the clashing rocks were forever joined leaving free passage for others to pass.",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Jason arrived in Colchis (modern Black Sea coast of Georgia) to claim the fleece as his own. It was owned by King Aeetes of Colchis. The fleece was given to him by Phrixus. Aeetes promised to give it to Jason only if he could perform three certain tasks. Presented with the tasks, Jason became discouraged and fell into depression. However, Hera had persuaded Aphrodite to convince her son Eros to make Aeetes' daughter, Medea, fall in love with Jason. As a result, Medea aided Jason in his tasks.",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "First, Jason had to plow a field with fire-breathing oxen, the Khalkotauroi, that he had to yoke himself. Medea provided an ointment that protected him from the oxen's flames. Then, Jason sowed the teeth of a dragon into a field. The teeth sprouted into an army of warriors (spartoi). Medea had previously warned Jason of this and told him how to defeat this foe.",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Before they attacked him, he threw a rock into the crowd. Unable to discover where the rock had come from, the soldiers attacked and defeated one another. His last task was to overcome the sleepless dragon which guarded the Golden Fleece. Jason sprayed the dragon with a potion, given by Medea, distilled from herbs. The dragon fell asleep, and Jason was able to seize the Golden Fleece.",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "He then sailed away with Medea. Medea distracted her father, who chased them as they fled, by killing her brother Apsyrtus and throwing pieces of his body into the sea; Aeetes stopped to gather them. In another version, Medea lured Apsyrtus into a trap. Jason killed him, chopped off his fingers and toes, and buried the corpse. In any case, Jason and Medea escaped.",
"title": "The Argonauts and the Quest for the Golden Fleece"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "On the way back to Iolcus, Medea prophesied to Euphemus, the Argo's helmsman, that one day he would rule Cyrene. This came true through Battus, a descendant of Euphemus. Zeus, as punishment for the slaughter of Medea's own brother, sent a series of storms at the Argo and blew it off course. The Argo then spoke and said that they should seek purification with Circe, a nymph living on the island of Aeaea. After being cleansed, they continued their journey home.",
"title": "The return journey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Chiron had told Jason that without the aid of Orpheus, the Argonauts would never be able to pass the Sirens—the same Sirens encountered by Odysseus in Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. The Sirens lived on three small, rocky islands called Sirenum scopuli and sang beautiful songs that enticed sailors to come to them, which resulted in the crashing of their ship into the islands. When Orpheus heard their voices, he drew his lyre and played music that was more beautiful and louder, drowning out the Sirens' bewitching songs.",
"title": "The return journey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Argo then came to the island of Crete, guarded by the bronze man, Talos. As the ship approached, Talos hurled huge stones at the ship, keeping it at bay. Talos had one ichor vessel which went from his neck to his ankle, bound shut by only one bronze nail (as in metal casting by the lost wax method). Medea cast a spell on Talos to calm him; she removed the bronze nail and Talos bled to death. The Argo was then able to sail on.",
"title": "The return journey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Thomas Bulfinch has an antecedent to the interaction of Medea and the daughters of Pelias. Jason, celebrating his return with the Golden Fleece, noted that his father was too aged and infirm to participate in the celebrations. He had seen and been served by Medea's magical powers. He asked Medea to take some years from his life and add them to the life of his father. She did so, but at no such cost to Jason's life. Medea withdrew the blood from Aeson's body and infused it with certain herbs; putting it back into his veins, returning vigor to him. Pelias' daughters saw this and wanted the same service for their father.",
"title": "The return journey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Medea, using her sorcery, claimed to Pelias' daughters that she could make their father smooth and vigorous as a child by chopping him up into pieces and boiling the pieces in a cauldron of water and magical herbs. She demonstrated this remarkable feat with the oldest ram in the flock, which leapt out of the cauldron as a lamb. The girls, rather naively, sliced and diced their father and put him in the cauldron. Medea did not add the magical herbs, and Pelias was dead. Pelias' son, Acastus, drove Jason and Medea into exile for the murder, and the couple settled in Corinth.",
"title": "The return journey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In Corinth, Jason became engaged to marry Creusa (sometimes referred to as Glauce), a daughter of the King of Corinth, to strengthen his political ties. When Medea confronted Jason about the engagement and cited all the help she had given him, he retorted that it was not she that he should thank, but Aphrodite who made Medea fall in love with him. Infuriated with Jason for breaking his vow that he would be hers forever, Medea took her revenge by presenting to Creusa a cursed dress, as a wedding gift, that stuck to her body and burned her to death as soon as she put it on.",
"title": "The return journey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Creusa's father, Creon, burned to death with his daughter as he tried to save her. Then Medea killed the two boys that she bore to Jason, fearing that they would be murdered or enslaved as a result of their mother's actions. When Jason learned of this, Medea was already gone. She fled to Athens in a chariot of dragons sent by her grandfather, the sun-god Helios.",
"title": "The return journey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Although Jason calls Medea most hateful to gods and men, the fact that the chariot is given to her by Helios indicates that she still has the gods on her side. As Bernard Knox points out, Medea's last scene with concluding appearances parallels that of a number of indisputably divine beings in other plays by Euripides. Just like these gods, Medea \"interrupts and puts a stop to the violent action of the human being on the lower level, ... justifies her savage revenge on the grounds that she has been treated with disrespect and mockery, ... takes measures and gives orders for the burial of the dead, prophesies the future\", and \"announces the foundation of a cult\".",
"title": "The return journey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Later Jason and Peleus, father of the hero Achilles, attacked and defeated Acastus, reclaiming the throne of Iolcus for himself once more. Jason's son, Thessalus, then became king.",
"title": "The return journey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "As a result of breaking his vow to love Medea forever, Jason lost his favor with Hera and died lonely and unhappy. He was asleep under the stern of the rotting Argo when it fell on him, killing him instantly.",
"title": "The return journey"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Jason's father is invariably Aeson, but there is great variation as to his mother's name. According to various authors, she could be:",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Jason was also said to have had a younger brother, Promachus.",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Children by Medea:",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Children by Hypsipyle:",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Though some of the episodes of Jason's story draw on ancient material, the definitive telling, on which this account relies, is that of Apollonius of Rhodes in his epic poem Argonautica, written in Alexandria in the late 3rd century BC.",
"title": "In literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Another Argonautica was written by Gaius Valerius Flaccus in the late 1st century AD, eight books in length. The poem ends abruptly with the request of Medea to accompany Jason on his homeward voyage. It is unclear if part of the epic poem has been lost, or if it was never finished. A third version is the Argonautica Orphica, which emphasizes the role of Orpheus in the story.",
"title": "In literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Jason is briefly mentioned in Dante's Divine Comedy in the poem Inferno. He appears in the Canto XVIII. In it, he is seen by Dante and his guide Virgil being punished in Hell's Eighth Circle (Bolgia 1) by being driven to march through the circle for all eternity while being whipped by devils. He is included among the panderers and seducers (possibly for his seduction and subsequent abandoning of Medea).",
"title": "In literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The story of Medea's revenge on Jason is told with devastating effect by Euripides in his tragedy Medea.",
"title": "In literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "William Morris wrote an English epic poem, The Life and Death of Jason, published in 1867.",
"title": "In literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Padraic Colum wrote an adaptation for children, The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, illustrated by Willy Pogany and published in 1921.",
"title": "In literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The mythical geography of the voyage of the Argonauts has been connected to specific geographic locations by Livio Stecchini but his theories have not been widely adopted.",
"title": "In literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Jason appeared in the Hercules episode \"Hercules and the Argonauts\" voiced by William Shatner. He is shown to have been a student of Philoctetes and takes his advice to let Hercules travel with him.",
"title": "Popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In the series The Heroes of Olympus's first novel The Lost Hero, there was a reference to the mythical Jason when Jason Grace and his friends encounter Medea.",
"title": "Popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The BBC series Atlantis, which premiered in 2013, featured Jason as the protagonist.",
"title": "Popular culture"
}
]
| Jason was an ancient Greek mythological hero and leader of the Argonauts, whose quest for the Golden Fleece featured in Greek literature. He was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcos. He was married to the sorceress Medea. He was also the great-grandson of the messenger god Hermes, through his mother's side. Jason appeared in various literary works in the classical world of Greece and Rome, including the epic poem Argonautica and the tragedy Medea. In the modern world, Jason has emerged as a character in various adaptations of his myths, such as the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts and the 2000 TV miniseries of the same name. | 2001-09-03T14:41:45Z | 2023-12-09T14:08:46Z | [
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15,888 | July 24 | July 24 is the 205th day of the year (206th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 160 days remain until the end of the year. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "July 24 is the 205th day of the year (206th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 160 days remain until the end of the year.",
"title": ""
}
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| July 24 is the 205th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 160 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-11-11T07:07:51Z | 2023-10-15T14:07:29Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_24 |
15,889 | Judah ha-Nasi | Judah ha-Nasi (Hebrew: יְהוּדָה הַנָּשִׂיא, Yəhūḏā hanNāsīʾ; Yehudah HaNasi or Judah the Prince) or Judah I, known simply as Rebbi or Rabbi, was a second-century rabbi (a tanna of the fifth generation) and chief redactor and editor of the Mishnah. He lived from approximately 135 to 217 CE. He was a key leader of the Jewish community in Roman-occupied Judea after the Bar Kokhba revolt.
The title nasi was used for presidents of the Sanhedrin. He was the first nasi to have this title added permanently to his name; in traditional literature he is usually called "Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi." Often though (and always in the Mishnah) he is simply called Rabbi "my lord" (רבי), the master par excellence. He is occasionally called Rabbenu "our master". He is also called "Rabbenu HaQadosh" "our holy master" (רבנו הקדוש) due to his deep piety.
Judah the Prince was born in 135 CE to Simeon ben Gamaliel II. According to the Talmud, he was of the Davidic line. He is said to have been born on the same day that Rabbi Akiva died as a martyr. The Talmud suggests that this was a result of Divine Providence: God had granted the Jewish people another leader of great stature to succeed Rabbi Akiva. His place of birth is unknown.
Judah spent his youth in the city of Usha. His father presumably gave him the same education that he himself had received, including Koine Greek. This knowledge of Greek enabled him to become the Jews' intermediary with the Roman authorities. He favoured Greek as the language of the country over Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. In Judah's house, only the Hebrew language was spoken, and the maids of the house became known for their use of obscure Hebrew terminology.
Judah devoted himself to the study of the oral and the written law. He studied under some of Akiva's most eminent students. As their student and through converse with other prominent men who gathered about his father, he laid a strong foundation of scholarship for his life's work: the editing of the Mishnah.
His teacher at Usha was Judah bar Ilai, who was officially employed in the house of the patriarch as judge in religious and legal questions. In later years, Judah described how in his childhood he read the Book of Esther at Usha in the presence of Judah bar Ilai.
Judah felt especial reverence for Jose ben Halafta, the student of Akiva's who had the closest relations with Simon ben Gamaliel. When, in later years, Judah raised objections to Jose's opinions, he would say: "We poor ones undertake to attack Jose, though our time compares with his as the profane with the holy!" Judah hands down a halakhah by Jose in Menachot 14a.
Judah studied from Shimon bar Yochai in Teqoa, a place some have identified with Meron. He also studied with Eleazar ben Shammua. Judah did not study with Rabbi Meir, evidently in consequence of the conflicts which distanced Meir from the house of the patriarch. However, he considered himself lucky even to have seen Meir from behind.
Another of Judah's teachers was Nathan the Babylonian, who also took a part in the conflict between Meir and the patriarch; Judah confessed that once, in a fit of youthful ardour, he had failed to treat Nathan with due reverence. In both halakhic and aggadic tradition, Judah's opinion is often opposed to Nathan's.
In the Jerusalemite tradition, Judah ben Korshai (the halakhic specialist mentioned as assistant to Simon ben Gamaliel) is designated as Judah's real teacher. Jacob ben Hanina (possibly the R. Jacob whose patronymic is not given and in whose name Judah quotes halakhic sentences) is also mentioned as one of Judah's teachers, and is said to have asked him to repeat halakhic sentences.
Judah was also taught by his father (Simon ben Gamaliel); when the two differed on a halakhic matter, the father was generally stricter. Judah himself says: "My opinion seems to me more correct than that of my father"; and he then proceeds to give his reasons. Humility was a virtue ascribed to Judah, and he admired it greatly in his father, who openly recognised Shimon bar Yochai's superiority, thus displaying the same modesty as the Bnei Bathyra when they gave way to Hillel, and as Jonathan when he voluntarily gave precedence to his friend David.
Nothing is known regarding the time when Judah succeeded his father as leader of the Palestinian Jews. According to Rashi, Judah's father, Rabbi Simon ben Gamliel, had served as the nasi of the Sanhedrin in Usha, before it transferred to Shefar'am. According to a tradition, the country at the time of Simon ben Gamaliel's death not only was devastated by a plague of locusts, but suffered many other hardships. From Shefar'am, the Sanhedrin transferred to Beit Shearim, where the Sanhedrin was headed by Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi. Here he officiated for a long time. Eventually, Judah moved with the court from Beit Shearim to Sepphoris, where he spent at least 17 years of his life. He had chosen Sepphoris chiefly because of his ill-health, and being induced to go there because of the place's high altitude and pure air. However, Judah's memorial as a leader is principally associated with Bet She'arim: "To Bet She'arim must one go in order to obtain Rabbi's decision in legal matters."
Among Judah's contemporaries in the early years of his activity were Eleazar ben Simeon, Ishmael ben Jose, Jose ben Judah, and Simeon ben Eleazar. His better-known contemporaries and students include Simon b. Manasseh, Pinchas ben Yair, Eleazar ha-Kappar and his son Bar Kappara, Hiyya the Great, Shimon ben Halafta, and Levi ben Sisi. Among his students who taught as the first generation of Amoraim after his death are: Hanina bar Hama and Hoshaiah Rabbah in Palestine, Abba Arikha and Samuel of Nehardea in Babylon.
Only scattered records of Judah's official activity exist. These include: the ordination of his students; the recommendation of students for communal offices; orders relating to the announcement of the new moon; amelioration of the law relating to the Sabbatical year; and to decrees relating to tithes in the frontier districts of Palestine. The last-named he was obliged to defend against the opposition of the members of the patriarchal family. The ameliorations he intended for Tisha B'Av were prevented by the college. Many religious and legal decisions are recorded as having been rendered by Judah together with his court, the college of scholars.
According to the Talmud, Rabbi Judah HaNasi was very wealthy and greatly revered in Rome. He had a close friendship with "Antoninus", possibly the Emperor Antoninus Pius, though it is more likely his famous friendship was with either Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus or Antoninus who is also called Caracalla and who would consult Judah on various worldly and spiritual matters. Jewish sources tell of various discussions between Judah and Antoninus. These include the parable of the blind and the lame (illustrating the judgment of the body and the soul after death), and a discussion of the impulse to sin.
The authority of Judah's office was enhanced by his wealth, which is referred to in various traditions. In Babylon, the hyperbolic statement was later made that even his stable-master was wealthier than King Shapur. His household was compared to that of the emperor. Simeon ben Menasya praised Judah by saying that he and his sons united in themselves beauty, power, wealth, wisdom, age, honour, and the blessings of children. During a famine, Judah opened his granaries and distributed corn among the needy. But he denied himself the pleasures procurable by wealth, saying: "Whoever chooses the delights of this world will be deprived of the delights of the next world; whoever renounces the former will receive the latter".
The year of Judah's death is deduced from the statement that his student Abba Arikha left Palestine for good not long before Judah's death, in year 530 of the Seleucid era (219 CE). He assumed the office of patriarch during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus (c. 165). Hence Judah, having been born about 135, became patriarch at the age of 30, and died at the age of about 85. The Talmud notes that Rabbi Judah the Prince lived for at least 17 years in Sepphoris, and that he applied unto himself the biblical verse, "And Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years" (Genesis 47:28).
According to a different calculation, he died on 15 Kislev, AM 3978 (around December 1, 217 CE), in Sepphoris, and his body was interred in the necropolis of Beit Shearim, 15.2 kilometres (9.4 mi) distant from Sepphoris, during whose funeral procession they made eighteen stops at different stations along the route to eulogise him.
It is said that when Judah died, no one had the heart to announce his demise to the anxious people of Sepphoris, until the clever Bar Ḳappara broke the news in a parable, saying: "The heavenly host and earth-born men held the tablets of the covenant; then the heavenly host was victorious and seized the tablets."
Judah's eminence as a scholar, who gave to this period its distinctive impression, was characterised at an early date by the saying that since the time of Moses, the Torah and greatness (i.e. knowledge and rank) were united in no one to the same extent as in Judah I.
Two of Judah's sons assumed positions of authority after his death: Gamaliel succeeded him as nasi, while Shimon became hakham of his yeshiva.
According to some Midrashic and Kabbalistic legends, Judah ha-Nasi had a son named Yaavetz who ascended to Heaven without experiencing death.
Various stories are told about Judah, illustrating different aspects of his character.
It is said that once he saw a calf being led to the slaughtering-block, which looked at him with tearful eyes, as if seeking protection. He said to it: "Go; for you were created for this purpose!" Due to this unkind attitude toward the suffering animal, he was punished with years of illness. Later, when his maid was about to kill some small animals which were in their house, he said to her: "Let them live, for it is written: '[God's] tender mercies are over all his works'." After this demonstration of compassion, his illness ceased. Judah also once said, "One who is ignorant of the Torah should not eat meat." The prayer he prescribed upon eating meat or eggs also indicates an appreciation of animal life: "Blessed be the Lord who has created many souls, in order to support by them the soul of every living being."
He exclaimed, sobbing, in reference to three different stories of martyrs whose deaths made them worthy of future life: "One man earns his world in an hour, while another requires many years". He began to weep when Elisha ben Abuyah's daughters, who were soliciting alms, reminded him of their father's learning. In a legend relating to his meeting with Pinchas ben Yair, he is described as tearfully admiring the pious Pinchas' unswerving steadfastness, protected by a higher power. He was frequently interrupted by tears when explaining Lamentations 2:2 and illustrating the passage by stories of the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple. While explaining certain passages of Scripture, he was reminded of divine judgment and of the uncertainty of acquittal, and began to cry. Hiyya found him weeping during his last illness because death was about to deprive him of the opportunity of studying the Torah and of fulfilling the commandments.
Once, when at a meal his students expressed their preference for soft tongue, he made this an opportunity to say, "May your tongues be soft in your mutual intercourse" (i.e., "Speak gently without disputing").
Before he died, Judah said: "I need my sons! ... Let the lamp continue to burn in its usual place; let the table be set in its usual place; let the bed be made in its usual place."
While teaching Torah, Judah would often interrupt the lesson to recite the Shema Yisrael. He passed his hand over his eyes as he said it.
When 70-year-old wine cured him of a protracted illness, he prayed: "Blessed be the Lord, who has given His world into the hands of guardians".
He privately recited daily the following supplication on finishing the obligatory prayers: "May it be Thy will, my God and the God of my fathers, to protect me against the impudent and against impudence, from bad men and bad companions, from severe sentences and severe plaintiffs, whether a son of the covenant or not."
Rabbi Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg relates that the spirit of Rebbi Judah used to visit his home, wearing Shabbat clothes, every Friday evening at dusk. He would recite Kiddush, and others would thereby discharge their obligation to hear Kiddush. One Friday night there was a knock at the door. "Sorry," said the maid, "I can't let you in just now because Rabbeinu HaKadosh is in the middle of Kiddush." From then on Judah stopped coming, since he did not want his coming to become public knowledge.
According to Rabbinical Jewish tradition, God gave both the Written Law (the Torah) and the Oral Law to Moses on biblical Mount Sinai. The Oral Law is the oral tradition as relayed by God to Moses and from him, transmitted and taught to the sages (rabbinic leaders) of each subsequent generation.
For centuries, the Torah appeared only as a written text transmitted in parallel with the oral tradition. Fearing that the oral traditions might be forgotten, Judah undertook the mission of consolidating the various opinions into one body of law which became known as the Mishnah. This completed a project which had been mostly clarified and organised by his father and Nathan the Babylonian.
The Mishnah consists of 63 tractates codifying Jewish law, which are the basis of the Talmud. According to Abraham ben David, the Mishnah was compiled by Rabbi Judah the Prince in 3949 AM, or the year 500 of the Seleucid era, which corresponds to 189 CE.
The Mishnah contains many of Judah's own sentences, which are introduced by the words, "Rabbi says."
The Mishnah was Judah's work, although it includes a few sentences by his son and successor, Gamaliel III, perhaps written after Judah's death. Both the Talmuds assume as a matter of course that Judah is the originator of the Mishnah—"our Mishnah," as it was called in Babylon—and the author of the explanations and discussions relating to its sentences. However, Judah is more correctly considered redactor of the Mishnah, rather than its author. The Mishnah is based on the systematic division of the halakhic material as formulated by Rabbi Akiva; Judah following in his work the arrangement of the halakot as taught by Rabbi Meir (Akiva's foremost student).
Using the precedent of Rabbi Meir's reported actions, Judah ruled the Beit Shean region to be exempt from the requirements of tithing and shmita regarding produce grown there. He also did the same for the cities of Kefar Tzemach, Caesarea and Beit Gubrin.
He forbade his students to study in the marketplace, basing his prohibition on his interpretation of Song of Songs 7:2, and censured one of his students who violated this restriction.
His exegesis includes many attempts to harmonise conflicting Biblical statements. Thus he harmonises the contradictions between Genesis 15:13 ("400 years") and 15:16 ("the fourth generation"); Exodus 20:16 and Deuteronomy 5:18; Numbers 9:23, 10:35 and ib., Deuteronomy 14:13 and Leviticus 11:14. The contradiction between Genesis 1:25 (which lists 3 categories of created beings) and 1:24 (which adds a fourth category, the "living souls") Judah explains by saying that this expression designates the demons, for whom God did not create bodies because the Sabbath had come.
Noteworthy among the other numerous Scriptural interpretations which have been handed down in Judah's name are his clever etymological explanations, for example: Exodus 19:8-9; Leviticus 23:40; Numbers 15:38; II Samuel 17:27; Joel 1:17; Psalms 68:7.
He interpreted the words "to do the evil" in II Samuel 12:9 to mean that David did not really sin with Bathsheba, but only intended to do so. As she was actually divorced at the time he took her. Abba Arikha, Judah's student, ascribes this apology for King David to Judah's desire to justify his ancestor. A sentence praising King Hezekiah and an extenuating opinion of King Ahaz have also been handed down in Judah's name. Characteristic of Judah's appreciation of aggadah is his interpretation of the word "vayagged" (Exodus 19:9) to the effect that the words of Moses attracted the hearts of his hearers, like the aggadah does. Once when the audience was falling asleep in his lecture, he made a ludicrous statement in order to revive their interest, and then explained the statement to be accurate in a metaphorical sense.
Judah was especially fond of the Book of Psalms. He paraphrased the psalmist's wish "Let the words of my mouth ... be acceptable in thy sight," thus: "May the Psalms have been composed for the coming generations; may they be written down for them; and may those that read them be rewarded like those that study halakhic sentences". He said that the Book of Job was important if only because it presented the sin and punishment of the generations of the Flood. He proves from Exodus 16:35 that there is no chronological order in the Torah. Referring to the prophetic books, he says: "All the Prophets begin with denunciations and end with comfortings". Even the genealogical portions of the Book of Chronicles must be interpreted.
It appears that there was an aggadic collection containing Judah's answers to exegetical questions. Among these questions may have been the one which Judah's son Simeon addressed to him.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Solomon Schechter; Wilhelm Bacher (1901–1906). "Judah I". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Judah ha-Nasi (Hebrew: יְהוּדָה הַנָּשִׂיא, Yəhūḏā hanNāsīʾ; Yehudah HaNasi or Judah the Prince) or Judah I, known simply as Rebbi or Rabbi, was a second-century rabbi (a tanna of the fifth generation) and chief redactor and editor of the Mishnah. He lived from approximately 135 to 217 CE. He was a key leader of the Jewish community in Roman-occupied Judea after the Bar Kokhba revolt.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The title nasi was used for presidents of the Sanhedrin. He was the first nasi to have this title added permanently to his name; in traditional literature he is usually called \"Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi.\" Often though (and always in the Mishnah) he is simply called Rabbi \"my lord\" (רבי), the master par excellence. He is occasionally called Rabbenu \"our master\". He is also called \"Rabbenu HaQadosh\" \"our holy master\" (רבנו הקדוש) due to his deep piety.",
"title": "Name and titles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Judah the Prince was born in 135 CE to Simeon ben Gamaliel II. According to the Talmud, he was of the Davidic line. He is said to have been born on the same day that Rabbi Akiva died as a martyr. The Talmud suggests that this was a result of Divine Providence: God had granted the Jewish people another leader of great stature to succeed Rabbi Akiva. His place of birth is unknown.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Judah spent his youth in the city of Usha. His father presumably gave him the same education that he himself had received, including Koine Greek. This knowledge of Greek enabled him to become the Jews' intermediary with the Roman authorities. He favoured Greek as the language of the country over Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. In Judah's house, only the Hebrew language was spoken, and the maids of the house became known for their use of obscure Hebrew terminology.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Judah devoted himself to the study of the oral and the written law. He studied under some of Akiva's most eminent students. As their student and through converse with other prominent men who gathered about his father, he laid a strong foundation of scholarship for his life's work: the editing of the Mishnah.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "His teacher at Usha was Judah bar Ilai, who was officially employed in the house of the patriarch as judge in religious and legal questions. In later years, Judah described how in his childhood he read the Book of Esther at Usha in the presence of Judah bar Ilai.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Judah felt especial reverence for Jose ben Halafta, the student of Akiva's who had the closest relations with Simon ben Gamaliel. When, in later years, Judah raised objections to Jose's opinions, he would say: \"We poor ones undertake to attack Jose, though our time compares with his as the profane with the holy!\" Judah hands down a halakhah by Jose in Menachot 14a.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Judah studied from Shimon bar Yochai in Teqoa, a place some have identified with Meron. He also studied with Eleazar ben Shammua. Judah did not study with Rabbi Meir, evidently in consequence of the conflicts which distanced Meir from the house of the patriarch. However, he considered himself lucky even to have seen Meir from behind.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Another of Judah's teachers was Nathan the Babylonian, who also took a part in the conflict between Meir and the patriarch; Judah confessed that once, in a fit of youthful ardour, he had failed to treat Nathan with due reverence. In both halakhic and aggadic tradition, Judah's opinion is often opposed to Nathan's.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In the Jerusalemite tradition, Judah ben Korshai (the halakhic specialist mentioned as assistant to Simon ben Gamaliel) is designated as Judah's real teacher. Jacob ben Hanina (possibly the R. Jacob whose patronymic is not given and in whose name Judah quotes halakhic sentences) is also mentioned as one of Judah's teachers, and is said to have asked him to repeat halakhic sentences.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Judah was also taught by his father (Simon ben Gamaliel); when the two differed on a halakhic matter, the father was generally stricter. Judah himself says: \"My opinion seems to me more correct than that of my father\"; and he then proceeds to give his reasons. Humility was a virtue ascribed to Judah, and he admired it greatly in his father, who openly recognised Shimon bar Yochai's superiority, thus displaying the same modesty as the Bnei Bathyra when they gave way to Hillel, and as Jonathan when he voluntarily gave precedence to his friend David.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Nothing is known regarding the time when Judah succeeded his father as leader of the Palestinian Jews. According to Rashi, Judah's father, Rabbi Simon ben Gamliel, had served as the nasi of the Sanhedrin in Usha, before it transferred to Shefar'am. According to a tradition, the country at the time of Simon ben Gamaliel's death not only was devastated by a plague of locusts, but suffered many other hardships. From Shefar'am, the Sanhedrin transferred to Beit Shearim, where the Sanhedrin was headed by Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi. Here he officiated for a long time. Eventually, Judah moved with the court from Beit Shearim to Sepphoris, where he spent at least 17 years of his life. He had chosen Sepphoris chiefly because of his ill-health, and being induced to go there because of the place's high altitude and pure air. However, Judah's memorial as a leader is principally associated with Bet She'arim: \"To Bet She'arim must one go in order to obtain Rabbi's decision in legal matters.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Among Judah's contemporaries in the early years of his activity were Eleazar ben Simeon, Ishmael ben Jose, Jose ben Judah, and Simeon ben Eleazar. His better-known contemporaries and students include Simon b. Manasseh, Pinchas ben Yair, Eleazar ha-Kappar and his son Bar Kappara, Hiyya the Great, Shimon ben Halafta, and Levi ben Sisi. Among his students who taught as the first generation of Amoraim after his death are: Hanina bar Hama and Hoshaiah Rabbah in Palestine, Abba Arikha and Samuel of Nehardea in Babylon.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Only scattered records of Judah's official activity exist. These include: the ordination of his students; the recommendation of students for communal offices; orders relating to the announcement of the new moon; amelioration of the law relating to the Sabbatical year; and to decrees relating to tithes in the frontier districts of Palestine. The last-named he was obliged to defend against the opposition of the members of the patriarchal family. The ameliorations he intended for Tisha B'Av were prevented by the college. Many religious and legal decisions are recorded as having been rendered by Judah together with his court, the college of scholars.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "According to the Talmud, Rabbi Judah HaNasi was very wealthy and greatly revered in Rome. He had a close friendship with \"Antoninus\", possibly the Emperor Antoninus Pius, though it is more likely his famous friendship was with either Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus or Antoninus who is also called Caracalla and who would consult Judah on various worldly and spiritual matters. Jewish sources tell of various discussions between Judah and Antoninus. These include the parable of the blind and the lame (illustrating the judgment of the body and the soul after death), and a discussion of the impulse to sin.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The authority of Judah's office was enhanced by his wealth, which is referred to in various traditions. In Babylon, the hyperbolic statement was later made that even his stable-master was wealthier than King Shapur. His household was compared to that of the emperor. Simeon ben Menasya praised Judah by saying that he and his sons united in themselves beauty, power, wealth, wisdom, age, honour, and the blessings of children. During a famine, Judah opened his granaries and distributed corn among the needy. But he denied himself the pleasures procurable by wealth, saying: \"Whoever chooses the delights of this world will be deprived of the delights of the next world; whoever renounces the former will receive the latter\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The year of Judah's death is deduced from the statement that his student Abba Arikha left Palestine for good not long before Judah's death, in year 530 of the Seleucid era (219 CE). He assumed the office of patriarch during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus (c. 165). Hence Judah, having been born about 135, became patriarch at the age of 30, and died at the age of about 85. The Talmud notes that Rabbi Judah the Prince lived for at least 17 years in Sepphoris, and that he applied unto himself the biblical verse, \"And Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years\" (Genesis 47:28).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "According to a different calculation, he died on 15 Kislev, AM 3978 (around December 1, 217 CE), in Sepphoris, and his body was interred in the necropolis of Beit Shearim, 15.2 kilometres (9.4 mi) distant from Sepphoris, during whose funeral procession they made eighteen stops at different stations along the route to eulogise him.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "It is said that when Judah died, no one had the heart to announce his demise to the anxious people of Sepphoris, until the clever Bar Ḳappara broke the news in a parable, saying: \"The heavenly host and earth-born men held the tablets of the covenant; then the heavenly host was victorious and seized the tablets.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Judah's eminence as a scholar, who gave to this period its distinctive impression, was characterised at an early date by the saying that since the time of Moses, the Torah and greatness (i.e. knowledge and rank) were united in no one to the same extent as in Judah I.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Two of Judah's sons assumed positions of authority after his death: Gamaliel succeeded him as nasi, while Shimon became hakham of his yeshiva.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "According to some Midrashic and Kabbalistic legends, Judah ha-Nasi had a son named Yaavetz who ascended to Heaven without experiencing death.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Various stories are told about Judah, illustrating different aspects of his character.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "It is said that once he saw a calf being led to the slaughtering-block, which looked at him with tearful eyes, as if seeking protection. He said to it: \"Go; for you were created for this purpose!\" Due to this unkind attitude toward the suffering animal, he was punished with years of illness. Later, when his maid was about to kill some small animals which were in their house, he said to her: \"Let them live, for it is written: '[God's] tender mercies are over all his works'.\" After this demonstration of compassion, his illness ceased. Judah also once said, \"One who is ignorant of the Torah should not eat meat.\" The prayer he prescribed upon eating meat or eggs also indicates an appreciation of animal life: \"Blessed be the Lord who has created many souls, in order to support by them the soul of every living being.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "He exclaimed, sobbing, in reference to three different stories of martyrs whose deaths made them worthy of future life: \"One man earns his world in an hour, while another requires many years\". He began to weep when Elisha ben Abuyah's daughters, who were soliciting alms, reminded him of their father's learning. In a legend relating to his meeting with Pinchas ben Yair, he is described as tearfully admiring the pious Pinchas' unswerving steadfastness, protected by a higher power. He was frequently interrupted by tears when explaining Lamentations 2:2 and illustrating the passage by stories of the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple. While explaining certain passages of Scripture, he was reminded of divine judgment and of the uncertainty of acquittal, and began to cry. Hiyya found him weeping during his last illness because death was about to deprive him of the opportunity of studying the Torah and of fulfilling the commandments.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Once, when at a meal his students expressed their preference for soft tongue, he made this an opportunity to say, \"May your tongues be soft in your mutual intercourse\" (i.e., \"Speak gently without disputing\").",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Before he died, Judah said: \"I need my sons! ... Let the lamp continue to burn in its usual place; let the table be set in its usual place; let the bed be made in its usual place.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "While teaching Torah, Judah would often interrupt the lesson to recite the Shema Yisrael. He passed his hand over his eyes as he said it.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "When 70-year-old wine cured him of a protracted illness, he prayed: \"Blessed be the Lord, who has given His world into the hands of guardians\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "He privately recited daily the following supplication on finishing the obligatory prayers: \"May it be Thy will, my God and the God of my fathers, to protect me against the impudent and against impudence, from bad men and bad companions, from severe sentences and severe plaintiffs, whether a son of the covenant or not.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Rabbi Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg relates that the spirit of Rebbi Judah used to visit his home, wearing Shabbat clothes, every Friday evening at dusk. He would recite Kiddush, and others would thereby discharge their obligation to hear Kiddush. One Friday night there was a knock at the door. \"Sorry,\" said the maid, \"I can't let you in just now because Rabbeinu HaKadosh is in the middle of Kiddush.\" From then on Judah stopped coming, since he did not want his coming to become public knowledge.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "According to Rabbinical Jewish tradition, God gave both the Written Law (the Torah) and the Oral Law to Moses on biblical Mount Sinai. The Oral Law is the oral tradition as relayed by God to Moses and from him, transmitted and taught to the sages (rabbinic leaders) of each subsequent generation.",
"title": "Teachings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "For centuries, the Torah appeared only as a written text transmitted in parallel with the oral tradition. Fearing that the oral traditions might be forgotten, Judah undertook the mission of consolidating the various opinions into one body of law which became known as the Mishnah. This completed a project which had been mostly clarified and organised by his father and Nathan the Babylonian.",
"title": "Teachings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Mishnah consists of 63 tractates codifying Jewish law, which are the basis of the Talmud. According to Abraham ben David, the Mishnah was compiled by Rabbi Judah the Prince in 3949 AM, or the year 500 of the Seleucid era, which corresponds to 189 CE.",
"title": "Teachings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Mishnah contains many of Judah's own sentences, which are introduced by the words, \"Rabbi says.\"",
"title": "Teachings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Mishnah was Judah's work, although it includes a few sentences by his son and successor, Gamaliel III, perhaps written after Judah's death. Both the Talmuds assume as a matter of course that Judah is the originator of the Mishnah—\"our Mishnah,\" as it was called in Babylon—and the author of the explanations and discussions relating to its sentences. However, Judah is more correctly considered redactor of the Mishnah, rather than its author. The Mishnah is based on the systematic division of the halakhic material as formulated by Rabbi Akiva; Judah following in his work the arrangement of the halakot as taught by Rabbi Meir (Akiva's foremost student).",
"title": "Teachings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Using the precedent of Rabbi Meir's reported actions, Judah ruled the Beit Shean region to be exempt from the requirements of tithing and shmita regarding produce grown there. He also did the same for the cities of Kefar Tzemach, Caesarea and Beit Gubrin.",
"title": "Teachings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "He forbade his students to study in the marketplace, basing his prohibition on his interpretation of Song of Songs 7:2, and censured one of his students who violated this restriction.",
"title": "Teachings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "His exegesis includes many attempts to harmonise conflicting Biblical statements. Thus he harmonises the contradictions between Genesis 15:13 (\"400 years\") and 15:16 (\"the fourth generation\"); Exodus 20:16 and Deuteronomy 5:18; Numbers 9:23, 10:35 and ib., Deuteronomy 14:13 and Leviticus 11:14. The contradiction between Genesis 1:25 (which lists 3 categories of created beings) and 1:24 (which adds a fourth category, the \"living souls\") Judah explains by saying that this expression designates the demons, for whom God did not create bodies because the Sabbath had come.",
"title": "Teachings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Noteworthy among the other numerous Scriptural interpretations which have been handed down in Judah's name are his clever etymological explanations, for example: Exodus 19:8-9; Leviticus 23:40; Numbers 15:38; II Samuel 17:27; Joel 1:17; Psalms 68:7.",
"title": "Teachings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "He interpreted the words \"to do the evil\" in II Samuel 12:9 to mean that David did not really sin with Bathsheba, but only intended to do so. As she was actually divorced at the time he took her. Abba Arikha, Judah's student, ascribes this apology for King David to Judah's desire to justify his ancestor. A sentence praising King Hezekiah and an extenuating opinion of King Ahaz have also been handed down in Judah's name. Characteristic of Judah's appreciation of aggadah is his interpretation of the word \"vayagged\" (Exodus 19:9) to the effect that the words of Moses attracted the hearts of his hearers, like the aggadah does. Once when the audience was falling asleep in his lecture, he made a ludicrous statement in order to revive their interest, and then explained the statement to be accurate in a metaphorical sense.",
"title": "Teachings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Judah was especially fond of the Book of Psalms. He paraphrased the psalmist's wish \"Let the words of my mouth ... be acceptable in thy sight,\" thus: \"May the Psalms have been composed for the coming generations; may they be written down for them; and may those that read them be rewarded like those that study halakhic sentences\". He said that the Book of Job was important if only because it presented the sin and punishment of the generations of the Flood. He proves from Exodus 16:35 that there is no chronological order in the Torah. Referring to the prophetic books, he says: \"All the Prophets begin with denunciations and end with comfortings\". Even the genealogical portions of the Book of Chronicles must be interpreted.",
"title": "Teachings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "It appears that there was an aggadic collection containing Judah's answers to exegetical questions. Among these questions may have been the one which Judah's son Simeon addressed to him.",
"title": "Teachings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Solomon Schechter; Wilhelm Bacher (1901–1906). \"Judah I\". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.",
"title": "References"
}
]
| Judah ha-Nasi or Judah I, known simply as Rebbi or Rabbi, was a second-century rabbi and chief redactor and editor of the Mishnah. He lived from approximately 135 to 217 CE. He was a key leader of the Jewish community in Roman-occupied Judea after the Bar Kokhba revolt. | 2001-07-26T17:35:01Z | 2023-10-16T14:49:03Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_ha-Nasi |
15,890 | Jack Kerouac | Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (/ˈkɛru.æk/; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.
Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jerry Garcia and the Doors.
In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published.
Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kéroack (1889–1946) and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque (1895–1973).
There is some confusion surrounding his name, partly because of variations on the spelling of Kerouac, and because of Kerouac's own statement of his name as Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac. His reason for that statement seems to be linked to an old family legend that the Kerouacs had descended from Baron François Louis Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac. Kerouac's baptism certificate lists his name simply as Jean Louis Kirouac, the most common spelling of the name in Quebec. Research has shown that Kerouac's roots were indeed in Brittany, and he was descended from a middle-class merchant colonist, Urbain-François Le Bihan, Sieur de Kervoac, whose sons married French Canadians.
Kerouac's father Leo had been born into a family of potato farmers in the village of Saint-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec. Jack also had various stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing it to Irish, Breton, Cornish, or other Celtic roots. In one interview he claimed it was from the name of the Cornish language (Kernewek), and that the Kerouacs had fled from Cornwall to Brittany. Another version was that the Kerouacs had come to Cornwall from Ireland before the time of Christ and the name meant "language of the house". In still another interview he said it was an Irish word for "language of the water" and related to Kerwick. Kerouac, derived from Kervoach, is the name of a town in Brittany in Lanmeur, near Morlaix.
Jack Kerouac later referred to 34 Beaulieu Street as "sad Beaulieu". The Kerouac family was living there in 1926 when Jack's older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever, aged nine. This deeply affected four-year-old Jack, who later said Gerard followed him in life as a guardian angel. This is the Gerard of Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard. He had one other sibling, an older sister named Caroline. Kerouac was referred to as Ti Jean or little John around the house during his childhood.
Kerouac spoke French with his family and began learning English at school, around age six; he began speaking it confidently in his late teens. He was a serious child who was devoted to his mother, who played an important role in his life. She was a devout Catholic, who instilled this deep faith into both her sons. He later said she was the only woman he ever loved. After Gerard died, his mother sought solace in her faith, while his father abandoned it, wallowing in drinking, gambling, and smoking.
Some of Kerouac's poetry was written in French, and in letters written to friend Allen Ginsberg towards the end of his life, he expressed a desire to speak his parents' native tongue again. In 2016, a whole volume of previously unpublished works originally written in French by Kerouac was published as La vie est d'hommage.
On May 17, 1928, while six years old, Kerouac made his first Confession. For penance, he was told to say a rosary, during which he heard God tell him that he had a good soul, that he would suffer in life and die in pain and horror, but would in the end receive salvation. This experience, along with his dying brother's vision of the Virgin Mary (as the nuns fawned over him, convinced he was a saint), combined with a later study of Buddhism and an ongoing commitment to Christ, solidified the worldview which informed his work.
Kerouac once told Ted Berrigan, in an interview for The Paris Review, of an incident in the 1940s in which his mother and father were walking together in a Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York. He recalled "a whole bunch of rabbis walking arm in arm ... teedah- teedah – teedah ... and they wouldn't part for this Christian man and his wife, so my father went POOM! and knocked a rabbi right in the gutter." Leo, after the death of his child, also treated a priest with similar contempt, angrily throwing him out of the house despite his invitation from Gabrielle.
Kerouac was a capable athlete in football and wrestling. Kerouac's skills as running back in football for Lowell High School earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and Columbia University. He spent a year at Horace Mann School, where he befriended Seymour Wyse, an Englishman whom he later featured as a character, under the pseudonym 'Lionel Smart', in several of Kerouac's books. He also cites Wyse as the person who introduced him to the new styles of jazz, including Bop. After his year at Horace Mann, Kerouac earned the requisite grades for entry to Columbia. Kerouac broke a leg playing football during his freshman season, and during an abbreviated second year he argued constantly with coach Lou Little, who kept him benched. While at Columbia, Kerouac wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, and joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. He was a resident of Livingston Hall and Hartley Hall, where other Beat Generation figures lived. He also studied at The New School.
When his football career at Columbia ended, Kerouac dropped out of the university. He continued to live for a time in New York's Upper West Side with his girlfriend and future first wife, Edie Parker. It was during this time that he first met the Beat Generation figures who shaped his legacy and became characters in many of his novels, such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr, and William S. Burroughs.
Kerouac was a United States Merchant Mariner from July to October 1942 and served on the SS Dorchester before her maiden voyage. A few months later, the SS Dorchester was sunk during a submarine attack while crossing the Atlantic, and several of his former shipmates were lost. In 1943 he joined the United States Navy Reserves. He served eight days of active duty with the Navy before arriving on the sick list. According to his medical report, Kerouac said he "asked for an aspirin for his headaches and they diagnosed me dementia praecox and sent me here." The medical examiner reported that Kerouac's military adjustment was poor, quoting Kerouac: "I just can't stand it; I like to be by myself." Two days later he was honorably discharged on the psychiatric grounds that he was of "indifferent character" with a diagnosis of "schizoid personality".
While a Merchant Mariner in 1942, Kerouac wrote his first novel, The Sea Is My Brother. The book was published in 2011, 70 years after it was written and over 40 years after Kerouac's death. Kerouac described the work as being about "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies." He viewed the work as a failure, calling it a "crock as literature" and never actively seeking to publish it.
In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer, who allegedly had been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. William Burroughs was also a native of St. Louis, and it was through Carr that Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Carr claimed that Kammerer's homosexual obsession turned aggressive, finally provoking Carr to stab him to death in self-defense. Carr dumped the body in the Hudson River. Afterwards, Carr sought help from Kerouac. Kerouac disposed of the murder weapon and buried Kammerer's eyeglasses. Carr, encouraged by Burroughs, turned himself in to the police. Kerouac and Burroughs were later arrested as material witnesses. Kerouac's father refused to pay his bail. Kerouac then agreed to marry Edie Parker if her parents would pay the bail. (Their marriage was annulled in 1948.) Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a novel about the Kammerer killing entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Though the book was not published during their lifetimes, an excerpt eventually appeared in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (and as noted below, the novel was finally published late 2008). Kerouac also later wrote about the killing in his novel Vanity of Duluoz.
Later, Kerouac lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they had also moved to New York. He wrote his first published novel, The Town and the City, and began On the Road around 1949 when living there. His friends jokingly called him "The Wizard of Ozone Park", alluding to Thomas Edison's nickname, "the Wizard of Menlo Park", and to the film The Wizard of Oz.
The Town and the City was published in 1950 under the name "John Kerouac" and, though it earned him a few respectable reviews, the book sold poorly. Heavily influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe, it reflects on the generational epic formula and the contrasts of small-town life versus the multi-dimensional, and larger life of the city. The book was heavily edited by Robert Giroux, with around 400 pages taken out.
For the next six years, Kerouac continued to write regularly. Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled "The Beat Generation" and "Gone on the Road," Kerouac completed what is now known as On the Road in April 1951, while living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty. The book was largely autobiographical and describes Kerouac's road-trip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady in the late 40s and early 50s, as well as his relationships with other Beat writers and friends. Although some of the novel is focused on driving, Kerouac did not have a driver's license and Cassady did most of the cross-country driving. He learned to drive aged 34, but never had a formal license.
Kerouac completed the first version of the novel during a three-week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Kerouac wrote the final draft in 20 days, with Joan, his wife, supplying him with benzedrine, cigarettes, bowls of pea soup, and mugs of coffee to keep him going. Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper into long strips, wide enough for a typewriter, and taped them together into a 120-foot (37 m) long roll which he then fed into the machine. This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or paragraph breaks and was much more explicit than the version which was eventually published. Though "spontaneous," Kerouac had prepared long in advance before beginning to write. In fact, according to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work in his journals over the several preceding years.
Though the work was completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a publisher. Before On the Road was accepted by Viking Press, Kerouac got a job as a "railroad brakeman and fire lookout" (see Desolation Peak (Washington)) traveling between the East and West coasts of the United States to earn money, frequently finding rest and the quiet space necessary for writing at the home of his mother. While employed in this way he met and befriended Abe Green, a young freight train jumper who later introduced Kerouac to Herbert Huncke, a Times Square street hustler and favorite of many Beat Generation writers.
Publishers rejected On the Road because of its experimental writing style and its sexual content. Many editors were also uncomfortable with the idea of publishing a book that contained what were, for the era, graphic descriptions of drug use and homosexual behavior—a move that could result in obscenity charges being filed, a fate that later befell Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Ginsberg's Howl.
According to Kerouac, On the Road "was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever Established and really must not be spoken about." According to his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, On the Road has been misinterpreted as a tale of companions out looking for kicks, but the most important thing to comprehend is that Kerouac was an American Catholic author – for example, virtually every page of his diary bore a sketch of a crucifix, a prayer, or an appeal to Christ to be forgiven.
In the spring of 1951, while pregnant, Joan Haverty left and divorced Kerouac. In February 1952, she gave birth to Kerouac's only child, Jan Kerouac, whom he acknowledged as his daughter after a blood test confirmed it nine years later. For the next several years Kerouac continued writing and traveling, taking long trips through the U.S. and Mexico. He often experienced episodes of heavy drinking and depression. During this period, he finished drafts of what became ten more novels, including The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Tristessa, and Desolation Angels, which chronicle many of the events of these years.
In 1953, he lived mostly in New York City, having a brief but passionate affair with Alene Lee, an African-American woman, and member of the Beat generation. Alene was the basis for the character named "Mardou" in the novel The Subterraneans, and Irene May in Book of Dreams and Big Sur. At the request of his editors, Kerouac changed the setting of the novel from New York to San Francisco.
In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of his study of Buddhism. Between 1955 and 1956, he lived on and off with his sister, whom he called "Nin," and her husband, Paul Blake, at their home outside of Rocky Mount, N.C. ("Testament, Va." in his works) where he meditated on, and studied, Buddhism. He wrote Some of the Dharma, an imaginative treatise on Buddhism, while living there. However, Kerouac had earlier taken an interest in Eastern thought. In 1946 he read Heinrich Zimmer's Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. In 1955, Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, titled Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, which was unpublished during his lifetime, but eventually serialized in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993–95. It was published by Viking in September 2008.
Kerouac found enemies on both sides of the political spectrum, the right disdaining his association with drugs and sexual libertinism and the left contemptuous of his anti-communism and Catholicism; characteristically, he watched the 1954 Senate McCarthy hearings smoking marijuana and rooting for the anti-communist crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy. In Desolation Angels he wrote, "when I went to Columbia all they tried to teach us was Marx, as if I cared" (considering Marxism, like Freudianism, to be an illusory tangent).
In 1957, after being rejected by several other publishers, On the Road was finally purchased by Viking Press, which demanded major revisions prior to publication. Many of the most sexually explicit passages were removed and, fearing libel suits, pseudonyms were used for the book's "characters." These revisions have often led to criticisms of the alleged spontaneity of Kerouac's style.
In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house at 1418½ Clouser Avenue in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida, to await the release of On the Road. Weeks later, a review of the book by Gilbert Millstein appeared in The New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation. Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer. His friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, became a notorious representation of the Beat Generation. The term Beat Generation was invented by Kerouac during a conversation held with fellow novelist Herbert Huncke. Huncke used the term "beat" to describe a person with little money and few prospects. Kerouac's fame came as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing.
Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post–World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac came to be called "the king of the beat generation," a term with which he never felt comfortable. He once observed, "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic", showing the reporter a painting of Pope Paul VI and saying, "You know who painted that? Me."
The success of On the Road brought Kerouac instant fame. His celebrity status brought publishers desiring unwanted manuscripts that were previously rejected before its publication. After nine months, he no longer felt safe in public. He was badly beaten by three men outside the San Remo Cafe at 189 Bleecker Street in New York City one night. Neal Cassady, possibly as a result of his new notoriety as the central character of the book, was set up and arrested for selling marijuana.
In response, Kerouac chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco–area poets, in The Dharma Bums, set in California and Washington and published in 1958. It was written in Orlando between November 26 and December 7, 1957. To begin writing Dharma Bums, Kerouac typed onto a ten-foot length of teleprinter paper, to avoid interrupting his flow for paper changes, as he had done six years previously for On the Road.
Kerouac was demoralized by criticism of Dharma Bums from such respected figures in the American field of Buddhism as Zen teachers Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Alan Watts. He wrote to Snyder, referring to a meeting with D. T. Suzuki, that "even Suzuki was looking at me through slitted eyes as though I was a monstrous imposter." He passed up the opportunity to reunite with Snyder in California, and explained to Philip Whalen "I'd be ashamed to confront you and Gary now I've become so decadent and drunk and don't give a shit. I'm not a Buddhist any more." In further reaction to their criticism, he quoted part of Abe Green's café recitation, Thrasonical Yawning in the Abattoir of the Soul: "A gaping, rabid congregation, eager to bathe, are washed over by the Font of Euphoria, and bask like protozoans in the celebrated light."
Kerouac used earnings from “On The Road” to purchase the first of three homes in Northport, New York — a wood-framed Victorian on Gilbert Street that he shared with his mother, Gabrielle. They moved there in March 1958 and stayed in Northport for six years, moving twice during that time.
Kerouac also wrote and narrated a beat movie titled Pull My Daisy (1959), directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. It starred poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, musician David Amram and painter Larry Rivers among others. Originally to be called The Beat Generation, the title was changed at the last moment when MGM released a film by the same name in July 1959 that sensationalized beatnik culture.
The television series Route 66 (1960–1964), featuring two untethered young men "on the road" in a Corvette seeking adventure and fueling their travels by apparently plentiful temporary jobs in the various U.S. locales framing the anthology-styled stories, gave the impression of being a commercially sanitized misappropriation of Kerouac's story model for On the Road. Even the leads, Buz and Todd, bore a resemblance to the dark, athletic Kerouac and the blonde Cassady/Moriarty, respectively. Kerouac felt he'd been conspicuously ripped off by Route 66 creator Stirling Silliphant and sought to sue him, CBS, the Screen Gems TV production company, and sponsor Chevrolet, but was somehow counseled against proceeding with what looked like a very potent cause of action.
John Antonelli's 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie begins and ends with footage of Kerouac reading from On the Road and Visions of Cody on The Steve Allen Show in November 1959. In response to Allen's question "How would you define the word 'beat?'", Kerouac responds "well ... sympathetic."
In 1965, he met the poet Youenn Gwernig who was a Breton American like him in New York, and they became friends. Gwernig used to translate his Breton language poems into English so that Kerouac could read and understand them : "Meeting with Jack Kerouac in 1965, for instance, was a decisive turn. Since he could not speak Breton he asked me: 'Would you not write some of your poems in English? I'd really like to read them ! ... ' So I wrote an Diri Dir – Stairs of Steel for him, and kept on doing so. That's why I often write my poems in Breton, French and English."
During these years, Kerouac suffered the loss of his older sister to a heart attack in 1964 and his mother suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1966. Kerouac moved in with his mother in Hyannis, Massachusetts, for almost a year in 1966. In 1968, Neal Cassady also died while in Mexico.
Despite the role which his literary work played in inspiring the counterculture movement of the 1960s, Kerouac was openly critical of it. Arguments over the movement, which Kerouac believed was only an excuse to be "spiteful," also resulted in him splitting with Ginsberg by 1968.
Also in 1968, Kerouac last appeared on television, for Firing Line, produced and hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. (a friend of his from college). Seemingly intoxicated, he affirmed his Catholicism and talked about the counterculture of the 1960s.
On the morning of October 20, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kerouac was working on a book about his father's print shop. He suddenly felt nauseated and went to the bathroom, where he began to vomit blood. Kerouac was taken to St. Anthony's Hospital, suffering from an esophageal hemorrhage. He received several transfusions in an attempt to make up for the loss of blood, and doctors subsequently attempted surgery, but a damaged liver prevented his blood from clotting. He never regained consciousness after the operation, and died at the hospital at 5:15 the following morning, at the age of 47. His cause of death was listed as an internal hemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis, the result of longtime alcohol abuse. A possible contributing factor was an untreated hernia he suffered in a bar fight several weeks earlier. His funeral was held at St. Jean Baptiste Church in Lowell, Massachusetts and he was buried at Edson Cemetery.
At the time of his death, Kerouac was living with his third wife, Stella Sampas Kerouac. His mother, Gabrielle, inherited most of his estate.
Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although he actively disliked such labels. Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac included ideas he developed from his Buddhist studies that began with Gary Snyder. He often referred to his style as "spontaneous prose." Although Kerouac's prose was spontaneous and purportedly without edits, he primarily wrote autobiographical novels (or roman à clef) based upon actual events from his life and the people with whom he interacted. This approach is reflected also by his plot structure: Kerouac's narratives were not heavily focused on traditional plot structures. Instead, his works often revolved around a series of episodic encounters, road trips, and personal reflections. The emphasis was on the characters' experiences and the exploration of themes such as freedom, rebellion, and the search for meaning.
Many of his books exemplified this spontaneous approach, including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath (borrowed from jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and limited revision. Connected with this idea of breath was the elimination of the period, substituting instead a long connecting dash. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words take on a certain musical rhythm and tempo.
Kerouac greatly admired and was influenced by Gary Snyder. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder, and includes excerpts of letters from Snyder. While living with Snyder outside Mill Valley, California, in 1956, Kerouac worked on a book about him, which he considered calling Visions of Gary. (This eventually became Dharma Bums, which Kerouac described as "mostly about [Snyder].") That summer, Kerouac took a job as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in Washington, after hearing Snyder's and Whalen's stories of working as fire spotters. Kerouac described the experience in Desolation Angels and later in "Alone on a Mountaintop" (published in Lonesome Traveler) and The Dharma Bums.
Kerouac would go on for hours, often drunk, to friends and strangers about his method. Allen Ginsberg, initially unimpressed, would later be one of his great proponents, and it was Kerouac's free-flowing prose method that inspired the composition of Ginsberg's poem Howl. It was at about the time of The Subterraneans that he was encouraged by Ginsberg and others to formally explain his style. Of his expositions of the Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise was Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of 30 "essentials".
... and I shambled after as usual as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
—On the Road
Some believed that at times Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote said of it, "That's not writing, it's typing". According to Carolyn Cassady and others, he constantly rewrote and revised his work.
Although the body of Kerouac's work has been published in English, recent research has shown that, in addition to his poetry and letters to friends and family, he also wrote unpublished works of fiction in French. The existence of his two novels written in French, La nuit est ma femme and Sur le chemin was revealed to the general public in a series of articles published by journalist Gabriel Anctil, in the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir in 2007 and 2008. All these works, including La nuit est ma femme, Sur le chemin, and large sections of Maggie Cassidy (originally written in French), have now been published together in a volume entitled La vie est d'hommage (Boréal, 2016) edited by University of Pennsylvania professor Jean-Christophe Cloutier. In 1996, the Nouvelle Revue Française had already published excerpts and an article on "La nuit est ma femme", and scholar Paul Maher Jr., in his biography Kerouac: His Life and Work', discussed Sur le chemin. The novella, completed in five days in Mexico during December 1952, is a telling example of Kerouac's attempts at writing in his first language, a language he often called Canuck French.
Kerouac refers to this short novel in a letter addressed to Neal Cassady (who is commonly known as the inspiration for the character Dean Moriarty) dated January 10, 1953. The published novel runs over 110 pages, having been reconstituted from six distinct files in the Kerouac archive by Professor Cloutier. Set in 1935, mostly on the East Coast, it explores some of the recurring themes of Kerouac's literature by way of a spoken word narrative. Here, as with most of his French writings, Kerouac writes with little regard for grammar or spelling, often relying on phonetics in order to render an authentic reproduction of the French-Canadian vernacular. Even though this work has the same title as one of his best known English novels, it is the original French version of an incomplete translation that later became Old Bull in the Bowery (now published in The Unknown Kerouac from the Library of America). The Unknown Kerouac, edited by Todd Tietchen, includes Cloutier's translation of La nuit est ma femme and the completed translation of Sur le Chemin under the title Old Bull in the Bowery. La nuit est ma femme was written in early 1951 and completed a few days or weeks before he began the original English version of On the Road, as many scholars, such as Paul Maher Jr., Joyce Johnson, Hassan Melehy, and Gabriel Anctil have pointed out.
Kerouac's early writing, particularly his first novel The Town and the City, was more conventional, and bore the strong influence of Thomas Wolfe. The technique Kerouac developed that later gained him notoriety was heavily influenced by jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as the Joan Anderson letter written by Neal Cassady. The Diamond Sutra was the most important Buddhist text for Kerouac, and "probably one of the three or four most influential things he ever read". In 1955, he began an intensive study of this sutra, in a repeating weekly cycle, devoting one day to each of the six Pāramitās, and the seventh to the concluding passage on Samādhi. This was his sole reading on Desolation Peak, and he hoped by this means to condition his mind to emptiness, and possibly to have a vision.
An often overlooked literary influence on Kerouac was James Joyce, whose work he alludes to more than any other author. Kerouac had high esteem for Joyce and he often used Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique. Regarding On the Road, he wrote in a letter to Ginsberg, "I can tell you now as I look back on the flood of language. It is like Ulysses and should be treated with the same gravity." Additionally, Kerouac admired Joyce's experimental use of language, as seen in his novel Visions of Cody, which uses an unconventional narrative as well as a multiplicity of authorial voices.
Kerouac and his literary works had a major impact on the popular rock music of the 1960s. Artists including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, The Grateful Dead, and The Doors all credit Kerouac as a significant influence on their music and lifestyles. This is especially so with members of the band The Doors, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, who quote Jack Kerouac and his novel On the Road as one of the band's greatest influences. In his book Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, Ray Manzarek (keyboard player of The Doors) wrote "I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed." The alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs wrote a song bearing his name, "Hey Jack Kerouac" on their 1987 album In My Tribe. Hip-hop group the Beastie Boys mention Kerouac in their 1989 song, "3-Minute Rule", from the album Paul's Boutique."Song Meanings". Retrieved September 24, 2023. The 2000 Barenaked Ladies song, "Baby Seat", from the album Maroon, references Kerouac.
As the critic Juan Arabia has written in relation to Kerouac's work and rock 'n' roll:
In order to vindicate the cultural, ideological and aesthetic advancement in Kerouac's work and its relevance–and the genesis of rock ‘n' roll–one must first understand the origins of jazz and its offshoots.
The first forms of jazz were formed in New Orleans from a melange of blues, work songs, marches, work songs, African and European music. Bop–the form of jazz that most influenced Kerouac–was created by African-American musicians in New York basements between 1941 and 1945. Bop arose as a reaction to the perception of musical theft perpetrated by white entertainers (e.g., Benny Goodman and his swing band) in an attempt to reclaim the cultural property of the black community which had informed every popular music genre. There has always been an exchange of ideas and musical forms between black and white communities. For example, Elvis sings gospel and blues and white country songs and some black rock n' roll artists sing in a manner similar to Elvis or borrow elements from European music or folk. Rock n' roll borrows elements from blues, country-western, boogie, and jazz.
This is the scenario that surrounds the dénouement of Kerouac's work. It's in 1948 that he finishes his first novel, The Town and the City; very soon after came the birth–and its explosion of popularity in the 1950s–of rock ‘n' roll.
In 1974, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was opened in his honor by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa University, a private Buddhist university in Boulder, Colorado. The school offers a BA in Writing and Literature, MFAs in Writing & Poetics and Creative Writing, and a summer writing program.
From 1978 to 1992, Joy Walsh published 28 issues of a magazine devoted to Kerouac, Moody Street Irregulars.
Kerouac's French-Canadian origins inspired a 1987 National Film Board of Canada docudrama, Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey, directed by Acadian poet Herménégilde Chiasson. Other tributes in French Canada include the 1972 biography by novelist Victor-Lévy Beaulieu Jack Kérouac (essai-poulet), translated as Jack Kerouac: a chicken-essay, the second in a series of works by Beaulieu on his literary forefathers, and two songs that came out within months of each other in 1987 and 1988: "Sur la route" by Pierre Flynn, and "L'ange vagabond" by Richard Séguin.
In the mid-1980s, Kerouac Park was placed in downtown Lowell, Massachusetts.
A street, rue Jack-Kerouac, is named after him in Quebec City, as well as in the hamlet of Kerouac, Lanmeur, Brittany. An annual Kerouac festival was established in Lanmeur in 2010. In the 1980s, the city of San Francisco named a one-way street, Jack Kerouac Alley, in his honor in Chinatown.
The character Hank in David Cronenberg's 1991 film Naked Lunch is based on Kerouac.
In 1997, the house on Clouser Avenue where The Dharma Bums was written was purchased by a newly formed non-profit group, The Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project of Orlando, Inc. This group provides opportunities for aspiring writers to live in the same house in which Kerouac was inspired, with room and board covered for three months. In 1998, the Chicago Tribune published a story by journalist Oscar J. Corral that described a simmering legal dispute between Kerouac's family and the executor of daughter Jan Kerouac's estate, Gerald Nicosia. The article, citing legal documents, showed that Kerouac's estate, worth $91 at the time of his death, was worth $10 million in 1998.
In 2005, Kerouac was mentioned in the single "Nolwenn Ohwo!" by French pop singer-songwriter Nolwenn Leroy, released on her album Histoires Naturelles.
In 2007, Kerouac was posthumously awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
In 2009, the movie One Fast Move or I'm Gone – Kerouac's Big Sur was released. It chronicles the time in Kerouac's life that led to his novel Big Sur, with actors, writers, artists, and close friends giving their insight into the book. The movie also describes the people and places on which Kerouac based his characters and settings, including the cabin in Bixby Canyon. An album released to accompany the movie, "One Fast Move or I'm Gone", features Benjamin Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and Jay Farrar (Son Volt) performing songs based on Kerouac's Big Sur.
In 2010, during the first weekend of October, the 25th anniversary of the literary festival "Lowell Celebrates Kerouac" was held in Kerouac's birthplace of Lowell, Massachusetts. It featured walking tours, literary seminars, and musical performances focused on Kerouac's work and that of the Beat Generation.
In the 2010s, there was a surge in films based on the Beat Generation. Kerouac has been depicted in the films Howl and Kill Your Darlings. A feature film version of On the Road was released internationally in 2012, and was directed by Walter Salles and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Independent filmmaker Michael Polish directed Big Sur, based on the novel, with Jean-Marc Barr cast as Kerouac. The film was released in 2013.
A species of Indian platygastrid wasp that is phoretic (hitch-hiking) on grasshoppers is named after him as Mantibaria kerouaci.
In October 2015, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honor.
The Cadets Drum and Bugle Corps based their 2022 production Rearview Mirror off of Kerouac's travels across America and his novel On the Road.
While he is best known for his novels, Kerouac also wrote poetry. Kerouac said that he wanted "to be considered as a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jazz session on Sunday.". Many of Kerouac's poems follow the style of his free-flowing, uninhibited prose, also incorporating elements of jazz and Buddhism. "Mexico City Blues," a collection of poems published in 1959, is made up of 242 choruses following the rhythms of jazz. In much of his poetry, to achieve a jazz-like rhythm, Kerouac made use of the long dash in place of a period. Several examples of this can be seen in "Mexico City Blues":
Everything Is Ignorant of its own emptiness— Anger Doesnt like to be reminded of fits—
Other poems by Kerouac, such as "Bowery Blues," incorporate jazz rhythms with Buddhist themes of Saṃsāra, the cycle of life and death, and Samadhi, the concentration of composing the mind. Also, following the jazz / blues tradition, Kerouac's poetry features repetition and themes of the troubles and sense of loss experienced in life.
In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publishing, Viking issued two new editions: On the Road: The Original Scroll and On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition. By far the more significant is Scroll, a transcription of the original draft typed as one long paragraph on sheets of tracing paper which Kerouac taped together to form a 120-foot (37 m) scroll. The text is more sexually explicit than Viking allowed to be published in 1957, and also uses the real names of Kerouac's friends rather than the fictional names he later substituted. Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay paid $2.43 million for the original scroll and allowed an exhibition tour that concluded at the end of 2009. The other new issue, 50th Anniversary Edition, is a reissue of the 40th anniversary issue under an updated title.
The Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time on November 1, 2008, by Grove Press. Previously, a fragment of the manuscript had been published in the Burroughs compendium, Word Virus.
Les Éditions du Boréal, a Montreal-based publishing house, obtained rights from Kerouac's estate to publish a collection of works titled La vie est d'hommage (it was released in April 2016). It includes 16 previously unpublished works, in French, including a novella, Sur le chemin, La nuit est ma femme, and large sections of Maggie Cassidy originally written in French. Both Sur le chemin and La nuit est ma femme have also been translated to English by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, in collaboration with Kerouac, and were published in 2016 by the Library of America in The Unknown Kerouac.
Since 2017, John H. Shen-Sampas has been the chief literary executor for the estate of Jack Kerouac. Together with the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Mr. Shen-Sampas has done instrumental work in preserving and archiving all aspects of Kerouac's life. Currently, the estate is represented by the Wylie Agency. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (/ˈkɛru.æk/; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He \"learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens.\" During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jerry Garcia and the Doors.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kéroack (1889–1946) and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque (1895–1973).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "There is some confusion surrounding his name, partly because of variations on the spelling of Kerouac, and because of Kerouac's own statement of his name as Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac. His reason for that statement seems to be linked to an old family legend that the Kerouacs had descended from Baron François Louis Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac. Kerouac's baptism certificate lists his name simply as Jean Louis Kirouac, the most common spelling of the name in Quebec. Research has shown that Kerouac's roots were indeed in Brittany, and he was descended from a middle-class merchant colonist, Urbain-François Le Bihan, Sieur de Kervoac, whose sons married French Canadians.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Kerouac's father Leo had been born into a family of potato farmers in the village of Saint-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec. Jack also had various stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing it to Irish, Breton, Cornish, or other Celtic roots. In one interview he claimed it was from the name of the Cornish language (Kernewek), and that the Kerouacs had fled from Cornwall to Brittany. Another version was that the Kerouacs had come to Cornwall from Ireland before the time of Christ and the name meant \"language of the house\". In still another interview he said it was an Irish word for \"language of the water\" and related to Kerwick. Kerouac, derived from Kervoach, is the name of a town in Brittany in Lanmeur, near Morlaix.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Jack Kerouac later referred to 34 Beaulieu Street as \"sad Beaulieu\". The Kerouac family was living there in 1926 when Jack's older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever, aged nine. This deeply affected four-year-old Jack, who later said Gerard followed him in life as a guardian angel. This is the Gerard of Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard. He had one other sibling, an older sister named Caroline. Kerouac was referred to as Ti Jean or little John around the house during his childhood.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Kerouac spoke French with his family and began learning English at school, around age six; he began speaking it confidently in his late teens. He was a serious child who was devoted to his mother, who played an important role in his life. She was a devout Catholic, who instilled this deep faith into both her sons. He later said she was the only woman he ever loved. After Gerard died, his mother sought solace in her faith, while his father abandoned it, wallowing in drinking, gambling, and smoking.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Some of Kerouac's poetry was written in French, and in letters written to friend Allen Ginsberg towards the end of his life, he expressed a desire to speak his parents' native tongue again. In 2016, a whole volume of previously unpublished works originally written in French by Kerouac was published as La vie est d'hommage.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "On May 17, 1928, while six years old, Kerouac made his first Confession. For penance, he was told to say a rosary, during which he heard God tell him that he had a good soul, that he would suffer in life and die in pain and horror, but would in the end receive salvation. This experience, along with his dying brother's vision of the Virgin Mary (as the nuns fawned over him, convinced he was a saint), combined with a later study of Buddhism and an ongoing commitment to Christ, solidified the worldview which informed his work.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Kerouac once told Ted Berrigan, in an interview for The Paris Review, of an incident in the 1940s in which his mother and father were walking together in a Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York. He recalled \"a whole bunch of rabbis walking arm in arm ... teedah- teedah – teedah ... and they wouldn't part for this Christian man and his wife, so my father went POOM! and knocked a rabbi right in the gutter.\" Leo, after the death of his child, also treated a priest with similar contempt, angrily throwing him out of the house despite his invitation from Gabrielle.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Kerouac was a capable athlete in football and wrestling. Kerouac's skills as running back in football for Lowell High School earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and Columbia University. He spent a year at Horace Mann School, where he befriended Seymour Wyse, an Englishman whom he later featured as a character, under the pseudonym 'Lionel Smart', in several of Kerouac's books. He also cites Wyse as the person who introduced him to the new styles of jazz, including Bop. After his year at Horace Mann, Kerouac earned the requisite grades for entry to Columbia. Kerouac broke a leg playing football during his freshman season, and during an abbreviated second year he argued constantly with coach Lou Little, who kept him benched. While at Columbia, Kerouac wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, and joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. He was a resident of Livingston Hall and Hartley Hall, where other Beat Generation figures lived. He also studied at The New School.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "When his football career at Columbia ended, Kerouac dropped out of the university. He continued to live for a time in New York's Upper West Side with his girlfriend and future first wife, Edie Parker. It was during this time that he first met the Beat Generation figures who shaped his legacy and became characters in many of his novels, such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr, and William S. Burroughs.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Kerouac was a United States Merchant Mariner from July to October 1942 and served on the SS Dorchester before her maiden voyage. A few months later, the SS Dorchester was sunk during a submarine attack while crossing the Atlantic, and several of his former shipmates were lost. In 1943 he joined the United States Navy Reserves. He served eight days of active duty with the Navy before arriving on the sick list. According to his medical report, Kerouac said he \"asked for an aspirin for his headaches and they diagnosed me dementia praecox and sent me here.\" The medical examiner reported that Kerouac's military adjustment was poor, quoting Kerouac: \"I just can't stand it; I like to be by myself.\" Two days later he was honorably discharged on the psychiatric grounds that he was of \"indifferent character\" with a diagnosis of \"schizoid personality\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "While a Merchant Mariner in 1942, Kerouac wrote his first novel, The Sea Is My Brother. The book was published in 2011, 70 years after it was written and over 40 years after Kerouac's death. Kerouac described the work as being about \"man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies.\" He viewed the work as a failure, calling it a \"crock as literature\" and never actively seeking to publish it.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer, who allegedly had been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. William Burroughs was also a native of St. Louis, and it was through Carr that Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Carr claimed that Kammerer's homosexual obsession turned aggressive, finally provoking Carr to stab him to death in self-defense. Carr dumped the body in the Hudson River. Afterwards, Carr sought help from Kerouac. Kerouac disposed of the murder weapon and buried Kammerer's eyeglasses. Carr, encouraged by Burroughs, turned himself in to the police. Kerouac and Burroughs were later arrested as material witnesses. Kerouac's father refused to pay his bail. Kerouac then agreed to marry Edie Parker if her parents would pay the bail. (Their marriage was annulled in 1948.) Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a novel about the Kammerer killing entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Though the book was not published during their lifetimes, an excerpt eventually appeared in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (and as noted below, the novel was finally published late 2008). Kerouac also later wrote about the killing in his novel Vanity of Duluoz.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Later, Kerouac lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they had also moved to New York. He wrote his first published novel, The Town and the City, and began On the Road around 1949 when living there. His friends jokingly called him \"The Wizard of Ozone Park\", alluding to Thomas Edison's nickname, \"the Wizard of Menlo Park\", and to the film The Wizard of Oz.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Town and the City was published in 1950 under the name \"John Kerouac\" and, though it earned him a few respectable reviews, the book sold poorly. Heavily influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe, it reflects on the generational epic formula and the contrasts of small-town life versus the multi-dimensional, and larger life of the city. The book was heavily edited by Robert Giroux, with around 400 pages taken out.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "For the next six years, Kerouac continued to write regularly. Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled \"The Beat Generation\" and \"Gone on the Road,\" Kerouac completed what is now known as On the Road in April 1951, while living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty. The book was largely autobiographical and describes Kerouac's road-trip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady in the late 40s and early 50s, as well as his relationships with other Beat writers and friends. Although some of the novel is focused on driving, Kerouac did not have a driver's license and Cassady did most of the cross-country driving. He learned to drive aged 34, but never had a formal license.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Kerouac completed the first version of the novel during a three-week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Kerouac wrote the final draft in 20 days, with Joan, his wife, supplying him with benzedrine, cigarettes, bowls of pea soup, and mugs of coffee to keep him going. Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper into long strips, wide enough for a typewriter, and taped them together into a 120-foot (37 m) long roll which he then fed into the machine. This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or paragraph breaks and was much more explicit than the version which was eventually published. Though \"spontaneous,\" Kerouac had prepared long in advance before beginning to write. In fact, according to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work in his journals over the several preceding years.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Though the work was completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a publisher. Before On the Road was accepted by Viking Press, Kerouac got a job as a \"railroad brakeman and fire lookout\" (see Desolation Peak (Washington)) traveling between the East and West coasts of the United States to earn money, frequently finding rest and the quiet space necessary for writing at the home of his mother. While employed in this way he met and befriended Abe Green, a young freight train jumper who later introduced Kerouac to Herbert Huncke, a Times Square street hustler and favorite of many Beat Generation writers.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Publishers rejected On the Road because of its experimental writing style and its sexual content. Many editors were also uncomfortable with the idea of publishing a book that contained what were, for the era, graphic descriptions of drug use and homosexual behavior—a move that could result in obscenity charges being filed, a fate that later befell Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Ginsberg's Howl.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "According to Kerouac, On the Road \"was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever Established and really must not be spoken about.\" According to his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, On the Road has been misinterpreted as a tale of companions out looking for kicks, but the most important thing to comprehend is that Kerouac was an American Catholic author – for example, virtually every page of his diary bore a sketch of a crucifix, a prayer, or an appeal to Christ to be forgiven.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In the spring of 1951, while pregnant, Joan Haverty left and divorced Kerouac. In February 1952, she gave birth to Kerouac's only child, Jan Kerouac, whom he acknowledged as his daughter after a blood test confirmed it nine years later. For the next several years Kerouac continued writing and traveling, taking long trips through the U.S. and Mexico. He often experienced episodes of heavy drinking and depression. During this period, he finished drafts of what became ten more novels, including The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Tristessa, and Desolation Angels, which chronicle many of the events of these years.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 1953, he lived mostly in New York City, having a brief but passionate affair with Alene Lee, an African-American woman, and member of the Beat generation. Alene was the basis for the character named \"Mardou\" in the novel The Subterraneans, and Irene May in Book of Dreams and Big Sur. At the request of his editors, Kerouac changed the setting of the novel from New York to San Francisco.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of his study of Buddhism. Between 1955 and 1956, he lived on and off with his sister, whom he called \"Nin,\" and her husband, Paul Blake, at their home outside of Rocky Mount, N.C. (\"Testament, Va.\" in his works) where he meditated on, and studied, Buddhism. He wrote Some of the Dharma, an imaginative treatise on Buddhism, while living there. However, Kerouac had earlier taken an interest in Eastern thought. In 1946 he read Heinrich Zimmer's Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. In 1955, Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, titled Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, which was unpublished during his lifetime, but eventually serialized in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993–95. It was published by Viking in September 2008.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Kerouac found enemies on both sides of the political spectrum, the right disdaining his association with drugs and sexual libertinism and the left contemptuous of his anti-communism and Catholicism; characteristically, he watched the 1954 Senate McCarthy hearings smoking marijuana and rooting for the anti-communist crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy. In Desolation Angels he wrote, \"when I went to Columbia all they tried to teach us was Marx, as if I cared\" (considering Marxism, like Freudianism, to be an illusory tangent).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In 1957, after being rejected by several other publishers, On the Road was finally purchased by Viking Press, which demanded major revisions prior to publication. Many of the most sexually explicit passages were removed and, fearing libel suits, pseudonyms were used for the book's \"characters.\" These revisions have often led to criticisms of the alleged spontaneity of Kerouac's style.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house at 1418½ Clouser Avenue in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida, to await the release of On the Road. Weeks later, a review of the book by Gilbert Millstein appeared in The New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation. Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer. His friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, became a notorious representation of the Beat Generation. The term Beat Generation was invented by Kerouac during a conversation held with fellow novelist Herbert Huncke. Huncke used the term \"beat\" to describe a person with little money and few prospects. Kerouac's fame came as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post–World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac came to be called \"the king of the beat generation,\" a term with which he never felt comfortable. He once observed, \"I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic\", showing the reporter a painting of Pope Paul VI and saying, \"You know who painted that? Me.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The success of On the Road brought Kerouac instant fame. His celebrity status brought publishers desiring unwanted manuscripts that were previously rejected before its publication. After nine months, he no longer felt safe in public. He was badly beaten by three men outside the San Remo Cafe at 189 Bleecker Street in New York City one night. Neal Cassady, possibly as a result of his new notoriety as the central character of the book, was set up and arrested for selling marijuana.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In response, Kerouac chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco–area poets, in The Dharma Bums, set in California and Washington and published in 1958. It was written in Orlando between November 26 and December 7, 1957. To begin writing Dharma Bums, Kerouac typed onto a ten-foot length of teleprinter paper, to avoid interrupting his flow for paper changes, as he had done six years previously for On the Road.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Kerouac was demoralized by criticism of Dharma Bums from such respected figures in the American field of Buddhism as Zen teachers Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Alan Watts. He wrote to Snyder, referring to a meeting with D. T. Suzuki, that \"even Suzuki was looking at me through slitted eyes as though I was a monstrous imposter.\" He passed up the opportunity to reunite with Snyder in California, and explained to Philip Whalen \"I'd be ashamed to confront you and Gary now I've become so decadent and drunk and don't give a shit. I'm not a Buddhist any more.\" In further reaction to their criticism, he quoted part of Abe Green's café recitation, Thrasonical Yawning in the Abattoir of the Soul: \"A gaping, rabid congregation, eager to bathe, are washed over by the Font of Euphoria, and bask like protozoans in the celebrated light.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Kerouac used earnings from “On The Road” to purchase the first of three homes in Northport, New York — a wood-framed Victorian on Gilbert Street that he shared with his mother, Gabrielle. They moved there in March 1958 and stayed in Northport for six years, moving twice during that time.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Kerouac also wrote and narrated a beat movie titled Pull My Daisy (1959), directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. It starred poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, musician David Amram and painter Larry Rivers among others. Originally to be called The Beat Generation, the title was changed at the last moment when MGM released a film by the same name in July 1959 that sensationalized beatnik culture.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The television series Route 66 (1960–1964), featuring two untethered young men \"on the road\" in a Corvette seeking adventure and fueling their travels by apparently plentiful temporary jobs in the various U.S. locales framing the anthology-styled stories, gave the impression of being a commercially sanitized misappropriation of Kerouac's story model for On the Road. Even the leads, Buz and Todd, bore a resemblance to the dark, athletic Kerouac and the blonde Cassady/Moriarty, respectively. Kerouac felt he'd been conspicuously ripped off by Route 66 creator Stirling Silliphant and sought to sue him, CBS, the Screen Gems TV production company, and sponsor Chevrolet, but was somehow counseled against proceeding with what looked like a very potent cause of action.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "John Antonelli's 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie begins and ends with footage of Kerouac reading from On the Road and Visions of Cody on The Steve Allen Show in November 1959. In response to Allen's question \"How would you define the word 'beat?'\", Kerouac responds \"well ... sympathetic.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In 1965, he met the poet Youenn Gwernig who was a Breton American like him in New York, and they became friends. Gwernig used to translate his Breton language poems into English so that Kerouac could read and understand them : \"Meeting with Jack Kerouac in 1965, for instance, was a decisive turn. Since he could not speak Breton he asked me: 'Would you not write some of your poems in English? I'd really like to read them ! ... ' So I wrote an Diri Dir – Stairs of Steel for him, and kept on doing so. That's why I often write my poems in Breton, French and English.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "During these years, Kerouac suffered the loss of his older sister to a heart attack in 1964 and his mother suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1966. Kerouac moved in with his mother in Hyannis, Massachusetts, for almost a year in 1966. In 1968, Neal Cassady also died while in Mexico.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Despite the role which his literary work played in inspiring the counterculture movement of the 1960s, Kerouac was openly critical of it. Arguments over the movement, which Kerouac believed was only an excuse to be \"spiteful,\" also resulted in him splitting with Ginsberg by 1968.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Also in 1968, Kerouac last appeared on television, for Firing Line, produced and hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. (a friend of his from college). Seemingly intoxicated, he affirmed his Catholicism and talked about the counterculture of the 1960s.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "On the morning of October 20, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kerouac was working on a book about his father's print shop. He suddenly felt nauseated and went to the bathroom, where he began to vomit blood. Kerouac was taken to St. Anthony's Hospital, suffering from an esophageal hemorrhage. He received several transfusions in an attempt to make up for the loss of blood, and doctors subsequently attempted surgery, but a damaged liver prevented his blood from clotting. He never regained consciousness after the operation, and died at the hospital at 5:15 the following morning, at the age of 47. His cause of death was listed as an internal hemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis, the result of longtime alcohol abuse. A possible contributing factor was an untreated hernia he suffered in a bar fight several weeks earlier. His funeral was held at St. Jean Baptiste Church in Lowell, Massachusetts and he was buried at Edson Cemetery.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "At the time of his death, Kerouac was living with his third wife, Stella Sampas Kerouac. His mother, Gabrielle, inherited most of his estate.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although he actively disliked such labels. Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac included ideas he developed from his Buddhist studies that began with Gary Snyder. He often referred to his style as \"spontaneous prose.\" Although Kerouac's prose was spontaneous and purportedly without edits, he primarily wrote autobiographical novels (or roman à clef) based upon actual events from his life and the people with whom he interacted. This approach is reflected also by his plot structure: Kerouac's narratives were not heavily focused on traditional plot structures. Instead, his works often revolved around a series of episodic encounters, road trips, and personal reflections. The emphasis was on the characters' experiences and the exploration of themes such as freedom, rebellion, and the search for meaning.",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Many of his books exemplified this spontaneous approach, including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath (borrowed from jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and limited revision. Connected with this idea of breath was the elimination of the period, substituting instead a long connecting dash. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words take on a certain musical rhythm and tempo.",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Kerouac greatly admired and was influenced by Gary Snyder. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder, and includes excerpts of letters from Snyder. While living with Snyder outside Mill Valley, California, in 1956, Kerouac worked on a book about him, which he considered calling Visions of Gary. (This eventually became Dharma Bums, which Kerouac described as \"mostly about [Snyder].\") That summer, Kerouac took a job as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in Washington, after hearing Snyder's and Whalen's stories of working as fire spotters. Kerouac described the experience in Desolation Angels and later in \"Alone on a Mountaintop\" (published in Lonesome Traveler) and The Dharma Bums.",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Kerouac would go on for hours, often drunk, to friends and strangers about his method. Allen Ginsberg, initially unimpressed, would later be one of his great proponents, and it was Kerouac's free-flowing prose method that inspired the composition of Ginsberg's poem Howl. It was at about the time of The Subterraneans that he was encouraged by Ginsberg and others to formally explain his style. Of his expositions of the Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise was Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of 30 \"essentials\".",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "... and I shambled after as usual as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes \"Awww!\"",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "—On the Road",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Some believed that at times Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote said of it, \"That's not writing, it's typing\". According to Carolyn Cassady and others, he constantly rewrote and revised his work.",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Although the body of Kerouac's work has been published in English, recent research has shown that, in addition to his poetry and letters to friends and family, he also wrote unpublished works of fiction in French. The existence of his two novels written in French, La nuit est ma femme and Sur le chemin was revealed to the general public in a series of articles published by journalist Gabriel Anctil, in the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir in 2007 and 2008. All these works, including La nuit est ma femme, Sur le chemin, and large sections of Maggie Cassidy (originally written in French), have now been published together in a volume entitled La vie est d'hommage (Boréal, 2016) edited by University of Pennsylvania professor Jean-Christophe Cloutier. In 1996, the Nouvelle Revue Française had already published excerpts and an article on \"La nuit est ma femme\", and scholar Paul Maher Jr., in his biography Kerouac: His Life and Work', discussed Sur le chemin. The novella, completed in five days in Mexico during December 1952, is a telling example of Kerouac's attempts at writing in his first language, a language he often called Canuck French.",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Kerouac refers to this short novel in a letter addressed to Neal Cassady (who is commonly known as the inspiration for the character Dean Moriarty) dated January 10, 1953. The published novel runs over 110 pages, having been reconstituted from six distinct files in the Kerouac archive by Professor Cloutier. Set in 1935, mostly on the East Coast, it explores some of the recurring themes of Kerouac's literature by way of a spoken word narrative. Here, as with most of his French writings, Kerouac writes with little regard for grammar or spelling, often relying on phonetics in order to render an authentic reproduction of the French-Canadian vernacular. Even though this work has the same title as one of his best known English novels, it is the original French version of an incomplete translation that later became Old Bull in the Bowery (now published in The Unknown Kerouac from the Library of America). The Unknown Kerouac, edited by Todd Tietchen, includes Cloutier's translation of La nuit est ma femme and the completed translation of Sur le Chemin under the title Old Bull in the Bowery. La nuit est ma femme was written in early 1951 and completed a few days or weeks before he began the original English version of On the Road, as many scholars, such as Paul Maher Jr., Joyce Johnson, Hassan Melehy, and Gabriel Anctil have pointed out.",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Kerouac's early writing, particularly his first novel The Town and the City, was more conventional, and bore the strong influence of Thomas Wolfe. The technique Kerouac developed that later gained him notoriety was heavily influenced by jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as the Joan Anderson letter written by Neal Cassady. The Diamond Sutra was the most important Buddhist text for Kerouac, and \"probably one of the three or four most influential things he ever read\". In 1955, he began an intensive study of this sutra, in a repeating weekly cycle, devoting one day to each of the six Pāramitās, and the seventh to the concluding passage on Samādhi. This was his sole reading on Desolation Peak, and he hoped by this means to condition his mind to emptiness, and possibly to have a vision.",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "An often overlooked literary influence on Kerouac was James Joyce, whose work he alludes to more than any other author. Kerouac had high esteem for Joyce and he often used Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique. Regarding On the Road, he wrote in a letter to Ginsberg, \"I can tell you now as I look back on the flood of language. It is like Ulysses and should be treated with the same gravity.\" Additionally, Kerouac admired Joyce's experimental use of language, as seen in his novel Visions of Cody, which uses an unconventional narrative as well as a multiplicity of authorial voices.",
"title": "Style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Kerouac and his literary works had a major impact on the popular rock music of the 1960s. Artists including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, The Grateful Dead, and The Doors all credit Kerouac as a significant influence on their music and lifestyles. This is especially so with members of the band The Doors, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, who quote Jack Kerouac and his novel On the Road as one of the band's greatest influences. In his book Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, Ray Manzarek (keyboard player of The Doors) wrote \"I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed.\" The alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs wrote a song bearing his name, \"Hey Jack Kerouac\" on their 1987 album In My Tribe. Hip-hop group the Beastie Boys mention Kerouac in their 1989 song, \"3-Minute Rule\", from the album Paul's Boutique.\"Song Meanings\". Retrieved September 24, 2023. The 2000 Barenaked Ladies song, \"Baby Seat\", from the album Maroon, references Kerouac.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "As the critic Juan Arabia has written in relation to Kerouac's work and rock 'n' roll:",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In order to vindicate the cultural, ideological and aesthetic advancement in Kerouac's work and its relevance–and the genesis of rock ‘n' roll–one must first understand the origins of jazz and its offshoots.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The first forms of jazz were formed in New Orleans from a melange of blues, work songs, marches, work songs, African and European music. Bop–the form of jazz that most influenced Kerouac–was created by African-American musicians in New York basements between 1941 and 1945. Bop arose as a reaction to the perception of musical theft perpetrated by white entertainers (e.g., Benny Goodman and his swing band) in an attempt to reclaim the cultural property of the black community which had informed every popular music genre. There has always been an exchange of ideas and musical forms between black and white communities. For example, Elvis sings gospel and blues and white country songs and some black rock n' roll artists sing in a manner similar to Elvis or borrow elements from European music or folk. Rock n' roll borrows elements from blues, country-western, boogie, and jazz.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "This is the scenario that surrounds the dénouement of Kerouac's work. It's in 1948 that he finishes his first novel, The Town and the City; very soon after came the birth–and its explosion of popularity in the 1950s–of rock ‘n' roll.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In 1974, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was opened in his honor by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa University, a private Buddhist university in Boulder, Colorado. The school offers a BA in Writing and Literature, MFAs in Writing & Poetics and Creative Writing, and a summer writing program.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "From 1978 to 1992, Joy Walsh published 28 issues of a magazine devoted to Kerouac, Moody Street Irregulars.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Kerouac's French-Canadian origins inspired a 1987 National Film Board of Canada docudrama, Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey, directed by Acadian poet Herménégilde Chiasson. Other tributes in French Canada include the 1972 biography by novelist Victor-Lévy Beaulieu Jack Kérouac (essai-poulet), translated as Jack Kerouac: a chicken-essay, the second in a series of works by Beaulieu on his literary forefathers, and two songs that came out within months of each other in 1987 and 1988: \"Sur la route\" by Pierre Flynn, and \"L'ange vagabond\" by Richard Séguin.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In the mid-1980s, Kerouac Park was placed in downtown Lowell, Massachusetts.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "A street, rue Jack-Kerouac, is named after him in Quebec City, as well as in the hamlet of Kerouac, Lanmeur, Brittany. An annual Kerouac festival was established in Lanmeur in 2010. In the 1980s, the city of San Francisco named a one-way street, Jack Kerouac Alley, in his honor in Chinatown.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The character Hank in David Cronenberg's 1991 film Naked Lunch is based on Kerouac.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In 1997, the house on Clouser Avenue where The Dharma Bums was written was purchased by a newly formed non-profit group, The Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project of Orlando, Inc. This group provides opportunities for aspiring writers to live in the same house in which Kerouac was inspired, with room and board covered for three months. In 1998, the Chicago Tribune published a story by journalist Oscar J. Corral that described a simmering legal dispute between Kerouac's family and the executor of daughter Jan Kerouac's estate, Gerald Nicosia. The article, citing legal documents, showed that Kerouac's estate, worth $91 at the time of his death, was worth $10 million in 1998.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In 2005, Kerouac was mentioned in the single \"Nolwenn Ohwo!\" by French pop singer-songwriter Nolwenn Leroy, released on her album Histoires Naturelles.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In 2007, Kerouac was posthumously awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In 2009, the movie One Fast Move or I'm Gone – Kerouac's Big Sur was released. It chronicles the time in Kerouac's life that led to his novel Big Sur, with actors, writers, artists, and close friends giving their insight into the book. The movie also describes the people and places on which Kerouac based his characters and settings, including the cabin in Bixby Canyon. An album released to accompany the movie, \"One Fast Move or I'm Gone\", features Benjamin Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and Jay Farrar (Son Volt) performing songs based on Kerouac's Big Sur.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In 2010, during the first weekend of October, the 25th anniversary of the literary festival \"Lowell Celebrates Kerouac\" was held in Kerouac's birthplace of Lowell, Massachusetts. It featured walking tours, literary seminars, and musical performances focused on Kerouac's work and that of the Beat Generation.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In the 2010s, there was a surge in films based on the Beat Generation. Kerouac has been depicted in the films Howl and Kill Your Darlings. A feature film version of On the Road was released internationally in 2012, and was directed by Walter Salles and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Independent filmmaker Michael Polish directed Big Sur, based on the novel, with Jean-Marc Barr cast as Kerouac. The film was released in 2013.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "A species of Indian platygastrid wasp that is phoretic (hitch-hiking) on grasshoppers is named after him as Mantibaria kerouaci.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In October 2015, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honor.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The Cadets Drum and Bugle Corps based their 2022 production Rearview Mirror off of Kerouac's travels across America and his novel On the Road.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "While he is best known for his novels, Kerouac also wrote poetry. Kerouac said that he wanted \"to be considered as a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jazz session on Sunday.\". Many of Kerouac's poems follow the style of his free-flowing, uninhibited prose, also incorporating elements of jazz and Buddhism. \"Mexico City Blues,\" a collection of poems published in 1959, is made up of 242 choruses following the rhythms of jazz. In much of his poetry, to achieve a jazz-like rhythm, Kerouac made use of the long dash in place of a period. Several examples of this can be seen in \"Mexico City Blues\":",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Everything Is Ignorant of its own emptiness— Anger Doesnt like to be reminded of fits—",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Other poems by Kerouac, such as \"Bowery Blues,\" incorporate jazz rhythms with Buddhist themes of Saṃsāra, the cycle of life and death, and Samadhi, the concentration of composing the mind. Also, following the jazz / blues tradition, Kerouac's poetry features repetition and themes of the troubles and sense of loss experienced in life.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publishing, Viking issued two new editions: On the Road: The Original Scroll and On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition. By far the more significant is Scroll, a transcription of the original draft typed as one long paragraph on sheets of tracing paper which Kerouac taped together to form a 120-foot (37 m) scroll. The text is more sexually explicit than Viking allowed to be published in 1957, and also uses the real names of Kerouac's friends rather than the fictional names he later substituted. Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay paid $2.43 million for the original scroll and allowed an exhibition tour that concluded at the end of 2009. The other new issue, 50th Anniversary Edition, is a reissue of the 40th anniversary issue under an updated title.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time on November 1, 2008, by Grove Press. Previously, a fragment of the manuscript had been published in the Burroughs compendium, Word Virus.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Les Éditions du Boréal, a Montreal-based publishing house, obtained rights from Kerouac's estate to publish a collection of works titled La vie est d'hommage (it was released in April 2016). It includes 16 previously unpublished works, in French, including a novella, Sur le chemin, La nuit est ma femme, and large sections of Maggie Cassidy originally written in French. Both Sur le chemin and La nuit est ma femme have also been translated to English by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, in collaboration with Kerouac, and were published in 2016 by the Library of America in The Unknown Kerouac.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Since 2017, John H. Shen-Sampas has been the chief literary executor for the estate of Jack Kerouac. Together with the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Mr. Shen-Sampas has done instrumental work in preserving and archiving all aspects of Kerouac's life. Currently, the estate is represented by the Wylie Agency.",
"title": "Works"
}
]
| Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes. Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jerry Garcia and the Doors. In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published. | 2001-07-27T06:46:48Z | 2023-12-30T21:07:53Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac |
15,892 | July 26 | July 26 is the 207th day of the year (208th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 158 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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| July 26 is the 207th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 158 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-08-28T21:56:30Z | 2023-11-30T21:38:37Z | [
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15,893 | Jeff Mills | Jeff Mills (born June 18, 1963, in Detroit, Michigan) is an American DJ, record producer, and composer. In the late 1980s Mills founded the techno collective Underground Resistance with fellow Detroit techno producers 'Mad' Mike Banks and Robert Hood but left the group to pursue a career as a solo artist in the early 90s. Mills founded the Chicago based Axis Records in 1992, which is responsible for the release of much of his solo work.
Mills has received international recognition for his work as a DJ and producer. He featured in Man From Tomorrow, a documentary about techno music that he produced along with French filmmaker Jacqueline Caux. He continued working in film, releasing Life to Death and Back, a film he shot in the Egyptian wing of the Louvre Museum where he also had a four-month residency. In 2017 the president of the Arab World Institute and former French Minister of Culture Jack Lang awarded Mills the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his services to the arts.
A 1981 graduate of Mackenzie High School, Mills started his career in the early 1980s using the name "The Wizard." He performed DJ tricks like beat juggling and scratching during his sets, some of which were pre-recorded. He had a nightly show called The Wizard at WDRQ and later at WJLB under the same name. He would highlight local techno artists, giving light to artists such as Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins.
In his early career, Mills managed numerous residencies in the Detroit area. He credits The Necto as the residency where he was able to experiment with new ideas in techno music. Mills played The Necto where he began incorporating concepts such as different equipment setups, including positioning himself on the dance floor with the people. For his radio DJ spots, Mills had a music spending budget to use for his sets. Mills would also drive as far as Toronto or Chicago in order to purchase newly released music.
Mills is a founding member of Underground Resistance, a techno collective that he started with former Parliament bass player 'Mad' Mike Banks. The group embraced revolutionary rhetoric and only appeared in public dressed in ski masks and black combat suits. Mills never "officially" left the group, but did begin to pursue his own ventures outside of the collective. Many of Underground Resistance's labelmate's early releases were the product of various experiments by Banks and Mills, both solo and in collaboration, before Mills left the collective in 1991 to achieve international success as a solo artist and DJ. The collective continues to be a mainstay of Detroit's music scene.
UR related the aesthetics of early Detroit Techno to the complex social, political, and economic circumstances which followed on from Reagan-era inner-city economic recession, producing uncompromising music geared toward promoting awareness and facilitating political change. UR's songs created a sense of self-exploration, experimentation and the ability to change yourself and circumstances. Additionally, UR wanted to establish a means of identification beyond traditional lines of race and ethnicity. Another form of UR's rebellion concerns the rejection of the commercialization of techno. This is evident in the messages scratched in UR's records, lyrics and sounds expressing economic independence from major record labels.
Mills left Underground Resistance in 1991 to pursue his own ventures. He relocated from Detroit, first to New York, then Berlin (as a resident at the Tresor club), and then Chicago. There in 1992, with fellow Detroit native Robert Hood, he set up the record label Axis, and later, sub-labels Purpose Maker, Tomorrow, and 6277, all aiming for a more minimal sound than most of the techno being produced in those years.
Mills released Blue Potential in 2006, a live album of him playing with the 70 piece Montpelier Philharmonic Orchestra in 2005. The album was a remix for classical interpretation, following musical acts such as Radiohead. In 2013, he released Where Light Ends, an album inspired by the Japanese astronaut Mamoru Mohri and his first trip to space. In 2018, Mills recorded E.P. Tomorrow Comes The Harvest with legendary afro-jazz drummer Tony Allen.
Mills performed a live set in January 2015 at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, California. The set was performed with four turntables to create a cinemix soundtrack for Woman in the Moon, the 1929 silent film from Fritz Lang. The set was performed during a screening of the film at the center. Mills has previously completed work highlighting Lang's career, including composing, performing, and releasing a soundtrack to Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis, releasing the soundtrack in 2000.
Mills became involved in film with the help of French filmmaker Jacqueline Caux. He helped Caux produce the film Man From Tomorrow, a documentary about techno music that featured Mills. He continued in the film industry with the release of the independent film Life to Death and Back which he shot in the Egyptian wing of the Louvre Museum in France, the same museum where he had a four-month residency.
In his DJ sets, Mills usually uses three decks, a Roland TR-909 drum machine, and up to seventy records in one hour. Mills' Exhibitionist DVD, from 2004, features him mixing live on three decks and CD player in a studio. In 2011, Mills switched to using three or four CD decks for most of his club appearances, instead of the usual Technics turntables. Mixmag described Mills as the "master" of the 909.
He was mentioned by Detroit rapper Eminem in his song "Groundhog Day", from his album The Marshall Mathers LP 2. Eminem says: "...and discovered this DJ who was mixing, I say it to this day, if you ain't listened to The Wizard, you ain't have a fucking clue what you was missing..."
Mills is also an artist and has shown his works at exhibits internationally. His works have included "Man of Tomorrow," a portrait of Mills that shows his perception of the future as well as "Critical Arrangements" exhibited at Pompidou Centre in 2008 as a part of "Le Futurisme à Paris – une avant-garde explosive." One of his most notable works was exhibited in 2015. Known as "The Visitor," it was a sculpture of a drum machine inspired by a UFO sighting in Los Angeles from the 1950s.
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"text": "Mills released Blue Potential in 2006, a live album of him playing with the 70 piece Montpelier Philharmonic Orchestra in 2005. The album was a remix for classical interpretation, following musical acts such as Radiohead. In 2013, he released Where Light Ends, an album inspired by the Japanese astronaut Mamoru Mohri and his first trip to space. In 2018, Mills recorded E.P. Tomorrow Comes The Harvest with legendary afro-jazz drummer Tony Allen.",
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"title": "Career"
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"text": "Mills became involved in film with the help of French filmmaker Jacqueline Caux. He helped Caux produce the film Man From Tomorrow, a documentary about techno music that featured Mills. He continued in the film industry with the release of the independent film Life to Death and Back which he shot in the Egyptian wing of the Louvre Museum in France, the same museum where he had a four-month residency.",
"title": "Career"
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"text": "Mills is also an artist and has shown his works at exhibits internationally. His works have included \"Man of Tomorrow,\" a portrait of Mills that shows his perception of the future as well as \"Critical Arrangements\" exhibited at Pompidou Centre in 2008 as a part of \"Le Futurisme à Paris – une avant-garde explosive.\" One of his most notable works was exhibited in 2015. Known as \"The Visitor,\" it was a sculpture of a drum machine inspired by a UFO sighting in Los Angeles from the 1950s.",
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| Jeff Mills is an American DJ, record producer, and composer. In the late 1980s Mills founded the techno collective Underground Resistance with fellow Detroit techno producers 'Mad' Mike Banks and Robert Hood but left the group to pursue a career as a solo artist in the early 90s. Mills founded the Chicago based Axis Records in 1992, which is responsible for the release of much of his solo work. Mills has received international recognition for his work as a DJ and producer. He featured in Man From Tomorrow, a documentary about techno music that he produced along with French filmmaker Jacqueline Caux. He continued working in film, releasing Life to Death and Back, a film he shot in the Egyptian wing of the Louvre Museum where he also had a four-month residency. In 2017 the president of the Arab World Institute and former French Minister of Culture Jack Lang awarded Mills the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his services to the arts. | 2001-10-10T16:34:31Z | 2023-12-09T13:11:11Z | [
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15,898 | John Major | Sir John Major KG CH (born 29 March 1943) is a British former politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1997. He previously held Cabinet positions under prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the last as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1989 to 1990. Major was the member of Parliament (MP) for Huntingdon, formerly Huntingdonshire, from 1979 to 2001. Since stepping down as an MP in 2001, Major has focused on writing and his business, sporting and charity work, and has occasionally commented on political developments in the role of an elder statesman.
Having left school just before turning sixteen, Major worked as a banker and joined the Young Conservatives in 1959, and soon became a highly active member. He was elected to Lambeth London Borough Council in 1968, and a decade later to parliament, being elected as the Conservative MP for Huntingdonshire in the 1979 general election. Major held several junior government positions under Thatcher from 1984 to 1987, including parliamentary private secretary and assistant whip. He served in Thatcher's third ministry as Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 1987 to 1989, Foreign Secretary in 1989, and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1989 to 1990. Following Thatcher's resignation in 1990, after a challenge was launched to her leadership, Major stood in the 1990 Conservative leadership election to replace her and emerged victorious, becoming prime minister. His mild-mannered style and moderate political stance contrasted with that of Thatcher. Two years into his premiership, Major went on to lead the Conservative Party to a fourth consecutive electoral victory, winning more than 14 million votes, which remains the highest number ever won by a political party in Britain.
As prime minister, Major created the Citizen's Charter, removed the Poll Tax and replaced it with the Council Tax, committed British troops to the Gulf War, took charge of the UK's negotiations over the Maastricht Treaty, led the country during the early 1990s economic crisis, withdrew the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (on Black Wednesday), promoted the socially conservative back to basics campaign, privatised the railways and coal industry, and played a pivotal role in creating peace in Northern Ireland. In 1995, Major resigned as party leader, amid internal divisions over UK membership of the European Union, parliamentary scandals (widely known as "sleaze") and questions over his economic credibility. Despite being reelected as Conservative leader in the 1995 leadership election, his administration remained unpopular, and soon lost its parliamentary majority. The Labour Party pulled ahead of the Conservatives in every local election during Major's leadership, which increased after Tony Blair became Labour leader in 1994.
The Conservatives were defeated in a landslide in the 1997 general election, ending 18 years of Conservative rule. After Blair succeeded Major as prime minister, Major served as Leader of the Opposition for seven weeks while the leadership election to replace him took place. He formed a temporary shadow cabinet, and Major himself served as shadow foreign secretary and shadow secretary of state for defence. His resignation as Conservative leader formally took effect in June 1997 following the election of William Hague. He remained active in Parliament, regularly attending and contributing in debates, until he stood down at the 2001 election to focus on writing and his business, sporting and charity work.
Since leaving office, Major has tended to maintain a low profile in the media, occasionally making political interventions. He supported the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign for the UK to remain in the European Union, and has often criticised Brexit since the outcome of the 2016 referendum. Major was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005 for services to politics and charity, and was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1999 for his work on the Northern Ireland peace process. Although public favourability of Major has improved since he left office, his premiership has generally been viewed as average in historical rankings and public opinion of British prime ministers.
John Major was born on 29 March 1943 at St Helier Hospital and Queen Mary's Hospital for Children in St Helier, Surrey, to Gwen Major (née Coates, 1905–1970) and former music hall performer Tom Major-Ball (1879–1962), who was 63 years old when Major was born. He was christened "John Roy Major" but only "John Major" was recorded on his birth certificate; he used his middle name until the early 1980s. His birth had been a difficult one, with his mother suffering from pleurisy and pneumonia and John Major requiring several blood transfusions due to an infection, causing permanent scarring to his ankles.
The Major family - John, his parents, and his two older siblings Terry and Pat) - lived at 260 Longfellow Road, Worcester Park, Surrey, a middle-class area where Major's father ran a garden ornaments business and his mother worked in a local library and as a part-time dance teacher. John Major later described the family's circumstances at this time as being "comfortable but not well off". Following a German V-1 flying bomb attack in the area in 1944 which killed several people, the Majors moved to the village of Saham Toney, Norfolk, for the duration of the war.
John began attending primary school at Cheam Common School from 1948. His childhood was generally happy, and he enjoyed reading, sports (especially cricket and football) and keeping pets, such as his rabbits. In 1954 John passed the 11+ exam, enabling him to go to Rutlish School, a grammar school in Merton Park, though to John's chagrin his father insisted that he register as 'John Major-Ball'. The family's fortunes took a turn for the worse, with his father's health deteriorating, and the business in severe financial difficulties. A recalled business loan which the family were unable to repay forced Tom Major to sell the house in Worcester Park in May 1955, with the family moving to a cramped, rented top-floor flat at 144 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton. With his parents distracted by their reduced circumstances, John Major's difficulties at Rutlish went unnoticed.
Acutely conscious of his straitened circumstances in relation to the other pupils, Major was something of a loner and consistently under-performed except in sports, coming to see the school as "a penance to be endured". Major left school just before his 16th birthday in 1959 with just three O-level passes in History, English Language and English Literature, to his parents' disappointment.
Major's interest in politics stems from this period, and he avidly kept up with current affairs by reading newspapers on his long commutes from Brixton to Wimbledon. In 1956 Major met local MP Marcus Lipton at a local church fair and was invited to watch his first debate in the House of Commons, where Harold Macmillan presented his only Budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Major has attributed his political ambitions to this event.
Major's first job was as a clerk in the London-based insurance brokerage firm Price Forbes in 1959, though finding the job dull and offering no prospects he quit. Major began working with his brother Terry at the garden ornaments business; this had been sold in 1959, enabling the family to move to a larger residence at 80 Burton Road, Brixton. Major's father died on 27 March 1962. John left the ornaments business the following year to care for his ill mother, though when she got better he was unable to find a new job and was unemployed for much of the latter half of 1962, a situation he says was "degrading". After Major became prime minister, it was misreported that his failure to get a job as a bus conductor resulted from his failing to pass a maths test; he had in fact passed all of the necessary tests but had been passed over owing to his height. In the meantime he studied for a qualification in banking via correspondence course. Eventually in December 1962 he found a job working at the London Electricity Board (LEB) in Elephant and Castle.
In 1959 Major had joined the Young Conservatives in Brixton and soon became a highly active member, which helped increase his confidence following the failure of his school days. Encouraged by fellow Conservative Derek Stone, he started giving speeches on a soap-box in Brixton Market. According to his biographer Anthony Seldon, Major brought "youthful exuberance" to the Tories in Brixton, but was sometimes in trouble with the professional agent Marion Standing. Major stood as a Councillor in the 1964 Lambeth London Borough Council election for Larkhall ward at the age of 21 in 1964, losing to Labour. He also assisted local Conservative candidates Kenneth Payne in the 1964 general election and Piers Dixon in the 1966 general election. Another formative influence on Major in this period was Jean Kierans, a divorcée 13 years his elder with two children who lived opposite the family on Burton Road, who became his mentor and lover. Seldon writes "She ... made Major smarten his appearance, groomed him politically, and made him more ambitious and worldly." Major later moved in with Kierans when his family left Burton Road in 1965; their relationship lasted from 1963 to sometime after 1968.
Major left the LEB and took up a post at District Bank in May 1965, though he soon left this to join Standard Bank the following year, largely because the latter offered the chance to work abroad. In December 1966 he was sent for a long secondment in Jos, Nigeria, which he enjoyed immensely, though he was put off by the casual racism of some of the ex-pat workers there. In May 1967 he was involved in a serious car crash in which he broke a leg and had to be flown home. Leaving hospital, he split his time between Jean Kierans' house and a small rented flat in Mayfair, working at Standard Bank's London office and resuming his banking diploma and activities with the Young Conservatives in his spare time.
Major stood again as Councillor in the 1968 Lambeth London Borough Council election, this time for Ferndale ward. Though a Labour stronghold, the Conservatives received a huge boost following Enoch Powell's anti-immigration 'Rivers of Blood speech' in April 1968 and Major won, despite strongly disapproving of Powell's views. Major took a major interest in housing matters, with Lambeth notorious for overcrowding and poor-quality rented accommodation. In February 1970 Major became Chairman of the Housing Committee, being responsible for overseeing the building of several large council estates. He also promoted more openness at the council, initiating a series of public meetings with local residents. Major also undertook fact-finding trips to the Netherlands, Finland and the Soviet Union. Despite the Lambeth housing team being well-regarded nationally, Major lost his seat in the 1971 Lambeth London Borough Council election.
Major met Norma Johnson at a Conservative party event in Brixton in April 1970, and the two became engaged shortly thereafter, marrying at St Matthew's Church in Brixton on 3 October 1970. John's mother died shortly before in September at the age of 65. John and Norma moved into a flat at Primrose Court, Streatham, which John had bought in 1969, and had their first child, Elizabeth, in November 1971. In 1974 the couple moved to a larger residence at West Oak, Beckenham, and had a second child, James, in January 1975. Meanwhile, Major continued to work at Standard Bank (renamed Standard Chartered from 1975), having completed his banking diploma in 1972. Major was promoted to head of the PR department in August 1976, and his duties necessitated the occasional foreign trip to East Asia.
Despite his setback at the 1971 Lambeth Council election, Major continued to nurse political ambitions, and with help from friends in the Conservative Party managed to get onto the Conservative Central Office's list of potential MP candidates. Major was selected as the Conservative candidate for the Labour-dominated St Pancras North constituency, fighting both the February and October 1974 general elections, losing heavily both times to Labour's Albert Stallard. Major then attempted to get selected as a candidate for a more promising seat, and despite numerous attempts was unsuccessful until December 1976. Growing increasingly frustrated, Major resolved to make one last attempt, applying for selection to the safe Conservative seat of Huntingdonshire and finally he succeeded. Major was in some ways an odd choice, being a born-and-bred Londoner in a largely rural constituency still home to many landed families; however, he was seen as being the most likely to win-over the increasingly large numbers of upwardly mobile London over-spill families living in the area, and he was helped to familiarise himself with the area by local MP David Renton. In 1977 the Major family purchased a house at De Vere Close in the village of Hemingford Grey. Major took on a less demanding job at Standard Chartered, and started working part-time in 1978 so that he could devote more time to his constituency duties.
Major won the Huntingdon seat by a large margin in the 1979 general election, which brought Margaret Thatcher to power. He made his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 13 June 1979, voicing his support for the government's budget. Major assiduously courted contacts at all levels of the party in this period, joining the informal 'Guy Fawkes club' of Conservative MPs and attending various Committees. He became Secretary of the Environment Committee and also assisted with work on the Housing Act 1980, which allowed council house tenants the Right to Buy their homes. At this time Major lived in De Vere Close, Hemingford Grey.
Major's first promotion came when he was appointed as a Parliamentary Private Secretary in January 1981 to Patrick Mayhew and Timothy Raison, both Ministers of State at the Home Office. Seeking to gain more exposure to foreign affairs, he joined several Labour Party MPs on a fact-finding trip to the Middle East in April 1982. The group met with King Hussein of Jordan and Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in Lebanon; in Israel they were briefly caught in the middle of a shooting incident between Israeli troops and a Palestinian rock-thrower.
Major later became an assistant whip in January 1983, responsible for East Anglian MPs. During this period Major became also involved in the response to protests at RAF Molesworth, which lay in his constituency; various peace groups were opposed to the siting of cruise missiles at the base and had established a permanent 'peace camp' there. Major addressed public meetings opposed to the protesters, organised by parish councillors, and also met Bill Westwood and separately Michael Heseltine to discuss the issue. The protesters were evicted in February 1984.
Major comfortably won re-election to the now slightly enlarged seat of Huntingdon at the 1983 general election. Shortly thereafter he and Norma moved to a larger house (Finings) in Great Stukeley; Major generally spent his weekends there, and weekdays at a rented flat in Durand Gardens, Stockwell. Major was invited to join the prestigious 'Blue Chip' group of rising stars in the Conservative Party, and he was promoted to Treasury Whip in October 1984. It was later revealed (in 2002) that during this period Major had conducted an affair with Edwina Currie, a Conservative backbencher and later Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Health and Social Security; the affair ended in 1988. Major narrowly avoided the IRA's Brighton hotel bombing in October 1984, having left the hotel only a few hours before the bomb went off. Also in this period, Major stood in for a Foreign Office minister on a trip to South America, visiting Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.
In September 1985, Major was made Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), before being promoted to become Minister of State in the same department in September 1986. The large size of the DHSS granted Ministers a greater degree of responsibility than in other departments, with Major assisting with work on the Social Security Act 1986 and improving provision for disabled people. Major began to gain a bigger profile, giving his first speech at the Conservative Party Conference in October 1986. He first attracted major national media attention in January 1987 over cold weather payments to the elderly, when Britain was in the depths of a severe winter. Amidst intense media criticism, Major discussed the issue with Margaret Thatcher and an increase in the payments was approved.
Following the 1987 general election, in which Major retained his seat with an increased majority, he was promoted to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, making him the first MP of the 1979 intake to reach the Cabinet. The then-Chancellor Nigel Lawson generally made significant decisions with little input from others, and Major was put in charge of agreeing departmental budgets with the Secretaries of State. These discussions went well, and for the first time in several years budgets were agreed without recourse to the external adjudication of the so-called 'Star Chamber'. Major successfully concluded a second round of such spending reviews in July 1988.
Whilst Chief Secretary Major took part in discussions over the future funding of the NHS, against the background of an NHS strike in February 1988 over pay, resulting in the 'Working for Patients' white paper and subsequent National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990. Major also insisted in discussions with Thatcher that government assistance should be provided to support the sale of Short Brothers to Bombardier, an aerospace company and major employer in Northern Ireland which might otherwise have collapsed.
In 1987–1988 it became clear that Major had become a 'favourite' of Margaret Thatcher and he was widely tipped for further promotion. Nevertheless, Major's appointment to Foreign Secretary in July 1989 came as a surprise due to his relative lack of experience in the Cabinet and unfamiliarity with international affairs. Major found the prospect daunting, and unsuccessfully attempted to convince Thatcher to allow him to stay on at the Treasury. There were also fears within the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) that Major would be Thatcher's 'hatchet-man', as her relations with the department under Geoffrey Howe had been poor and characterised by mutual distrust. Major accepted the job and began to settle into the department, living in an upstairs room at the FCO and devolving decision making where necessary, though he found the increased security burdensome and disliked the extensive ceremonial aspects of the role.
Amongst Major's first acts as Foreign Secretary was to cancel the sale of Hawk aircraft to Iraq, over concerns they would be used for internal repression. He represented Britain at the Paris Peace Conference to determine the future of Cambodia. Major also met with US secretary of state James Baker, with whom he primarily discussed the issue of Vietnamese boat people, and with Qian Qichen, Foreign Minister of China, becoming the first senior Western politician to meet with a Chinese official since the violent crackdown of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square the previous month. Discussions focused primarily on the future of Hong Kong, which Britain was scheduled to hand over to China in 1997.
Major spent most of a summer holiday that year in Spain conducting extensive background reading on foreign affairs and British foreign policy. Upon his return to the UK he and Thatcher met with French president François Mitterrand, in which the future direction of the European Community was discussed. In September 1989 Major delivered a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, in which he pledged to support Colombia's effort to tackle the drugs trade and reiterated Britain's opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa. Major also met US president George H. W. Bush in Washington, D.C. and Domingo Cavallo, the Argentine foreign minister, the first such meeting since the end of the Falklands War seven years earlier.
Major's last major summit as Foreign Secretary was the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Malaysia. The meeting was dominated by the issue of sanctions on South Africa, with Britain being the only country to oppose them, on the grounds that they would end up hurting poorer South Africans far more than the apartheid regime at which they were aimed. The summit ended acrimoniously, with Thatcher controversially and against established precedent issuing a second final communiqué stating Britain's opposition to sanctions, with the press seizing on the apparent disagreement on the matter between Major and Thatcher.
After just three months as Foreign Secretary Major was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer on 26 October 1989 following the sudden resignation of Nigel Lawson, who had fallen out with Thatcher over what he saw as her excessive reliance on the advice of her Economic Adviser Alan Walters. The appointment meant that, despite only being in the Cabinet for a little over two years, Major had gone from the most junior position in the Cabinet to holding two of the Great Offices of State. Major made tackling inflation a priority, stating that tough measures were needed to bring it down and that "if it isn't hurting, it isn't working." He delivered his first Autumn Statement on 15 November, announcing a boost in spending (mainly for the NHS) and with interest rates to be kept as they were.
As Chancellor, Major presented only one Budget, the first to be televised live, on 20 March 1990. He publicised it as a 'budget for savers', with the creations of the Tax-exempt special savings account (TESSA), arguing that measures were required to address the marked fall in the household savings ratio that had been apparent during the previous financial year. Major also abolished the composite rate tax and stamp duty on share trades, whilst increasing taxes on alcohol, cigarettes and petrol. Tax cuts were also made which benefited football associations, the aim being to increase funding on safety measures following the Bradford City stadium fire and Hillsborough disaster. Extra funding was also made available to Scotland in order to limit the impact of the Community Charge (widely dubbed the 'Poll Tax'), which had been introduced there that year.
The European Community's push for full Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was another important factor in Major's time as Chancellor; in June 1990 he proposed that instead of a single European currency there could instead be a 'hard ECU', which different national currencies could compete against and, if the ECU was successful, could lead to a single currency. The move was seen as a wrecking tactic by France and Germany, especially when the increasingly Euro-sceptic Thatcher announced her outright opposition to EMU, and the idea was abandoned. More successfully, Major managed to get the new European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) located in London.
By early 1990 Major had become convinced that the best way to combat inflation and restore macroeconomic stability would be if the British pound were to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), and he and Douglas Hurd (Major's successor as Foreign Secretary) set about trying to convince a reluctant Thatcher to join it. The move was supported by the Bank of England, the Treasury, most of the Cabinet, the Labour Party, several major business associations and much of the press. With the 'Lawson Boom' showing signs of running out of steam, exacerbated by rising oil prices following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, there were fears of a potential recession and pressure to cut interest rates. Thatcher finally agreed on 4 October, and Britain's entry into the ERM at a rate of DM 2.95 to £1.00 (with an agreed 6% floating 'band' either side) was announced the following day. An interest rate cut of 1% (from 15%) was also announced on the same day.
The rest of Major's Chancellorship prior to the leadership contest was largely uneventful; he considered granting the Bank of England operational independence over monetary policy, with the ability to set interest rates, but decided against it. He also agreed a restructuring and write-off of some Third World debt at a Commonwealth Finance Ministers meeting in Trinidad and Tobago in September 1990.
Opposition within the Conservative Party to Margaret Thatcher had been brewing for some time, focusing on what was seen as her brusque, imperious style and the poll tax, which was facing serious opposition across the country. In December 1989, she had survived a leadership bid by Anthony Meyer; though she won easily, 60 MPs had not voted for her, and it was rumoured that many more had had to be strong-armed into supporting her. By early 1990, it was clear that bills for many under the new poll tax regime would be higher than anticipated, and opposition to the Tax grew, with a non-payment campaign gaining much support and an anti-poll tax demonstration in Trafalgar Square in March ending in rioting. The Conservatives lost the 1990 Mid Staffordshire by-election to Labour and the 1990 Eastbourne by-election to the Liberal Democrats, both Conservative seats, causing many Conservative MPs to worry about their prospects at the upcoming general election, due in 1991 or 1992. Thatcher's staunch anti-European stance also alienated pro-Europe Conservatives. On 1 November, the pro-European deputy prime minister Geoffrey Howe resigned, issuing a fiercely critical broadside against Thatcher in the House of Commons on 13 November.
The day after Howe's speech Michael Heseltine, Thatcher's former Secretary of State for Defence who had acrimoniously resigned in 1986 over the Westland affair, challenged Thatcher for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Both John Major and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd supported Thatcher in the first round. Major was at home in Huntingdon recovering from a pre-arranged wisdom tooth operation during the first leadership ballot, which Thatcher won but not by the required threshold, necessitating a second round. Following discussions with her cabinet, in which many stated that though supporting her they doubted she could win, Thatcher withdrew from the contest and announced that she would resign as prime minister once a new leader had been elected. Major subsequently announced on 22 November that he would stand in the second ballot, with Thatcher's backing. Major's platform was one of moderation on Europe, a review of the poll tax, and the desire to build a "classless society".
Unlike in the first ballot, a candidate only required a simple majority of Conservative MPs to win, in this case 187 of 372 MPs. The ballot was held on the afternoon of 27 November; although Major obtained 185 votes, 2 votes short of an overall majority, he polled far enough ahead of both Hurd and Heseltine to secure their immediate withdrawal. With no remaining challengers, Major was formally named Leader of the Conservative Party that evening and was duly appointed prime minister the following day. At 47, he was the youngest prime minister since Lord Rosebery some 95 years earlier.
Major became prime minister on 28 November 1990 when he accepted the Queen's invitation to form a government, succeeding Margaret Thatcher. He inherited a majority government from Margaret Thatcher who had been the prime minister for the previous eleven years. The Conservatives' popularity was low, with some polling showing Labour's Neil Kinnock with a 23% lead over the Tories in April 1990 following the introduction of the Community Charge (poll tax). By the time of Major's appointment, Labour's lead had shrunk to 14%. However, by 1991, the Conservatives had narrowly retaken Labour in the polls.
Major's first ministry was dominated by the early 1990s recession which was believed to be caused by high interest rates, falling house prices and an overvalued exchange rate. The high interest rates led to more saving, less spending and less investment in the UK's sectors. Falling house prices stalled construction in the housing sector. Economic growth wasn't re-established until early 1993. By December 1991, unemployment was at 2.5 million (compared to 1.6 million 18 months earlier). Additionally, inflation was in double digits and interest rates reached 15%. However, opinion polling for Major's government remained stable during this period.
On 10 March 1992, Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont delivered his budget speech to the House of Commons, which included tax cuts widely perceived to achieve votes at the forthcoming general election. The next day, as universally expected, Major called an election for 9 April.
To the surprise of many pollsters, the Conservatives won a majority on the 9 April election, with 336 seats, and earning 41.9% of the vote. With a high turnout, the Conservatives earned over 14 million votes which remains a record in any UK general election. This was the Conservatives' fourth consecutive election victory. Neil Kinnock was replaced by John Smith as Labour leader and Leader of the Opposition in 1992.
On 16 September 1992, the pound sterling crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism after the Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont had invested heavily in trying to keep it there, adjusting interest rates four times in one day. This event would later be called Black Wednesday. Despite the recession finally ending in 1993, the Conservatives' popularity didn't improve. Major's second ministry was also defined by conflicts within the Conservative Party regarding Europe following the government's defeat on the Maastricht Treaty.
On 12 May 1994, John Smith died from a heart attack and was replaced by Tony Blair who continued Labour's modernisation under the slogan of "New Labour". Some polling at the end of 1994 and the start of 1995 had Labour with a vote share of over 60%. The Tories remained divided over this era and in an attempt to silence his critics, Major resigned as Party leader. In the leadership election, Major comfortably beat John Redwood in June 1995. Following a string of by-election defeats, the Conservatives' majority of 21 had been eroded by 13 December 1996.
In the 1997 election on 1 May 1997, Labour won a 179-seat majority, ending their eighteen years in opposition. This was the worst general election result of the 20th century for the Conservatives, seeing the loss of all the party's seats in Wales and Scotland. On the morning of 2 May 1997, on his final departure from Downing Street to offer his resignation to the Queen, Major announced his intention to step down as leader of the Conservative Party, stating in his exit speech that "when the curtain falls, it's time to get off the stage". He was succeeded as prime minister by Tony Blair.
Speculation over Major's leadership had continued since his re-election in 1995, and intensified as it became increasingly likely that the Conservatives would suffer a landslide defeat in the upcoming general election. During this period, Michael Portillo had frequently been touted as the favourite to replace Major, but lost his seat in the election, thus eliminating him from the running. Although many Conservative MPs wanted Major to resign as leader immediately because of the 1997 election loss, there was a movement among the grassroots of the party, encouraged by his political allies, to have him stay on as leader until the autumn. Lord Cranborne, his chief of staff during the election, and the chief whip, Alastair Goodlad, both pleaded with him to stay on: they argued that remaining as leader for a few months would give the party time to come to terms with the scale of defeat before electing a successor. Major refused, saying: "It would be terrible, because I would be presiding with no authority over a number of candidates fighting for the crown. It would merely prolong the agony."
Major served as Leader of the Opposition for seven weeks while the leadership election to replace him was underway. He formed a temporary Shadow Cabinet, but with seven of his Cabinet ministers having lost their seats at the election, and with few senior MPs left to replace them, several MPs had to hold multiple briefs. Major himself served as shadow foreign secretary (having served as foreign secretary for three months in 1989) and Shadow Secretary of State for Defence, and the office of Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland was left vacant until after the 2001 general election as the party no longer had any Scottish MPs. Major's resignation as Conservative leader formally took effect on 19 June 1997 after the election of William Hague.
Major's Resignation Honours were announced on 1 August 1997. He remained active in Parliament, regularly attending and contributing in debates. He stood down from the House of Commons at the 2001 general election, having announced his retirement from Parliament on 10 March 2000. Jonathan Djanogly took over as MP for Huntingdon, retaining the seat for the Conservatives at the 2001 election.
Like some post-war former prime ministers (such as Edward Heath), Major turned down a peerage when he retired from the House of Commons in 2001. He said that he wanted a "firebreak from politics" and to focus on writing and his business, sporting and charity work.
Since leaving office, Major has tended to maintain a low profile in the media, occasionally commentating on political developments in the role of an elder statesman. In 1999 he published an autobiography, covering his early life and time in office, which was generally well received. Major went on to write a book about the history of cricket in 2007 (More Than a Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years) and a book about music hall (My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall) in 2012.
Major has further indulged his love of cricket as President of Surrey County Cricket Club from 2000 to 2001 (and Honorary Life Vice-president since 2002). In March 2001 he gave the tribute to cricketer Colin Cowdrey at his memorial service in Westminster Abbey. In 2005 he was elected to the Committee of the Marylebone Cricket Club, historically the governing body of the sport, and still guardian of the laws of the game. Major left the committee in 2011, citing concerns with the planned redevelopment of Lord's Cricket Ground.
John Major has also been actively engaged in charity work, being President of Asthma UK, and a Patron of the Prostate Cancer Charity, Sightsavers UK, Mercy Ships, Support for Africa 2000, Afghan Heroes, and Consortium for Street Children. In February 2012, Major became chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, which was formed as part of the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II and is intended to support charitable organisations and projects across the Commonwealth, focusing on areas such as cures for diseases and the promotion of culture and education. Major was a Patron of the sight loss and learning disability charity SeeAbility from 2006 to 2012 and has been a vice-president since 2013.
Major has also pursued a variety of business interests, taking up appointments as senior adviser to Credit Suisse, chairman of the board of senior advisers at Global Infrastructure Partners, Global Adviser to AECOM, Chairman of the International Advisory Board of the National Bank of Kuwait, and Chairman of the European Advisory Council of the Emerson Electric Company. He was a member of the Carlyle Group's European Advisory Board from 1998 and was appointed Chairman of Carlyle Europe in May 2001. He stood down from the Group circa 2004–05. Major was also a director at the bus manufacturers the Mayflower Corporation from 2000 to 2003, which was liquidated in 2004 due to funding issues.
Following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, Major was appointed a special guardian to Princes William and Harry, with responsibility for legal and administrative matters. As a result of this, Major was the only current or former prime minister out of the five then still alive invited to the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May 2018. Major has also attended the funerals of notable political figures, such as Nelson Mandela in December 2013, former US first lady Barbara Bush at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas on 21 April 2018 and the state funeral of George H. W. Bush on 5 December 2018.
In 1993, Major sued two magazines, New Statesman and Society and Scallywag, as well as their distributors, for reporting rumours of an affair with Clare Latimer, a Downing Street caterer, even though at least one of the magazines had said that the rumours were false. The allegations of an affair with Latimer were indeed proven false. However, an affair with a different woman, Edwina Currie, came out a decade later, and both of these publications considered legal action to recover their costs when that happened.
In September 2002, it was revealed that, prior to his elevation to the Cabinet, Major had had a four-year-long extramarital affair with Edwina Currie, from 1984 to 1988. Commentators were quick to refer to Major's previous 'Back to Basics' platform to throw charges of hypocrisy at him. An obituary of Tony Newton in The Daily Telegraph claimed that if Newton had not kept the affair a closely guarded secret, "it is highly unlikely that Major would have become prime minister". In a press statement, Major said that he was "ashamed" by the affair and that his wife had forgiven him. In response, Currie said "he wasn't ashamed of it at the time and he wanted it to continue."
Major has become an active after-dinner speaker, earning over £25,000 per engagement for his "insights and his own opinions" on politics and other matters according to his agency. Major is also actively involved in various think tanks: he is the chair of the Panel of senior advisers at Chatham House (having previously served as a president of Chatham House), a member of the International Advisory Boards of the Peres Center for Peace in Israel, the InterAction Council, the Baker Institute in Houston, and a Patron of the Atlantic Partnership. Major was also a director with the Ditchley Foundation from 2000 to 2009, and a president of the influential centre-right think tank the Bow Group from 2012 to 2014.
In February 2005, it was reported that Major and Norman Lamont delayed the release of papers on Black Wednesday under the Freedom of Information Act. Major denied doing so, saying that he had not heard of the request until the scheduled release date and had merely asked to look at the papers himself. He told BBC News that he and Lamont had been the victims of "whispering voices" to the press. He later publicly approved the release of the papers.
In December 2006, Major led calls for an independent inquiry into Blair's decision to invade Iraq, following revelations made by Carne Ross, a former British senior diplomat, that contradicted Blair's case for the invasion.
He was touted as a possible Conservative candidate for the Mayor of London elections in 2008, but turned down an offer from the Leader of the Conservatives at the time, David Cameron. A spokesperson for Major said "his political career is behind him".
Following the 2010 general election, Major announced his support for the Cameron–Clegg coalition, and stated that he hoped for a "liberal conservative" alliance beyond 2015, criticising Labour under Ed Miliband for playing "party games" rather than serving the national interest. Nevertheless, in 2013 Major expressed his concern at the seeming decline in social mobility in Britain: "In every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class. To me, from my background, I find that truly shocking."
During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum Major strongly encouraged a "No" vote, stating that a vote for independence would be damaging both for Scotland and the rest of the UK. This was similar to his stance on devolution in Scotland before referendums were held on the subject both there and in Wales in 1997.
Major was a vocal supporter for the Remain campaign in the 2016 referendum on British membership of the European Union. Major supported a second referendum over Brexit, stating that the leave campaign put out a "fantasy case" during the referendum campaign, adding that to describe a second vote as undemocratic was "a rather curious proposition" and that he could see no "intellectual argument" against redoing the ballot. Major feared Brexit would make the UK poorer and could endanger the peace settlement in Northern Ireland.
On 30 August 2019, it was announced that Major intended to join a court case by Gina Miller against the proroguing of Parliament by the prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson. In the 2019 general election Major urged voters to vote tactically against candidates supporting Boris Johnson when those candidates wanted a hard Brexit. Major said Brexit is, "the worst foreign policy decision in my lifetime. It will affect nearly every single aspect of our lives for many decades to come. It will make our country poorer and weaker. It will hurt most those who have least. Never have the stakes been higher, especially for the young. Brexit may even break up our historic United Kingdom." In early 2020, after the UK formally left the EU with an initial deal, Major expressed his concerns about a future trading deal with the EU being "flimsy".
In February 2022, Major made a speech at the Institute for Government think-tank in London, in which he criticised Johnson over the Partygate scandal, suggesting that he ought to resign, and also the proposed policy for those seeking asylum which he called "un-British". In July 2022, immediately following Johnson's announcement he intended to resign as prime minister but would stay until a successor was chosen, Major called for Johnson's immediate replacement and removal "for the overall wellbeing of the country."
In February 2023, Major made a speech at the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee, where he said that Brexit was "a colossal mistake" and that Johnson agreed the Brexit protocol knowing it was "a mess".
Major's mild-mannered style and moderate political stance contrasted with that of Thatcher, and made him theoretically well-placed to act as a conciliatory and relatively uncontroversial leader of his party. In spite of this, conflict raged within the parliamentary Conservative Party, particularly over the extent of Britain's integration with the European Union. Major never succeeded in reconciling the "Euro-rebels" among his MPs to his European policy, who although relatively few in number, wielded great influence because of his small majority and their wider following among Conservative activists and voters. Episodes such as the Maastricht Rebellion, led by Bill Cash and Margaret Thatcher, inflicted serious political damage on him and his government. The additional bitterness on the right wing of the Conservative Party at the manner in which Margaret Thatcher had been deposed did not make Major's task any easier, with many viewing him as a weak and vacillating leader. Ongoing 'sleaze'-related scandals among leading Conservative MPs also did Major and his government no favours, decreasing support for the party amongst the public.
His task became even more difficult after the election of the modernist and highly media-savvy Tony Blair as Labour leader in July 1994, who mercilessly exploited Conservative divisions whilst shifting Labour to the centre, thus making it much more electable. Whilst few observers doubted that Major was an honest and decent man, or that he made sincere and sometimes successful attempts to improve life in Britain and to unite his deeply divided party, he was also perceived as a weak and ineffectual figure, and his approval ratings for most of his time in office were low, particularly after "Black Wednesday" in September 1992 which destroyed the Conservative's reputation for effective economic management.
Major defended his government in his memoirs, focusing particularly on how under him the British economy had recovered from the recession of 1990–1993. He wrote that "during my premiership interest rates fell from 14% to 6%; unemployment was at 1.75 million when I took office, and at 1.6 million and falling upon my departure; and the government's annual borrowing rose from £0.5 billion to nearly £46 billion at its peak before falling to £1 billion". Major's Chancellor Ken Clarke stated in 2016 that Major's reputation looked better as time went by, in contrast to that of Tony Blair's which appeared to be in decline. Paddy Ashdown, the Leader of the Liberal Democrats during Major's term of office, was more sympathetic, writing in 2017 that Major was "one of the most honest, brave and sincere men to ever be Prime Minister" and that his time in office compares favourably with that of his successor Tony Blair.
Writing shortly after he left office, the historian and journalist Paul Johnson wrote that Major was "a hopeless leader" who "should never have been Prime Minister". The sentiments echoed that of much of the press at the time, which was generally hostile to Major, especially after Black Wednesday. The journalist Peter Oborne was one such figure, though writing in 2017 he stated that he now regrets his negative reporting, stating that he himself and the press in general were "grossly unfair to Major" and that this was motivated at least in part by snobbery at Major's humble upbringing. In 2012 Oborne had written that Major's government looks ever more successful as time goes by. Oborne singled out Major's achievements in the Northern Irish peace process, boosting the economy, keeping Britain out of the Eurozone, and his reforms of public services as being worthy of praise. Others remain unconvinced however and, writing in 2011, the BBC's Home editor Mark Easton judged that "Majorism" had made little lasting impact.
In academic circles Major's legacy has generally been better received. Mark Stuart, writing in 2017, stated that Major is "the best ex-Prime Minister we have ever had", praising him for initiating the Northern Ireland peace process, peacefully handing Hong Kong back to China, creating the National Lottery and leaving a sound economy to Labour in 1997. Dennis Kavanagh likewise states that Major did relatively well considering the unbridgeable divides that existed in the Conservative Party in the 1990s, chiefly over Europe, whilst also delivering economic growth, a more user-focused public sector and the basis of peace settlement in Northern Ireland. He also notes that Major's unexpected 1992 election victory effectively sealed in the Thatcher-era reforms and forced the Labour Party to ditch most of its more socialist-tinged policies, thereby permanently shifting the British political landscape to the centre ground. Anthony Seldon largely agrees with this assessment, adding that Major's deep dislike of discrimination contributed to the continuing decline in racism and homophobia in British society, and that his proactive foreign policy stance maintained Britain's influence in the world at a time of profound global change. He also notes that Major faced a deeply unfavourable set of circumstances: most of the obvious and pressing Conservative reforms (e.g. reining in the power of trade unions and privatising failing industries) had already been completed under Thatcher, the swift nature of his rise to power left him little time to formulate policy positions and upon becoming prime minister he was immediately thrust into having to deal with the Gulf War and a major recession. Furthermore, the narrow majority achieved after the 1992 election left him exposed to internal Conservative rebellions, which only worsened as time went by, abetted by a hostile press, as it became clear the Conservatives would lose the next election. Seldon concludes that "Major was neither non-entity nor failure. His will be judged an important if unruly premiership at the end of the Conservative century, completing some parts of an earlier agenda while in some key respects helping to define a Conservatism for the 21st century." Seldon reiterated these views in his contribution to the 2017 volume John Major: An Unsuccessful Prime Minister?
Political historian Robert Taylor, in his 2006 biography of Major, concurs with many of these points, summing up that "In the perspective provided by the years of New Labour government since May 1997, John Major's record as Prime Minister looked much better than his many critics liked to suggest... Britain's most extraordinary Conservative Prime Minister bequeathed an important legacy to this party and his country to build on. One day both yet may come to recognise and appreciate it." Noted political historian Dick Leonard, however, writing in 2004, was more harsh in his assessment, concluding that Major was "A man of evident decent instincts, but limited abilities: as Prime Minister he pushed these abilities to the limit. It was not enough."
During his leadership of the Conservative Party, Major was portrayed as honest ("Honest John") but unable to exert effective control over his fractious party. However, his polite, easy-going manner was initially well received by both his supporters and his critics. Major's appearance was noted for its greyness, his prodigious philtrum, and large glasses, all of which were exaggerated in caricatures. For example, in Spitting Image, Major's puppet was changed from a circus performer to that of a literally grey man who ate dinner with his wife in silence, occasionally saying "nice peas, dear", while at the same time nursing an unrequited crush on his colleague Virginia Bottomley – an invention, but an ironic one in view of his affair with Edwina Currie, which was not then a matter of public knowledge. By the end of his premiership his puppet would often be shown observing the latest fiasco and ineffectually murmuring "oh dear". Long-standing Conservative MP Enoch Powell, when asked about Major, stated "I simply find myself asking – does he really exist?", whereas on the left Labour's Alastair Campbell dismissed him as a "piece of lettuce that passes for prime minister" and Labour MP Tony Banks said of Major in 1994 that, "He was a fairly competent Chairman of Housing on Lambeth Council. Every time he gets up now I keep thinking, 'What on earth is Councillor Major doing?' I can't believe he's here and sometimes I think he can't either."
The media (particularly The Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell) used the allegation by Alastair Campbell that he had observed Major tucking his shirt into his underpants to caricature him wearing his pants outside his trousers, as a pale grey echo of both Superman and Supermac, a parody of Harold Macmillan. Bell also used the humorous possibilities of the Cones Hotline, a means for the public to inform the authorities of potentially unnecessary traffic cones, which was part of the Citizen's Charter project established by John Major. Major was also satirised by Patrick Wright with his book 101 Uses for a John Major (based on a comic book of some 10 years earlier called 101 Uses for a Dead Cat), in which Major was illustrated serving a number of bizarre purposes, such as a train-spotter's anorak or as a flag-pole; Wright published a second collection of '101 Uses', as well as a parodic cartoon biography of Major entitled Not Inconsiderable: Being the Life and Times of John Major.
Private Eye parodied Sue Townsend's The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, age 13¾ to run a regular column The Secret Diary of John Major, age 47¾, in which Major was portrayed as naïve and childish, keeping lists of his enemies in a Rymans Notebook called his "Bastards Book", and featuring "my wife Norman" and "Mr Dr Mawhinney" as recurring characters. The magazine still runs one-off specials of this diary (with the age updated) on occasions when Major is in the news, such as on the breaking of the Edwina Currie story or the publication of his autobiography.
The impressionist comedian Rory Bremner often mocked John Major, for example depicting him as 'John 90', a play on 1960s puppet show Joe 90; his impersonation was so accurate that he managed to fool the MP Richard Body that he was really speaking to Major in a prank phone call. The incident prompted Cabinet Secretary Robin Butler to warn Channel 4 head Michael Grade against any further calls for fear that state secrets could be inadvertently leaked.
Major was often mocked for his nostalgic evocation of what sounded like the lost Britain of the 1950s (see Merry England); for example, his famous speech stating that "Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – 'old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist'." Major complained in his memoirs that these words (which drew upon a passage in George Orwell's essay The Lion and the Unicorn) had been misrepresented as being more naive and romantic than he had intended, and indeed his memoirs were dismissive of the common conservative viewpoint that there was once a time of moral rectitude; Major wrote that "life has never been as simple as that". Throughout his time in office Major was often acutely sensitive to criticism of him in the press; his biographer Anthony Seldon posits this to an inner vulnerability stemming from his difficult childhood and adolescence. After leaving office, Major stated that "Perhaps up to a point I was too sensitive about some of the things in the press, I'm happy to concede that. But, the politicians who are said to have hides like rhinos and be utterly impervious to criticism, if they're not extinct, they are very rare and I freely confess I wasn't amongst them."
Major has been depicted on screen by Keith Drinkel in Thatcher: The Final Days (1991), Michael Maloney in Margaret (2009), Robin Kermode in The Iron Lady (2011), Marc Ozall in the TV series The Crown, Gordon Griffin in Westminster on Trial and Roger Sansom in On the Record. Footage of Major's 1992 election win is used in Patrick Keiller's 1994 documentary film London. Major was also one of the prime ministers portrayed in the 2013 stage play The Audience. Less flatteringly, Major was the subject of the song John Major – Fuck You by Scottish punk band Oi Polloi.
Major was portrayed by Jonny Lee Miller in the fifth season of The Crown in 2022. Major called the series a "barrel-load of nonsense" for a fictitious storyline in which the then Prince Charles lobbies Major in 1991, attempting to oust Queen Elizabeth II from power. Netflix defended the series as a "fictional dramatisation".
Major married Norma Johnson (now Dame Norma Major) on 3 October 1970 at St Matthew's Church, Brixton. She was a teacher and a member of the Young Conservatives. They met on polling day for the Greater London Council elections in London, and became engaged after only ten days. They have two children: a daughter, Elizabeth (born November 1971) and a son, James (b. January 1975). They continue to live at their constituency home, Finings, in Great Stukeley, Huntingdonshire. They also own a flat in London and a holiday home on the Norfolk coast at Weybourne, which they have in the past invited ex-soldiers to use for free as part of the Afghan Heroes charity. As with all former prime ministers, Major is entitled to round-the-clock police protection.
Elizabeth Major, a qualified veterinary nurse, married Luke Salter on 26 March 2000 at All Saints Church, Somerby, having been in a relationship with him since 1988. Salter died on 22 November 2002 from cancer. James Major, a former retail manager and nightclub promoter, married gameshow hostess Emma Noble on 29 March 1999 in the Chapel Crypt at Westminster Abbey. They had a son, Harrison, born July 2000, who was later diagnosed with autism. The marriage ended in an acrimonious divorce in 2003, with Noble accusing Major of "unreasonable behaviour". James later married Kate Postlethwaite (née Dorrell), the mother of his second son.
Major's elder brother Terry, who died in 2007, became a minor media personality during Major's period in Downing Street, writing a 1994 autobiography, Major Major: Memories of an Older Brother, and appearing on TV shows such as Have I Got News for You. John's sister Patricia Dessoy kept a much lower profile; she died in 2017. After leaving office Major became aware that his father fathered two half-siblings extramaritally: Tom Moss and Kathleen Lemmon.
Research conducted by Paul Penn-Simkins, a genealogist formerly employed as a researcher at the College of Arms and as a heraldic consultant at Christie's, and subsequently corroborated by Lynda Rippin, a genealogist employed by Lincolnshire Council, showed that John Major and Margaret Thatcher were fifth cousins once removed, both descending from the Crust family, who farmed at Leake, near Boston, Lincolnshire.
Major has been keen on sports since his youth, most notably cricket; he is also a supporter of Chelsea F.C. and a Patron of British Gymnastics. He also enjoys gardening, listening to music and reading; Anthony Trollope being among his favourite authors. Major is a Christian, though his upbringing was never especially religious and he states that he is "a believer at a distance". He shied away from the topic when in office, stating that "I have always been a little wary of politicians who parade their faith, and prefer a little English reserve on the subject."
In the 1999 New Year Honours List, Major was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for his work on the Northern Ireland peace process.
On 23 April 2005, Major was bestowed with a knighthood as a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter by Queen Elizabeth II. He was installed at St George's Chapel, Windsor, on 13 June. Membership of the Order of the Garter is limited in number to 24, and as a personal gift of the Monarch is an honour traditionally bestowed on former prime ministers.
On 20 June 2008, Major was granted the Freedom of the City of Cork. He was also granted the Outstanding Contribution to Ireland award in Dublin on 4 December 2014.
On 8 May 2012, Major was personally decorated at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo by the Emperor of Japan with the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun in recognition of his invaluable contributions to Japan–UK relations through his work in the political and economic arena, and also in promoting mutual understanding. While prime minister, Major had pursued energetic campaigns aimed at boosting bilateral trade: "Priority Japan" (1991–1994) and "Action Japan" (1994–1997). The 1991 Japan Festival also took place under his premiership. He was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D) by Queen's University Belfast on 10 November 2023.
In 2008, Major won the British Sports Book Awards (Best Cricket Book) for More Than a Game.
An oil painting of Major, painted in 1996 by June Mendoza, is part of the Parliamentary collection, as is a bronze bust by Anne Curry, unveiled in the Members' Lobby on 16 October 2017. There is another bust of Major in the Norman Shaw Building North by Neale Andrew, sculpted in 1993 and installed in 2004, however this is not accessible to the public.
A large bust of John Major by Shenda Amery in Huntingdon Library was unveiled by his wife Norma in 1993.
A painting of John Major by Diccon Swan is on display at the Carlton Club, and was unveiled by his wife Norma in 1994. The National Portrait Gallery holds two paintings of Major – the first official portrait of him as prime minister, painted by Peter Deighan in 1994, and one of John and Norma by John Wonnacott, painted in 1997.
There is a large John Major Suite at The Oval, home to Surrey County Cricket Club; the venue also contains a painting of Major.
There is a 'Heritage in Sutton' plaque on St Helier Hospital, where John Major was born in 1943, and a plaque commemorating him in Archbishop's Park next to Lambeth Palace, included as part of the Lambeth Millennium Pathway. There are also various plaques commemorating facilities opened by John Major: at Brampton Memorial Centre, Brampton (opened 1988), Hamerton Zoo Park, Hamerton (1990), Cadbury World, Birmingham (1991), a tree commemorating the restoration of the River Mill pub, Eaton Socon, the gardens at Hinchingbrooke Hospital, Huntingdon (2009), the North Terminal extension at Gatwick Airport (2011), Huntingdonshire Football Association headquarters, Huntingdon (2015), and Alconbury Weald cricket pitch (2019).
In 2013 the town of Candeleda in Spain named a street for John Major (Avenida de John Major), as Major has holidayed there for many years. Major Close, in Loughborough Junction near where John grew up, is also named for him; the street was to be called 'Sir John Major Close', however this long name breached council guidelines.
In type theory, heterogeneous equality, that is, a form of equality predicate defined for pairs of elements of arbitrary type, not just from the same type, is sometimes referred to as John Major's equality (JMeq), following Conor McBride: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Sir John Major KG CH (born 29 March 1943) is a British former politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1997. He previously held Cabinet positions under prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the last as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1989 to 1990. Major was the member of Parliament (MP) for Huntingdon, formerly Huntingdonshire, from 1979 to 2001. Since stepping down as an MP in 2001, Major has focused on writing and his business, sporting and charity work, and has occasionally commented on political developments in the role of an elder statesman.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Having left school just before turning sixteen, Major worked as a banker and joined the Young Conservatives in 1959, and soon became a highly active member. He was elected to Lambeth London Borough Council in 1968, and a decade later to parliament, being elected as the Conservative MP for Huntingdonshire in the 1979 general election. Major held several junior government positions under Thatcher from 1984 to 1987, including parliamentary private secretary and assistant whip. He served in Thatcher's third ministry as Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 1987 to 1989, Foreign Secretary in 1989, and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1989 to 1990. Following Thatcher's resignation in 1990, after a challenge was launched to her leadership, Major stood in the 1990 Conservative leadership election to replace her and emerged victorious, becoming prime minister. His mild-mannered style and moderate political stance contrasted with that of Thatcher. Two years into his premiership, Major went on to lead the Conservative Party to a fourth consecutive electoral victory, winning more than 14 million votes, which remains the highest number ever won by a political party in Britain.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "As prime minister, Major created the Citizen's Charter, removed the Poll Tax and replaced it with the Council Tax, committed British troops to the Gulf War, took charge of the UK's negotiations over the Maastricht Treaty, led the country during the early 1990s economic crisis, withdrew the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (on Black Wednesday), promoted the socially conservative back to basics campaign, privatised the railways and coal industry, and played a pivotal role in creating peace in Northern Ireland. In 1995, Major resigned as party leader, amid internal divisions over UK membership of the European Union, parliamentary scandals (widely known as \"sleaze\") and questions over his economic credibility. Despite being reelected as Conservative leader in the 1995 leadership election, his administration remained unpopular, and soon lost its parliamentary majority. The Labour Party pulled ahead of the Conservatives in every local election during Major's leadership, which increased after Tony Blair became Labour leader in 1994.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Conservatives were defeated in a landslide in the 1997 general election, ending 18 years of Conservative rule. After Blair succeeded Major as prime minister, Major served as Leader of the Opposition for seven weeks while the leadership election to replace him took place. He formed a temporary shadow cabinet, and Major himself served as shadow foreign secretary and shadow secretary of state for defence. His resignation as Conservative leader formally took effect in June 1997 following the election of William Hague. He remained active in Parliament, regularly attending and contributing in debates, until he stood down at the 2001 election to focus on writing and his business, sporting and charity work.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Since leaving office, Major has tended to maintain a low profile in the media, occasionally making political interventions. He supported the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign for the UK to remain in the European Union, and has often criticised Brexit since the outcome of the 2016 referendum. Major was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005 for services to politics and charity, and was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1999 for his work on the Northern Ireland peace process. Although public favourability of Major has improved since he left office, his premiership has generally been viewed as average in historical rankings and public opinion of British prime ministers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "John Major was born on 29 March 1943 at St Helier Hospital and Queen Mary's Hospital for Children in St Helier, Surrey, to Gwen Major (née Coates, 1905–1970) and former music hall performer Tom Major-Ball (1879–1962), who was 63 years old when Major was born. He was christened \"John Roy Major\" but only \"John Major\" was recorded on his birth certificate; he used his middle name until the early 1980s. His birth had been a difficult one, with his mother suffering from pleurisy and pneumonia and John Major requiring several blood transfusions due to an infection, causing permanent scarring to his ankles.",
"title": "Early life and education (1943–1959)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Major family - John, his parents, and his two older siblings Terry and Pat) - lived at 260 Longfellow Road, Worcester Park, Surrey, a middle-class area where Major's father ran a garden ornaments business and his mother worked in a local library and as a part-time dance teacher. John Major later described the family's circumstances at this time as being \"comfortable but not well off\". Following a German V-1 flying bomb attack in the area in 1944 which killed several people, the Majors moved to the village of Saham Toney, Norfolk, for the duration of the war.",
"title": "Early life and education (1943–1959)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "John began attending primary school at Cheam Common School from 1948. His childhood was generally happy, and he enjoyed reading, sports (especially cricket and football) and keeping pets, such as his rabbits. In 1954 John passed the 11+ exam, enabling him to go to Rutlish School, a grammar school in Merton Park, though to John's chagrin his father insisted that he register as 'John Major-Ball'. The family's fortunes took a turn for the worse, with his father's health deteriorating, and the business in severe financial difficulties. A recalled business loan which the family were unable to repay forced Tom Major to sell the house in Worcester Park in May 1955, with the family moving to a cramped, rented top-floor flat at 144 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton. With his parents distracted by their reduced circumstances, John Major's difficulties at Rutlish went unnoticed.",
"title": "Early life and education (1943–1959)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Acutely conscious of his straitened circumstances in relation to the other pupils, Major was something of a loner and consistently under-performed except in sports, coming to see the school as \"a penance to be endured\". Major left school just before his 16th birthday in 1959 with just three O-level passes in History, English Language and English Literature, to his parents' disappointment.",
"title": "Early life and education (1943–1959)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Major's interest in politics stems from this period, and he avidly kept up with current affairs by reading newspapers on his long commutes from Brixton to Wimbledon. In 1956 Major met local MP Marcus Lipton at a local church fair and was invited to watch his first debate in the House of Commons, where Harold Macmillan presented his only Budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Major has attributed his political ambitions to this event.",
"title": "Early life and education (1943–1959)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Major's first job was as a clerk in the London-based insurance brokerage firm Price Forbes in 1959, though finding the job dull and offering no prospects he quit. Major began working with his brother Terry at the garden ornaments business; this had been sold in 1959, enabling the family to move to a larger residence at 80 Burton Road, Brixton. Major's father died on 27 March 1962. John left the ornaments business the following year to care for his ill mother, though when she got better he was unable to find a new job and was unemployed for much of the latter half of 1962, a situation he says was \"degrading\". After Major became prime minister, it was misreported that his failure to get a job as a bus conductor resulted from his failing to pass a maths test; he had in fact passed all of the necessary tests but had been passed over owing to his height. In the meantime he studied for a qualification in banking via correspondence course. Eventually in December 1962 he found a job working at the London Electricity Board (LEB) in Elephant and Castle.",
"title": "Early post-school career (1959–1979)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1959 Major had joined the Young Conservatives in Brixton and soon became a highly active member, which helped increase his confidence following the failure of his school days. Encouraged by fellow Conservative Derek Stone, he started giving speeches on a soap-box in Brixton Market. According to his biographer Anthony Seldon, Major brought \"youthful exuberance\" to the Tories in Brixton, but was sometimes in trouble with the professional agent Marion Standing. Major stood as a Councillor in the 1964 Lambeth London Borough Council election for Larkhall ward at the age of 21 in 1964, losing to Labour. He also assisted local Conservative candidates Kenneth Payne in the 1964 general election and Piers Dixon in the 1966 general election. Another formative influence on Major in this period was Jean Kierans, a divorcée 13 years his elder with two children who lived opposite the family on Burton Road, who became his mentor and lover. Seldon writes \"She ... made Major smarten his appearance, groomed him politically, and made him more ambitious and worldly.\" Major later moved in with Kierans when his family left Burton Road in 1965; their relationship lasted from 1963 to sometime after 1968.",
"title": "Early post-school career (1959–1979)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Major left the LEB and took up a post at District Bank in May 1965, though he soon left this to join Standard Bank the following year, largely because the latter offered the chance to work abroad. In December 1966 he was sent for a long secondment in Jos, Nigeria, which he enjoyed immensely, though he was put off by the casual racism of some of the ex-pat workers there. In May 1967 he was involved in a serious car crash in which he broke a leg and had to be flown home. Leaving hospital, he split his time between Jean Kierans' house and a small rented flat in Mayfair, working at Standard Bank's London office and resuming his banking diploma and activities with the Young Conservatives in his spare time.",
"title": "Early post-school career (1959–1979)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Major stood again as Councillor in the 1968 Lambeth London Borough Council election, this time for Ferndale ward. Though a Labour stronghold, the Conservatives received a huge boost following Enoch Powell's anti-immigration 'Rivers of Blood speech' in April 1968 and Major won, despite strongly disapproving of Powell's views. Major took a major interest in housing matters, with Lambeth notorious for overcrowding and poor-quality rented accommodation. In February 1970 Major became Chairman of the Housing Committee, being responsible for overseeing the building of several large council estates. He also promoted more openness at the council, initiating a series of public meetings with local residents. Major also undertook fact-finding trips to the Netherlands, Finland and the Soviet Union. Despite the Lambeth housing team being well-regarded nationally, Major lost his seat in the 1971 Lambeth London Borough Council election.",
"title": "Early post-school career (1959–1979)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Major met Norma Johnson at a Conservative party event in Brixton in April 1970, and the two became engaged shortly thereafter, marrying at St Matthew's Church in Brixton on 3 October 1970. John's mother died shortly before in September at the age of 65. John and Norma moved into a flat at Primrose Court, Streatham, which John had bought in 1969, and had their first child, Elizabeth, in November 1971. In 1974 the couple moved to a larger residence at West Oak, Beckenham, and had a second child, James, in January 1975. Meanwhile, Major continued to work at Standard Bank (renamed Standard Chartered from 1975), having completed his banking diploma in 1972. Major was promoted to head of the PR department in August 1976, and his duties necessitated the occasional foreign trip to East Asia.",
"title": "Early post-school career (1959–1979)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Despite his setback at the 1971 Lambeth Council election, Major continued to nurse political ambitions, and with help from friends in the Conservative Party managed to get onto the Conservative Central Office's list of potential MP candidates. Major was selected as the Conservative candidate for the Labour-dominated St Pancras North constituency, fighting both the February and October 1974 general elections, losing heavily both times to Labour's Albert Stallard. Major then attempted to get selected as a candidate for a more promising seat, and despite numerous attempts was unsuccessful until December 1976. Growing increasingly frustrated, Major resolved to make one last attempt, applying for selection to the safe Conservative seat of Huntingdonshire and finally he succeeded. Major was in some ways an odd choice, being a born-and-bred Londoner in a largely rural constituency still home to many landed families; however, he was seen as being the most likely to win-over the increasingly large numbers of upwardly mobile London over-spill families living in the area, and he was helped to familiarise himself with the area by local MP David Renton. In 1977 the Major family purchased a house at De Vere Close in the village of Hemingford Grey. Major took on a less demanding job at Standard Chartered, and started working part-time in 1978 so that he could devote more time to his constituency duties.",
"title": "Early post-school career (1959–1979)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Major won the Huntingdon seat by a large margin in the 1979 general election, which brought Margaret Thatcher to power. He made his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 13 June 1979, voicing his support for the government's budget. Major assiduously courted contacts at all levels of the party in this period, joining the informal 'Guy Fawkes club' of Conservative MPs and attending various Committees. He became Secretary of the Environment Committee and also assisted with work on the Housing Act 1980, which allowed council house tenants the Right to Buy their homes. At this time Major lived in De Vere Close, Hemingford Grey.",
"title": "Early parliamentary career (1979–1987)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Major's first promotion came when he was appointed as a Parliamentary Private Secretary in January 1981 to Patrick Mayhew and Timothy Raison, both Ministers of State at the Home Office. Seeking to gain more exposure to foreign affairs, he joined several Labour Party MPs on a fact-finding trip to the Middle East in April 1982. The group met with King Hussein of Jordan and Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in Lebanon; in Israel they were briefly caught in the middle of a shooting incident between Israeli troops and a Palestinian rock-thrower.",
"title": "Early parliamentary career (1979–1987)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Major later became an assistant whip in January 1983, responsible for East Anglian MPs. During this period Major became also involved in the response to protests at RAF Molesworth, which lay in his constituency; various peace groups were opposed to the siting of cruise missiles at the base and had established a permanent 'peace camp' there. Major addressed public meetings opposed to the protesters, organised by parish councillors, and also met Bill Westwood and separately Michael Heseltine to discuss the issue. The protesters were evicted in February 1984.",
"title": "Early parliamentary career (1979–1987)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Major comfortably won re-election to the now slightly enlarged seat of Huntingdon at the 1983 general election. Shortly thereafter he and Norma moved to a larger house (Finings) in Great Stukeley; Major generally spent his weekends there, and weekdays at a rented flat in Durand Gardens, Stockwell. Major was invited to join the prestigious 'Blue Chip' group of rising stars in the Conservative Party, and he was promoted to Treasury Whip in October 1984. It was later revealed (in 2002) that during this period Major had conducted an affair with Edwina Currie, a Conservative backbencher and later Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Health and Social Security; the affair ended in 1988. Major narrowly avoided the IRA's Brighton hotel bombing in October 1984, having left the hotel only a few hours before the bomb went off. Also in this period, Major stood in for a Foreign Office minister on a trip to South America, visiting Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.",
"title": "Early parliamentary career (1979–1987)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In September 1985, Major was made Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), before being promoted to become Minister of State in the same department in September 1986. The large size of the DHSS granted Ministers a greater degree of responsibility than in other departments, with Major assisting with work on the Social Security Act 1986 and improving provision for disabled people. Major began to gain a bigger profile, giving his first speech at the Conservative Party Conference in October 1986. He first attracted major national media attention in January 1987 over cold weather payments to the elderly, when Britain was in the depths of a severe winter. Amidst intense media criticism, Major discussed the issue with Margaret Thatcher and an increase in the payments was approved.",
"title": "Early parliamentary career (1979–1987)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Following the 1987 general election, in which Major retained his seat with an increased majority, he was promoted to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, making him the first MP of the 1979 intake to reach the Cabinet. The then-Chancellor Nigel Lawson generally made significant decisions with little input from others, and Major was put in charge of agreeing departmental budgets with the Secretaries of State. These discussions went well, and for the first time in several years budgets were agreed without recourse to the external adjudication of the so-called 'Star Chamber'. Major successfully concluded a second round of such spending reviews in July 1988.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Whilst Chief Secretary Major took part in discussions over the future funding of the NHS, against the background of an NHS strike in February 1988 over pay, resulting in the 'Working for Patients' white paper and subsequent National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990. Major also insisted in discussions with Thatcher that government assistance should be provided to support the sale of Short Brothers to Bombardier, an aerospace company and major employer in Northern Ireland which might otherwise have collapsed.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 1987–1988 it became clear that Major had become a 'favourite' of Margaret Thatcher and he was widely tipped for further promotion. Nevertheless, Major's appointment to Foreign Secretary in July 1989 came as a surprise due to his relative lack of experience in the Cabinet and unfamiliarity with international affairs. Major found the prospect daunting, and unsuccessfully attempted to convince Thatcher to allow him to stay on at the Treasury. There were also fears within the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) that Major would be Thatcher's 'hatchet-man', as her relations with the department under Geoffrey Howe had been poor and characterised by mutual distrust. Major accepted the job and began to settle into the department, living in an upstairs room at the FCO and devolving decision making where necessary, though he found the increased security burdensome and disliked the extensive ceremonial aspects of the role.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Amongst Major's first acts as Foreign Secretary was to cancel the sale of Hawk aircraft to Iraq, over concerns they would be used for internal repression. He represented Britain at the Paris Peace Conference to determine the future of Cambodia. Major also met with US secretary of state James Baker, with whom he primarily discussed the issue of Vietnamese boat people, and with Qian Qichen, Foreign Minister of China, becoming the first senior Western politician to meet with a Chinese official since the violent crackdown of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square the previous month. Discussions focused primarily on the future of Hong Kong, which Britain was scheduled to hand over to China in 1997.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Major spent most of a summer holiday that year in Spain conducting extensive background reading on foreign affairs and British foreign policy. Upon his return to the UK he and Thatcher met with French president François Mitterrand, in which the future direction of the European Community was discussed. In September 1989 Major delivered a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, in which he pledged to support Colombia's effort to tackle the drugs trade and reiterated Britain's opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa. Major also met US president George H. W. Bush in Washington, D.C. and Domingo Cavallo, the Argentine foreign minister, the first such meeting since the end of the Falklands War seven years earlier.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Major's last major summit as Foreign Secretary was the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Malaysia. The meeting was dominated by the issue of sanctions on South Africa, with Britain being the only country to oppose them, on the grounds that they would end up hurting poorer South Africans far more than the apartheid regime at which they were aimed. The summit ended acrimoniously, with Thatcher controversially and against established precedent issuing a second final communiqué stating Britain's opposition to sanctions, with the press seizing on the apparent disagreement on the matter between Major and Thatcher.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "After just three months as Foreign Secretary Major was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer on 26 October 1989 following the sudden resignation of Nigel Lawson, who had fallen out with Thatcher over what he saw as her excessive reliance on the advice of her Economic Adviser Alan Walters. The appointment meant that, despite only being in the Cabinet for a little over two years, Major had gone from the most junior position in the Cabinet to holding two of the Great Offices of State. Major made tackling inflation a priority, stating that tough measures were needed to bring it down and that \"if it isn't hurting, it isn't working.\" He delivered his first Autumn Statement on 15 November, announcing a boost in spending (mainly for the NHS) and with interest rates to be kept as they were.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "As Chancellor, Major presented only one Budget, the first to be televised live, on 20 March 1990. He publicised it as a 'budget for savers', with the creations of the Tax-exempt special savings account (TESSA), arguing that measures were required to address the marked fall in the household savings ratio that had been apparent during the previous financial year. Major also abolished the composite rate tax and stamp duty on share trades, whilst increasing taxes on alcohol, cigarettes and petrol. Tax cuts were also made which benefited football associations, the aim being to increase funding on safety measures following the Bradford City stadium fire and Hillsborough disaster. Extra funding was also made available to Scotland in order to limit the impact of the Community Charge (widely dubbed the 'Poll Tax'), which had been introduced there that year.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The European Community's push for full Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was another important factor in Major's time as Chancellor; in June 1990 he proposed that instead of a single European currency there could instead be a 'hard ECU', which different national currencies could compete against and, if the ECU was successful, could lead to a single currency. The move was seen as a wrecking tactic by France and Germany, especially when the increasingly Euro-sceptic Thatcher announced her outright opposition to EMU, and the idea was abandoned. More successfully, Major managed to get the new European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) located in London.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "By early 1990 Major had become convinced that the best way to combat inflation and restore macroeconomic stability would be if the British pound were to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), and he and Douglas Hurd (Major's successor as Foreign Secretary) set about trying to convince a reluctant Thatcher to join it. The move was supported by the Bank of England, the Treasury, most of the Cabinet, the Labour Party, several major business associations and much of the press. With the 'Lawson Boom' showing signs of running out of steam, exacerbated by rising oil prices following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, there were fears of a potential recession and pressure to cut interest rates. Thatcher finally agreed on 4 October, and Britain's entry into the ERM at a rate of DM 2.95 to £1.00 (with an agreed 6% floating 'band' either side) was announced the following day. An interest rate cut of 1% (from 15%) was also announced on the same day.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The rest of Major's Chancellorship prior to the leadership contest was largely uneventful; he considered granting the Bank of England operational independence over monetary policy, with the ability to set interest rates, but decided against it. He also agreed a restructuring and write-off of some Third World debt at a Commonwealth Finance Ministers meeting in Trinidad and Tobago in September 1990.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Opposition within the Conservative Party to Margaret Thatcher had been brewing for some time, focusing on what was seen as her brusque, imperious style and the poll tax, which was facing serious opposition across the country. In December 1989, she had survived a leadership bid by Anthony Meyer; though she won easily, 60 MPs had not voted for her, and it was rumoured that many more had had to be strong-armed into supporting her. By early 1990, it was clear that bills for many under the new poll tax regime would be higher than anticipated, and opposition to the Tax grew, with a non-payment campaign gaining much support and an anti-poll tax demonstration in Trafalgar Square in March ending in rioting. The Conservatives lost the 1990 Mid Staffordshire by-election to Labour and the 1990 Eastbourne by-election to the Liberal Democrats, both Conservative seats, causing many Conservative MPs to worry about their prospects at the upcoming general election, due in 1991 or 1992. Thatcher's staunch anti-European stance also alienated pro-Europe Conservatives. On 1 November, the pro-European deputy prime minister Geoffrey Howe resigned, issuing a fiercely critical broadside against Thatcher in the House of Commons on 13 November.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The day after Howe's speech Michael Heseltine, Thatcher's former Secretary of State for Defence who had acrimoniously resigned in 1986 over the Westland affair, challenged Thatcher for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Both John Major and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd supported Thatcher in the first round. Major was at home in Huntingdon recovering from a pre-arranged wisdom tooth operation during the first leadership ballot, which Thatcher won but not by the required threshold, necessitating a second round. Following discussions with her cabinet, in which many stated that though supporting her they doubted she could win, Thatcher withdrew from the contest and announced that she would resign as prime minister once a new leader had been elected. Major subsequently announced on 22 November that he would stand in the second ballot, with Thatcher's backing. Major's platform was one of moderation on Europe, a review of the poll tax, and the desire to build a \"classless society\".",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Unlike in the first ballot, a candidate only required a simple majority of Conservative MPs to win, in this case 187 of 372 MPs. The ballot was held on the afternoon of 27 November; although Major obtained 185 votes, 2 votes short of an overall majority, he polled far enough ahead of both Hurd and Heseltine to secure their immediate withdrawal. With no remaining challengers, Major was formally named Leader of the Conservative Party that evening and was duly appointed prime minister the following day. At 47, he was the youngest prime minister since Lord Rosebery some 95 years earlier.",
"title": "In Cabinet (1987–1990)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Major became prime minister on 28 November 1990 when he accepted the Queen's invitation to form a government, succeeding Margaret Thatcher. He inherited a majority government from Margaret Thatcher who had been the prime minister for the previous eleven years. The Conservatives' popularity was low, with some polling showing Labour's Neil Kinnock with a 23% lead over the Tories in April 1990 following the introduction of the Community Charge (poll tax). By the time of Major's appointment, Labour's lead had shrunk to 14%. However, by 1991, the Conservatives had narrowly retaken Labour in the polls.",
"title": "Prime Minister (1990–1997)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Major's first ministry was dominated by the early 1990s recession which was believed to be caused by high interest rates, falling house prices and an overvalued exchange rate. The high interest rates led to more saving, less spending and less investment in the UK's sectors. Falling house prices stalled construction in the housing sector. Economic growth wasn't re-established until early 1993. By December 1991, unemployment was at 2.5 million (compared to 1.6 million 18 months earlier). Additionally, inflation was in double digits and interest rates reached 15%. However, opinion polling for Major's government remained stable during this period.",
"title": "Prime Minister (1990–1997)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "On 10 March 1992, Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont delivered his budget speech to the House of Commons, which included tax cuts widely perceived to achieve votes at the forthcoming general election. The next day, as universally expected, Major called an election for 9 April.",
"title": "Prime Minister (1990–1997)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "To the surprise of many pollsters, the Conservatives won a majority on the 9 April election, with 336 seats, and earning 41.9% of the vote. With a high turnout, the Conservatives earned over 14 million votes which remains a record in any UK general election. This was the Conservatives' fourth consecutive election victory. Neil Kinnock was replaced by John Smith as Labour leader and Leader of the Opposition in 1992.",
"title": "Prime Minister (1990–1997)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "On 16 September 1992, the pound sterling crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism after the Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont had invested heavily in trying to keep it there, adjusting interest rates four times in one day. This event would later be called Black Wednesday. Despite the recession finally ending in 1993, the Conservatives' popularity didn't improve. Major's second ministry was also defined by conflicts within the Conservative Party regarding Europe following the government's defeat on the Maastricht Treaty.",
"title": "Prime Minister (1990–1997)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "On 12 May 1994, John Smith died from a heart attack and was replaced by Tony Blair who continued Labour's modernisation under the slogan of \"New Labour\". Some polling at the end of 1994 and the start of 1995 had Labour with a vote share of over 60%. The Tories remained divided over this era and in an attempt to silence his critics, Major resigned as Party leader. In the leadership election, Major comfortably beat John Redwood in June 1995. Following a string of by-election defeats, the Conservatives' majority of 21 had been eroded by 13 December 1996.",
"title": "Prime Minister (1990–1997)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In the 1997 election on 1 May 1997, Labour won a 179-seat majority, ending their eighteen years in opposition. This was the worst general election result of the 20th century for the Conservatives, seeing the loss of all the party's seats in Wales and Scotland. On the morning of 2 May 1997, on his final departure from Downing Street to offer his resignation to the Queen, Major announced his intention to step down as leader of the Conservative Party, stating in his exit speech that \"when the curtain falls, it's time to get off the stage\". He was succeeded as prime minister by Tony Blair.",
"title": "Prime Minister (1990–1997)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Speculation over Major's leadership had continued since his re-election in 1995, and intensified as it became increasingly likely that the Conservatives would suffer a landslide defeat in the upcoming general election. During this period, Michael Portillo had frequently been touted as the favourite to replace Major, but lost his seat in the election, thus eliminating him from the running. Although many Conservative MPs wanted Major to resign as leader immediately because of the 1997 election loss, there was a movement among the grassroots of the party, encouraged by his political allies, to have him stay on as leader until the autumn. Lord Cranborne, his chief of staff during the election, and the chief whip, Alastair Goodlad, both pleaded with him to stay on: they argued that remaining as leader for a few months would give the party time to come to terms with the scale of defeat before electing a successor. Major refused, saying: \"It would be terrible, because I would be presiding with no authority over a number of candidates fighting for the crown. It would merely prolong the agony.\"",
"title": "Final years in Parliament (1997–2001)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Major served as Leader of the Opposition for seven weeks while the leadership election to replace him was underway. He formed a temporary Shadow Cabinet, but with seven of his Cabinet ministers having lost their seats at the election, and with few senior MPs left to replace them, several MPs had to hold multiple briefs. Major himself served as shadow foreign secretary (having served as foreign secretary for three months in 1989) and Shadow Secretary of State for Defence, and the office of Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland was left vacant until after the 2001 general election as the party no longer had any Scottish MPs. Major's resignation as Conservative leader formally took effect on 19 June 1997 after the election of William Hague.",
"title": "Final years in Parliament (1997–2001)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Major's Resignation Honours were announced on 1 August 1997. He remained active in Parliament, regularly attending and contributing in debates. He stood down from the House of Commons at the 2001 general election, having announced his retirement from Parliament on 10 March 2000. Jonathan Djanogly took over as MP for Huntingdon, retaining the seat for the Conservatives at the 2001 election.",
"title": "Final years in Parliament (1997–2001)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Like some post-war former prime ministers (such as Edward Heath), Major turned down a peerage when he retired from the House of Commons in 2001. He said that he wanted a \"firebreak from politics\" and to focus on writing and his business, sporting and charity work.",
"title": "Final years in Parliament (1997–2001)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Since leaving office, Major has tended to maintain a low profile in the media, occasionally commentating on political developments in the role of an elder statesman. In 1999 he published an autobiography, covering his early life and time in office, which was generally well received. Major went on to write a book about the history of cricket in 2007 (More Than a Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years) and a book about music hall (My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall) in 2012.",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Major has further indulged his love of cricket as President of Surrey County Cricket Club from 2000 to 2001 (and Honorary Life Vice-president since 2002). In March 2001 he gave the tribute to cricketer Colin Cowdrey at his memorial service in Westminster Abbey. In 2005 he was elected to the Committee of the Marylebone Cricket Club, historically the governing body of the sport, and still guardian of the laws of the game. Major left the committee in 2011, citing concerns with the planned redevelopment of Lord's Cricket Ground.",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "John Major has also been actively engaged in charity work, being President of Asthma UK, and a Patron of the Prostate Cancer Charity, Sightsavers UK, Mercy Ships, Support for Africa 2000, Afghan Heroes, and Consortium for Street Children. In February 2012, Major became chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, which was formed as part of the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II and is intended to support charitable organisations and projects across the Commonwealth, focusing on areas such as cures for diseases and the promotion of culture and education. Major was a Patron of the sight loss and learning disability charity SeeAbility from 2006 to 2012 and has been a vice-president since 2013.",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Major has also pursued a variety of business interests, taking up appointments as senior adviser to Credit Suisse, chairman of the board of senior advisers at Global Infrastructure Partners, Global Adviser to AECOM, Chairman of the International Advisory Board of the National Bank of Kuwait, and Chairman of the European Advisory Council of the Emerson Electric Company. He was a member of the Carlyle Group's European Advisory Board from 1998 and was appointed Chairman of Carlyle Europe in May 2001. He stood down from the Group circa 2004–05. Major was also a director at the bus manufacturers the Mayflower Corporation from 2000 to 2003, which was liquidated in 2004 due to funding issues.",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, Major was appointed a special guardian to Princes William and Harry, with responsibility for legal and administrative matters. As a result of this, Major was the only current or former prime minister out of the five then still alive invited to the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May 2018. Major has also attended the funerals of notable political figures, such as Nelson Mandela in December 2013, former US first lady Barbara Bush at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas on 21 April 2018 and the state funeral of George H. W. Bush on 5 December 2018.",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In 1993, Major sued two magazines, New Statesman and Society and Scallywag, as well as their distributors, for reporting rumours of an affair with Clare Latimer, a Downing Street caterer, even though at least one of the magazines had said that the rumours were false. The allegations of an affair with Latimer were indeed proven false. However, an affair with a different woman, Edwina Currie, came out a decade later, and both of these publications considered legal action to recover their costs when that happened.",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In September 2002, it was revealed that, prior to his elevation to the Cabinet, Major had had a four-year-long extramarital affair with Edwina Currie, from 1984 to 1988. Commentators were quick to refer to Major's previous 'Back to Basics' platform to throw charges of hypocrisy at him. An obituary of Tony Newton in The Daily Telegraph claimed that if Newton had not kept the affair a closely guarded secret, \"it is highly unlikely that Major would have become prime minister\". In a press statement, Major said that he was \"ashamed\" by the affair and that his wife had forgiven him. In response, Currie said \"he wasn't ashamed of it at the time and he wanted it to continue.\"",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Major has become an active after-dinner speaker, earning over £25,000 per engagement for his \"insights and his own opinions\" on politics and other matters according to his agency. Major is also actively involved in various think tanks: he is the chair of the Panel of senior advisers at Chatham House (having previously served as a president of Chatham House), a member of the International Advisory Boards of the Peres Center for Peace in Israel, the InterAction Council, the Baker Institute in Houston, and a Patron of the Atlantic Partnership. Major was also a director with the Ditchley Foundation from 2000 to 2009, and a president of the influential centre-right think tank the Bow Group from 2012 to 2014.",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In February 2005, it was reported that Major and Norman Lamont delayed the release of papers on Black Wednesday under the Freedom of Information Act. Major denied doing so, saying that he had not heard of the request until the scheduled release date and had merely asked to look at the papers himself. He told BBC News that he and Lamont had been the victims of \"whispering voices\" to the press. He later publicly approved the release of the papers.",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In December 2006, Major led calls for an independent inquiry into Blair's decision to invade Iraq, following revelations made by Carne Ross, a former British senior diplomat, that contradicted Blair's case for the invasion.",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "He was touted as a possible Conservative candidate for the Mayor of London elections in 2008, but turned down an offer from the Leader of the Conservatives at the time, David Cameron. A spokesperson for Major said \"his political career is behind him\".",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Following the 2010 general election, Major announced his support for the Cameron–Clegg coalition, and stated that he hoped for a \"liberal conservative\" alliance beyond 2015, criticising Labour under Ed Miliband for playing \"party games\" rather than serving the national interest. Nevertheless, in 2013 Major expressed his concern at the seeming decline in social mobility in Britain: \"In every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class. To me, from my background, I find that truly shocking.\"",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum Major strongly encouraged a \"No\" vote, stating that a vote for independence would be damaging both for Scotland and the rest of the UK. This was similar to his stance on devolution in Scotland before referendums were held on the subject both there and in Wales in 1997.",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Major was a vocal supporter for the Remain campaign in the 2016 referendum on British membership of the European Union. Major supported a second referendum over Brexit, stating that the leave campaign put out a \"fantasy case\" during the referendum campaign, adding that to describe a second vote as undemocratic was \"a rather curious proposition\" and that he could see no \"intellectual argument\" against redoing the ballot. Major feared Brexit would make the UK poorer and could endanger the peace settlement in Northern Ireland.",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "On 30 August 2019, it was announced that Major intended to join a court case by Gina Miller against the proroguing of Parliament by the prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson. In the 2019 general election Major urged voters to vote tactically against candidates supporting Boris Johnson when those candidates wanted a hard Brexit. Major said Brexit is, \"the worst foreign policy decision in my lifetime. It will affect nearly every single aspect of our lives for many decades to come. It will make our country poorer and weaker. It will hurt most those who have least. Never have the stakes been higher, especially for the young. Brexit may even break up our historic United Kingdom.\" In early 2020, after the UK formally left the EU with an initial deal, Major expressed his concerns about a future trading deal with the EU being \"flimsy\".",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In February 2022, Major made a speech at the Institute for Government think-tank in London, in which he criticised Johnson over the Partygate scandal, suggesting that he ought to resign, and also the proposed policy for those seeking asylum which he called \"un-British\". In July 2022, immediately following Johnson's announcement he intended to resign as prime minister but would stay until a successor was chosen, Major called for Johnson's immediate replacement and removal \"for the overall wellbeing of the country.\"",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In February 2023, Major made a speech at the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee, where he said that Brexit was \"a colossal mistake\" and that Johnson agreed the Brexit protocol knowing it was \"a mess\".",
"title": "Post-parliamentary life (2001–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Major's mild-mannered style and moderate political stance contrasted with that of Thatcher, and made him theoretically well-placed to act as a conciliatory and relatively uncontroversial leader of his party. In spite of this, conflict raged within the parliamentary Conservative Party, particularly over the extent of Britain's integration with the European Union. Major never succeeded in reconciling the \"Euro-rebels\" among his MPs to his European policy, who although relatively few in number, wielded great influence because of his small majority and their wider following among Conservative activists and voters. Episodes such as the Maastricht Rebellion, led by Bill Cash and Margaret Thatcher, inflicted serious political damage on him and his government. The additional bitterness on the right wing of the Conservative Party at the manner in which Margaret Thatcher had been deposed did not make Major's task any easier, with many viewing him as a weak and vacillating leader. Ongoing 'sleaze'-related scandals among leading Conservative MPs also did Major and his government no favours, decreasing support for the party amongst the public.",
"title": "Assessment and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "His task became even more difficult after the election of the modernist and highly media-savvy Tony Blair as Labour leader in July 1994, who mercilessly exploited Conservative divisions whilst shifting Labour to the centre, thus making it much more electable. Whilst few observers doubted that Major was an honest and decent man, or that he made sincere and sometimes successful attempts to improve life in Britain and to unite his deeply divided party, he was also perceived as a weak and ineffectual figure, and his approval ratings for most of his time in office were low, particularly after \"Black Wednesday\" in September 1992 which destroyed the Conservative's reputation for effective economic management.",
"title": "Assessment and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Major defended his government in his memoirs, focusing particularly on how under him the British economy had recovered from the recession of 1990–1993. He wrote that \"during my premiership interest rates fell from 14% to 6%; unemployment was at 1.75 million when I took office, and at 1.6 million and falling upon my departure; and the government's annual borrowing rose from £0.5 billion to nearly £46 billion at its peak before falling to £1 billion\". Major's Chancellor Ken Clarke stated in 2016 that Major's reputation looked better as time went by, in contrast to that of Tony Blair's which appeared to be in decline. Paddy Ashdown, the Leader of the Liberal Democrats during Major's term of office, was more sympathetic, writing in 2017 that Major was \"one of the most honest, brave and sincere men to ever be Prime Minister\" and that his time in office compares favourably with that of his successor Tony Blair.",
"title": "Assessment and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Writing shortly after he left office, the historian and journalist Paul Johnson wrote that Major was \"a hopeless leader\" who \"should never have been Prime Minister\". The sentiments echoed that of much of the press at the time, which was generally hostile to Major, especially after Black Wednesday. The journalist Peter Oborne was one such figure, though writing in 2017 he stated that he now regrets his negative reporting, stating that he himself and the press in general were \"grossly unfair to Major\" and that this was motivated at least in part by snobbery at Major's humble upbringing. In 2012 Oborne had written that Major's government looks ever more successful as time goes by. Oborne singled out Major's achievements in the Northern Irish peace process, boosting the economy, keeping Britain out of the Eurozone, and his reforms of public services as being worthy of praise. Others remain unconvinced however and, writing in 2011, the BBC's Home editor Mark Easton judged that \"Majorism\" had made little lasting impact.",
"title": "Assessment and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In academic circles Major's legacy has generally been better received. Mark Stuart, writing in 2017, stated that Major is \"the best ex-Prime Minister we have ever had\", praising him for initiating the Northern Ireland peace process, peacefully handing Hong Kong back to China, creating the National Lottery and leaving a sound economy to Labour in 1997. Dennis Kavanagh likewise states that Major did relatively well considering the unbridgeable divides that existed in the Conservative Party in the 1990s, chiefly over Europe, whilst also delivering economic growth, a more user-focused public sector and the basis of peace settlement in Northern Ireland. He also notes that Major's unexpected 1992 election victory effectively sealed in the Thatcher-era reforms and forced the Labour Party to ditch most of its more socialist-tinged policies, thereby permanently shifting the British political landscape to the centre ground. Anthony Seldon largely agrees with this assessment, adding that Major's deep dislike of discrimination contributed to the continuing decline in racism and homophobia in British society, and that his proactive foreign policy stance maintained Britain's influence in the world at a time of profound global change. He also notes that Major faced a deeply unfavourable set of circumstances: most of the obvious and pressing Conservative reforms (e.g. reining in the power of trade unions and privatising failing industries) had already been completed under Thatcher, the swift nature of his rise to power left him little time to formulate policy positions and upon becoming prime minister he was immediately thrust into having to deal with the Gulf War and a major recession. Furthermore, the narrow majority achieved after the 1992 election left him exposed to internal Conservative rebellions, which only worsened as time went by, abetted by a hostile press, as it became clear the Conservatives would lose the next election. Seldon concludes that \"Major was neither non-entity nor failure. His will be judged an important if unruly premiership at the end of the Conservative century, completing some parts of an earlier agenda while in some key respects helping to define a Conservatism for the 21st century.\" Seldon reiterated these views in his contribution to the 2017 volume John Major: An Unsuccessful Prime Minister?",
"title": "Assessment and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Political historian Robert Taylor, in his 2006 biography of Major, concurs with many of these points, summing up that \"In the perspective provided by the years of New Labour government since May 1997, John Major's record as Prime Minister looked much better than his many critics liked to suggest... Britain's most extraordinary Conservative Prime Minister bequeathed an important legacy to this party and his country to build on. One day both yet may come to recognise and appreciate it.\" Noted political historian Dick Leonard, however, writing in 2004, was more harsh in his assessment, concluding that Major was \"A man of evident decent instincts, but limited abilities: as Prime Minister he pushed these abilities to the limit. It was not enough.\"",
"title": "Assessment and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "During his leadership of the Conservative Party, Major was portrayed as honest (\"Honest John\") but unable to exert effective control over his fractious party. However, his polite, easy-going manner was initially well received by both his supporters and his critics. Major's appearance was noted for its greyness, his prodigious philtrum, and large glasses, all of which were exaggerated in caricatures. For example, in Spitting Image, Major's puppet was changed from a circus performer to that of a literally grey man who ate dinner with his wife in silence, occasionally saying \"nice peas, dear\", while at the same time nursing an unrequited crush on his colleague Virginia Bottomley – an invention, but an ironic one in view of his affair with Edwina Currie, which was not then a matter of public knowledge. By the end of his premiership his puppet would often be shown observing the latest fiasco and ineffectually murmuring \"oh dear\". Long-standing Conservative MP Enoch Powell, when asked about Major, stated \"I simply find myself asking – does he really exist?\", whereas on the left Labour's Alastair Campbell dismissed him as a \"piece of lettuce that passes for prime minister\" and Labour MP Tony Banks said of Major in 1994 that, \"He was a fairly competent Chairman of Housing on Lambeth Council. Every time he gets up now I keep thinking, 'What on earth is Councillor Major doing?' I can't believe he's here and sometimes I think he can't either.\"",
"title": "Representation in the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The media (particularly The Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell) used the allegation by Alastair Campbell that he had observed Major tucking his shirt into his underpants to caricature him wearing his pants outside his trousers, as a pale grey echo of both Superman and Supermac, a parody of Harold Macmillan. Bell also used the humorous possibilities of the Cones Hotline, a means for the public to inform the authorities of potentially unnecessary traffic cones, which was part of the Citizen's Charter project established by John Major. Major was also satirised by Patrick Wright with his book 101 Uses for a John Major (based on a comic book of some 10 years earlier called 101 Uses for a Dead Cat), in which Major was illustrated serving a number of bizarre purposes, such as a train-spotter's anorak or as a flag-pole; Wright published a second collection of '101 Uses', as well as a parodic cartoon biography of Major entitled Not Inconsiderable: Being the Life and Times of John Major.",
"title": "Representation in the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Private Eye parodied Sue Townsend's The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, age 13¾ to run a regular column The Secret Diary of John Major, age 47¾, in which Major was portrayed as naïve and childish, keeping lists of his enemies in a Rymans Notebook called his \"Bastards Book\", and featuring \"my wife Norman\" and \"Mr Dr Mawhinney\" as recurring characters. The magazine still runs one-off specials of this diary (with the age updated) on occasions when Major is in the news, such as on the breaking of the Edwina Currie story or the publication of his autobiography.",
"title": "Representation in the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The impressionist comedian Rory Bremner often mocked John Major, for example depicting him as 'John 90', a play on 1960s puppet show Joe 90; his impersonation was so accurate that he managed to fool the MP Richard Body that he was really speaking to Major in a prank phone call. The incident prompted Cabinet Secretary Robin Butler to warn Channel 4 head Michael Grade against any further calls for fear that state secrets could be inadvertently leaked.",
"title": "Representation in the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Major was often mocked for his nostalgic evocation of what sounded like the lost Britain of the 1950s (see Merry England); for example, his famous speech stating that \"Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – 'old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist'.\" Major complained in his memoirs that these words (which drew upon a passage in George Orwell's essay The Lion and the Unicorn) had been misrepresented as being more naive and romantic than he had intended, and indeed his memoirs were dismissive of the common conservative viewpoint that there was once a time of moral rectitude; Major wrote that \"life has never been as simple as that\". Throughout his time in office Major was often acutely sensitive to criticism of him in the press; his biographer Anthony Seldon posits this to an inner vulnerability stemming from his difficult childhood and adolescence. After leaving office, Major stated that \"Perhaps up to a point I was too sensitive about some of the things in the press, I'm happy to concede that. But, the politicians who are said to have hides like rhinos and be utterly impervious to criticism, if they're not extinct, they are very rare and I freely confess I wasn't amongst them.\"",
"title": "Representation in the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Major has been depicted on screen by Keith Drinkel in Thatcher: The Final Days (1991), Michael Maloney in Margaret (2009), Robin Kermode in The Iron Lady (2011), Marc Ozall in the TV series The Crown, Gordon Griffin in Westminster on Trial and Roger Sansom in On the Record. Footage of Major's 1992 election win is used in Patrick Keiller's 1994 documentary film London. Major was also one of the prime ministers portrayed in the 2013 stage play The Audience. Less flatteringly, Major was the subject of the song John Major – Fuck You by Scottish punk band Oi Polloi.",
"title": "Representation in the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Major was portrayed by Jonny Lee Miller in the fifth season of The Crown in 2022. Major called the series a \"barrel-load of nonsense\" for a fictitious storyline in which the then Prince Charles lobbies Major in 1991, attempting to oust Queen Elizabeth II from power. Netflix defended the series as a \"fictional dramatisation\".",
"title": "Representation in the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Major married Norma Johnson (now Dame Norma Major) on 3 October 1970 at St Matthew's Church, Brixton. She was a teacher and a member of the Young Conservatives. They met on polling day for the Greater London Council elections in London, and became engaged after only ten days. They have two children: a daughter, Elizabeth (born November 1971) and a son, James (b. January 1975). They continue to live at their constituency home, Finings, in Great Stukeley, Huntingdonshire. They also own a flat in London and a holiday home on the Norfolk coast at Weybourne, which they have in the past invited ex-soldiers to use for free as part of the Afghan Heroes charity. As with all former prime ministers, Major is entitled to round-the-clock police protection.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Elizabeth Major, a qualified veterinary nurse, married Luke Salter on 26 March 2000 at All Saints Church, Somerby, having been in a relationship with him since 1988. Salter died on 22 November 2002 from cancer. James Major, a former retail manager and nightclub promoter, married gameshow hostess Emma Noble on 29 March 1999 in the Chapel Crypt at Westminster Abbey. They had a son, Harrison, born July 2000, who was later diagnosed with autism. The marriage ended in an acrimonious divorce in 2003, with Noble accusing Major of \"unreasonable behaviour\". James later married Kate Postlethwaite (née Dorrell), the mother of his second son.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Major's elder brother Terry, who died in 2007, became a minor media personality during Major's period in Downing Street, writing a 1994 autobiography, Major Major: Memories of an Older Brother, and appearing on TV shows such as Have I Got News for You. John's sister Patricia Dessoy kept a much lower profile; she died in 2017. After leaving office Major became aware that his father fathered two half-siblings extramaritally: Tom Moss and Kathleen Lemmon.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Research conducted by Paul Penn-Simkins, a genealogist formerly employed as a researcher at the College of Arms and as a heraldic consultant at Christie's, and subsequently corroborated by Lynda Rippin, a genealogist employed by Lincolnshire Council, showed that John Major and Margaret Thatcher were fifth cousins once removed, both descending from the Crust family, who farmed at Leake, near Boston, Lincolnshire.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Major has been keen on sports since his youth, most notably cricket; he is also a supporter of Chelsea F.C. and a Patron of British Gymnastics. He also enjoys gardening, listening to music and reading; Anthony Trollope being among his favourite authors. Major is a Christian, though his upbringing was never especially religious and he states that he is \"a believer at a distance\". He shied away from the topic when in office, stating that \"I have always been a little wary of politicians who parade their faith, and prefer a little English reserve on the subject.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "In the 1999 New Year Honours List, Major was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for his work on the Northern Ireland peace process.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "On 23 April 2005, Major was bestowed with a knighthood as a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter by Queen Elizabeth II. He was installed at St George's Chapel, Windsor, on 13 June. Membership of the Order of the Garter is limited in number to 24, and as a personal gift of the Monarch is an honour traditionally bestowed on former prime ministers.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "On 20 June 2008, Major was granted the Freedom of the City of Cork. He was also granted the Outstanding Contribution to Ireland award in Dublin on 4 December 2014.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "On 8 May 2012, Major was personally decorated at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo by the Emperor of Japan with the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun in recognition of his invaluable contributions to Japan–UK relations through his work in the political and economic arena, and also in promoting mutual understanding. While prime minister, Major had pursued energetic campaigns aimed at boosting bilateral trade: \"Priority Japan\" (1991–1994) and \"Action Japan\" (1994–1997). The 1991 Japan Festival also took place under his premiership. He was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D) by Queen's University Belfast on 10 November 2023.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "In 2008, Major won the British Sports Book Awards (Best Cricket Book) for More Than a Game.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "An oil painting of Major, painted in 1996 by June Mendoza, is part of the Parliamentary collection, as is a bronze bust by Anne Curry, unveiled in the Members' Lobby on 16 October 2017. There is another bust of Major in the Norman Shaw Building North by Neale Andrew, sculpted in 1993 and installed in 2004, however this is not accessible to the public.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "A large bust of John Major by Shenda Amery in Huntingdon Library was unveiled by his wife Norma in 1993.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "A painting of John Major by Diccon Swan is on display at the Carlton Club, and was unveiled by his wife Norma in 1994. The National Portrait Gallery holds two paintings of Major – the first official portrait of him as prime minister, painted by Peter Deighan in 1994, and one of John and Norma by John Wonnacott, painted in 1997.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "There is a large John Major Suite at The Oval, home to Surrey County Cricket Club; the venue also contains a painting of Major.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "There is a 'Heritage in Sutton' plaque on St Helier Hospital, where John Major was born in 1943, and a plaque commemorating him in Archbishop's Park next to Lambeth Palace, included as part of the Lambeth Millennium Pathway. There are also various plaques commemorating facilities opened by John Major: at Brampton Memorial Centre, Brampton (opened 1988), Hamerton Zoo Park, Hamerton (1990), Cadbury World, Birmingham (1991), a tree commemorating the restoration of the River Mill pub, Eaton Socon, the gardens at Hinchingbrooke Hospital, Huntingdon (2009), the North Terminal extension at Gatwick Airport (2011), Huntingdonshire Football Association headquarters, Huntingdon (2015), and Alconbury Weald cricket pitch (2019).",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "In 2013 the town of Candeleda in Spain named a street for John Major (Avenida de John Major), as Major has holidayed there for many years. Major Close, in Loughborough Junction near where John grew up, is also named for him; the street was to be called 'Sir John Major Close', however this long name breached council guidelines.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "In type theory, heterogeneous equality, that is, a form of equality predicate defined for pairs of elements of arbitrary type, not just from the same type, is sometimes referred to as John Major's equality (JMeq), following Conor McBride:",
"title": "Honours"
}
]
| Sir John Major is a British former politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1997. He previously held Cabinet positions under prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the last as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1989 to 1990. Major was the member of Parliament (MP) for Huntingdon, formerly Huntingdonshire, from 1979 to 2001. Since stepping down as an MP in 2001, Major has focused on writing and his business, sporting and charity work, and has occasionally commented on political developments in the role of an elder statesman. Having left school just before turning sixteen, Major worked as a banker and joined the Young Conservatives in 1959, and soon became a highly active member. He was elected to Lambeth London Borough Council in 1968, and a decade later to parliament, being elected as the Conservative MP for Huntingdonshire in the 1979 general election. Major held several junior government positions under Thatcher from 1984 to 1987, including parliamentary private secretary and assistant whip. He served in Thatcher's third ministry as Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 1987 to 1989, Foreign Secretary in 1989, and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1989 to 1990. Following Thatcher's resignation in 1990, after a challenge was launched to her leadership, Major stood in the 1990 Conservative leadership election to replace her and emerged victorious, becoming prime minister. His mild-mannered style and moderate political stance contrasted with that of Thatcher. Two years into his premiership, Major went on to lead the Conservative Party to a fourth consecutive electoral victory, winning more than 14 million votes, which remains the highest number ever won by a political party in Britain. As prime minister, Major created the Citizen's Charter, removed the Poll Tax and replaced it with the Council Tax, committed British troops to the Gulf War, took charge of the UK's negotiations over the Maastricht Treaty, led the country during the early 1990s economic crisis, withdrew the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, promoted the socially conservative back to basics campaign, privatised the railways and coal industry, and played a pivotal role in creating peace in Northern Ireland. In 1995, Major resigned as party leader, amid internal divisions over UK membership of the European Union, parliamentary scandals and questions over his economic credibility. Despite being reelected as Conservative leader in the 1995 leadership election, his administration remained unpopular, and soon lost its parliamentary majority. The Labour Party pulled ahead of the Conservatives in every local election during Major's leadership, which increased after Tony Blair became Labour leader in 1994. The Conservatives were defeated in a landslide in the 1997 general election, ending 18 years of Conservative rule. After Blair succeeded Major as prime minister, Major served as Leader of the Opposition for seven weeks while the leadership election to replace him took place. He formed a temporary shadow cabinet, and Major himself served as shadow foreign secretary and shadow secretary of state for defence. His resignation as Conservative leader formally took effect in June 1997 following the election of William Hague. He remained active in Parliament, regularly attending and contributing in debates, until he stood down at the 2001 election to focus on writing and his business, sporting and charity work. Since leaving office, Major has tended to maintain a low profile in the media, occasionally making political interventions. He supported the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign for the UK to remain in the European Union, and has often criticised Brexit since the outcome of the 2016 referendum. Major was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005 for services to politics and charity, and was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1999 for his work on the Northern Ireland peace process. Although public favourability of Major has improved since he left office, his premiership has generally been viewed as average in historical rankings and public opinion of British prime ministers. | 2001-09-27T16:18:47Z | 2023-12-31T13:15:04Z | [
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15,904 | Jazz dance | Jazz dance is a performance dance and style that arose in the United States in the mid 20th century. Jazz dance may allude to vernacular jazz, Broadway or dramatic jazz. The two types expand on African American vernacular styles of dance that arose with jazz music. Vernacular jazz dance incorporates ragtime moves, Charleston, Lindy hop and mambo. Popular vernacular jazz dance performers include The Whitman Sisters, Florence Mills, Ethel Waters, Al Minns and Leon James, Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, Dawn Hampton, and Katherine Dunham. Dramatic jazz dance performed on the show stage was promoted by Jack Cole, Bob Fosse, Eugene Louis Faccuito, and Gus Giordano.
The term 'jazz dance' has been used in ways that have little or nothing to do with jazz music. Since the 1940s, Hollywood movies and Broadway shows have used the term to describe the choreographies of Bob Fosse and Jerome Robbins. In the 1990s, colleges and universities applied to the term to classes offered by physical education departments in which students dance to various forms of pop music, rarely jazz.
In 1917, jazz pianist Spencer Williams wrote a song called "Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble" which inspired a jazz dance called the shimmy. The shimmy is done by holding the body still "except for the shoulders, which are quickly alternated back and forth". The dances that emerged during this period were the Charleston and the Lindy hop.The Charleston is "characterized by its toes-in, heels-out twisting steps". It can be done as a solo or with any number of people.
The Lindy hop was a wild and spontaneous partner dance that was extremely rhythmically conscious. When the Great Depression began in October 1929, many people turned to dance. Because of this, the Aubrielle and the Lindy hop are now considered to be under the umbrella term "swing dance stylized, continuously flowing movements that developed the technique and style for the combinations that followed". Cole's style has been called hip, hard, and cool". Fosse combined "vaudeville, striptease, magic shows, nightclubs, film and Broadway musicals".
Contemporary jazz became well known because of its television shows unlike So You Think You Can Dance. Mia Michaels's earlier work exemplifies this style. Some other companies and choreographers that create contemporary jazz dance are Sonya Tayeh, Mandy Moore, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Commercial jazz, which has been popular since the 1980s, combines aspects of hip hop and jazz and is often done to pop music. This style can be seen in the music videos of Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul. Commercial jazz often includes more "tricks." Commercial jazz and contemporary jazz are both seen at dance competitions. Another variety of jazz is Latin jazz. "Maria Torres developed and popularized the fusion at Broadway Dance Center". Latin jazz has an emphasis on the movement of hips and isolations. It can be seen in the films El Cantante and Dance with Me, as well as on TV dance shows. | [
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| Jazz dance is a performance dance and style that arose in the United States in the mid 20th century. Jazz dance may allude to vernacular jazz, Broadway or dramatic jazz. The two types expand on African American vernacular styles of dance that arose with jazz music. Vernacular jazz dance incorporates ragtime moves, Charleston, Lindy hop and mambo. Popular vernacular jazz dance performers include The Whitman Sisters, Florence Mills, Ethel Waters, Al Minns and Leon James, Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, Dawn Hampton, and Katherine Dunham. Dramatic jazz dance performed on the show stage was promoted by Jack Cole, Bob Fosse, Eugene Louis Faccuito, and Gus Giordano. The term 'jazz dance' has been used in ways that have little or nothing to do with jazz music. Since the 1940s, Hollywood movies and Broadway shows have used the term to describe the choreographies of Bob Fosse and Jerome Robbins. In the 1990s, colleges and universities applied to the term to classes offered by physical education departments in which students dance to various forms of pop music, rarely jazz. | 2001-07-30T16:45:20Z | 2023-12-15T19:00:51Z | [
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15,907 | Jabberwocky | "Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock". It was included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The book tells of Alice's adventures within the back-to-front world of the Looking-Glass world.
In an early scene in which she first encounters the chess piece characters White King and White Queen, Alice finds a book written in a seemingly unintelligible language. Realising that she is travelling through an inverted world, she recognises that the verses on the pages are written in mirror-writing. She holds a mirror to one of the poems and reads the reflected verse of "Jabberwocky". She finds the nonsense verse as puzzling as the odd land she has passed into, later revealed as a dreamscape.
"Jabberwocky" is considered one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English. Its playful, whimsical language has given English nonsense words and neologisms such as "galumphing" and "chortle".
A decade before the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll wrote the first stanza to what would become "Jabberwocky" while in Croft-on-Tees, where his parents resided. It was printed in 1855 in Mischmasch, a periodical he wrote and illustrated for the amusement of his family. The piece, titled "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry", reads:
Twas bryllyg, and þ slythy toves Did gyre and gymble in þ wabe: All mimsy were þ borogoves; And þ mome raths outgrabe.
The stanza is printed first in faux-mediaeval lettering as a "relic of ancient Poetry" (in which þ is a form of the word the) and printed again "in modern characters". The rest of the poem was written during Carroll's stay with relatives at Whitburn, near Sunderland. The story may have been partly inspired by the local Sunderland area legend of the Lambton Worm and the tale of the Sockburn Worm.
The concept of nonsense verse was not original to Carroll, who would have known of chapbooks such as The World Turned Upside Down and stories such as "The Grand Panjandrum". Nonsense existed in Shakespeare's work and was well-known in the Brothers Grimm's fairytales, some of which are called lying tales or lügenmärchen. Biographer Roger Lancelyn Green suggested that "Jabberwocky" was a parody of the German ballad "The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains", which had been translated into English by Carroll's cousin Menella Bute Smedley in 1846. Historian Sean B. Palmer suggests that Carroll was inspired by a section from Shakespeare's Hamlet, citing the lines: "The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets" from Act I, Scene i.
John Tenniel reluctantly agreed to illustrate the book in 1871, and his illustrations are still the defining images of the poem. The illustration of the Jabberwock may reflect the contemporary Victorian obsession with natural history and the fast-evolving sciences of palaeontology and geology. Stephen Prickett notes that in the context of Darwin and Mantell's publications and vast exhibitions of dinosaurs, such as those at the Crystal Palace from 1854, it is unsurprising that Tenniel gave the Jabberwock "the leathery wings of a pterodactyl and the long scaly neck and tail of a sauropod."
"Jabberwocky" 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!" He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought. And as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" He chortled in his joy. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
from Through the Looking-Glass, andWhat Alice Found There (1871)
Many of the words in the poem are playful nonce words of Carroll's own invention, without intended explicit meaning. When Alice has finished reading the poem she gives her impressions:
"It seems very pretty," she said when she had finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand!" (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate."
This may reflect Carroll's intention for his readership; the poem is, after all, part of a dream. In later writings he discussed some of his lexicon, commenting that he did not know the specific meanings or sources of some of the words; the linguistic ambiguity and uncertainty throughout both the book and the poem may largely be the point.
In Through the Looking-Glass, the character of Humpty Dumpty, in response to Alice's request, explains to her the non-sense words from the first stanza of the poem, but Carroll's personal commentary on several of the words differ from Humpty Dumpty's. For example, following the poem, a "rath" is described by Humpty Dumpty as "a sort of green pig". Carroll's notes for the original in Mischmasch suggest a "rath" is "a species of Badger" that "lived chiefly on cheese" and had smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns like a stag. The appendices to certain Looking Glass editions state that the creature is "a species of land turtle" that lived on swallows and oysters. Later critics added their own interpretations of the lexicon, often without reference to Carroll's own contextual commentary. An extended analysis of the poem and Carroll's commentary is given in the book The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner.
In 1868 Carroll asked his publishers, Macmillan, "Have you any means, or can you find any, for printing a page or two in the next volume of Alice in reverse?" It may be that Carroll was wanting to print the whole poem in mirror writing. Macmillan responded that it would cost a great deal more to do, and this may have dissuaded him.
In the author's note to the Christmas 1896 edition of Through the Looking-Glass Carroll writes, "The new words, in the poem Jabberwocky, have given rise to some differences of opinion as to their pronunciation, so it may be well to give instructions on that point also. Pronounce 'slithy' as if it were the two words, 'sly, thee': make the 'g' hard in 'gyre' and 'gimble': and pronounce 'rath' to rhyme with 'bath'."
In the Preface to The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll wrote, "[Let] me take this opportunity of answering a question that has often been asked me, how to pronounce 'slithy toves'. The 'i' in 'slithy' is long, as in 'writhe', and 'toves' is pronounced so as to rhyme with 'groves'. Again, the first "o" in "borogoves" is pronounced like the 'o' in 'borrow'. I have heard people try to give it the sound of the 'o' in 'worry'. Such is Human Perversity."
Though the poem contains many nonsensical words, English syntax and poetic forms are observed, such as the quatrain verses, the general ABAB rhyme scheme and the iambic meter. Linguist Peter Lucas believes the "nonsense" term is inaccurate. The poem relies on a distortion of sense rather than "non-sense", allowing the reader to infer meaning and therefore engage with narrative while lexical allusions swim under the surface of the poem.
Marnie Parsons describes the work as a "semiotic catastrophe", arguing that the words create a discernible narrative within the structure of the poem, though the reader cannot know what they symbolise. She argues that Humpty Dumpty tries, after the recitation, to "ground" the unruly multiplicities of meaning with definitions, but cannot succeed as both the book and the poem are playgrounds for the "carnivalised aspect of language". Parsons suggests that this is mirrored in the prosody of the poem: in the tussle between the tetrameter in the first three lines of each stanza and trimeter in the last lines, such that one undercuts the other and we are left off balance, like the poem's hero.
Carroll wrote many poem parodies such as "Twinkle, twinkle little bat", "You Are Old, Father William" and "How Doth the Little Crocodile?" Some have become generally better known than the originals on which they are based, and this is certainly the case with "Jabberwocky". The poems' successes do not rely on any recognition or association of the poems that they parody. Lucas suggests that the original poems provide a strong container but Carroll's works are famous precisely because of their random, surreal quality. Carroll's grave playfulness has been compared with that of the poet Edward Lear; there are also parallels with the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the frequent use of soundplay, alliteration, created-language and portmanteau. Both writers were Carroll's contemporaries.
"Jabberwocky" has been translated into 65 languages. The translation might be difficult because the poem holds to English syntax and many of the principal words of the poem are invented. Translators have generally dealt with them by creating equivalent words of their own. Often these are similar in spelling or sound to Carroll's while respecting the morphology of the language they are being translated into. In Frank L. Warrin's French translation, "'Twas brillig" becomes "Il brilgue". In instances like this, both the original and the invented words echo actual words of Carroll's lexicon, but not necessarily ones with similar meanings. Translators have invented words which draw on root words with meanings similar to the English roots used by Carroll. Douglas Hofstadter noted in his essay "Translations of Jabberwocky", the word 'slithy', for example, echoes the English 'slimy', 'slither', 'slippery', 'lithe' and 'sly'. A French translation that uses 'lubricilleux' for 'slithy', evokes French words like 'lubrifier' (to lubricate) to give an impression of a meaning similar to that of Carroll's word. In his exploration of the translation challenge, Hofstadter asks "what if a word does exist, but it is very intellectual-sounding and Latinate ('lubricilleux'), rather than earthy and Anglo-Saxon ('slithy')? Perhaps 'huilasse' would be better than 'lubricilleux'? Or does the Latin origin of the word 'lubricilleux' not make itself felt to a speaker of French in the way that it would if it were an English word ('lubricilious', perhaps)? ".
Hofstadter also notes that it makes a great difference whether the poem is translated in isolation or as part of a translation of the novel. In the latter case the translator must, through Humpty Dumpty, supply explanations of the invented words. But, he suggests, "even in this pathologically difficult case of translation, there seems to be some rough equivalence obtainable, a kind of rough isomorphism, partly global, partly local, between the brains of all the readers".
In 1967, D.G. Orlovskaya wrote a popular Russian translation of "Jabberwocky" entitled "Barmaglot" ("Бармаглот"). She translated "Barmaglot" for "Jabberwock", "Brandashmyg" for "Bandersnatch" while "myumsiki" ("мюмзики") echoes "mimsy". Full translations of "Jabberwocky" into French and German can be found in The Annotated Alice along with a discussion of why some translation decisions were made. Chao Yuen Ren, a Chinese linguist, translated the poem into Chinese by inventing characters to imitate what Rob Gifford of National Public Radio refers to as the "slithy toves that gyred and gimbled in the wabe of Carroll's original". Satyajit Ray, a film-maker, translated the work into Bengali and concrete poet Augusto de Campos created a Brazilian Portuguese version. There is also an Arabic translation by Wael Al-Mahdi, and at least two into Croatian. Multiple translations into Latin were made within the first weeks of Carroll's original publication. In a 1964 article, M. L. West published two versions of the poem in Ancient Greek that exemplify the respective styles of the epic poets Homer and Nonnus.
Sources:
According to Chesterton and Green and others, the original purpose of "Jabberwocky" was to satirise both pretentious verse and ignorant literary critics. It was designed as verse showing how not to write verse, but eventually became the subject of pedestrian translation or explanation and incorporated into classroom learning. It has also been interpreted as a parody of contemporary Oxford scholarship and specifically the story of how Benjamin Jowett, the notoriously agnostic Professor of Greek at Oxford, and Master of Balliol, came to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles, as an Anglican statement of faith, to save his job. The transformation of audience perception from satire to seriousness was in a large part predicted by G. K. Chesterton, who wrote in 1932, "Poor, poor, little Alice! She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others."
It is often now cited as one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English, the source for countless parodies and tributes. In most cases the writers have changed the nonsense words into words relating to the parodied subject, as in Frank Jacobs's "If Lewis Carroll Were a Hollywood Press Agent in the Thirties" in Mad for Better or Verse. Other writers use the poem as a form, much like a sonnet, and create their own words for it as in "Strunklemiss" by Shay K. Azoulay or the poem "Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly" recited by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a 1979 book which contains numerous other references and homages to Carroll's work.
Oh freddled gruntbuggly thy micturations are to me As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee. Groop I implore thee my foonting turlingdromes And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles, Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!
Some of the words that Carroll created, such as "chortled" and "galumphing", have entered the English language and are listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. The word "jabberwocky" itself has come to refer to nonsense language.
In American Sign Language, Eric Malzkuhn invented the sign for "chortled". It unintentionally caught on and became a part of American Sign Language's lexicon as well.
A song called "Beware the Jabberwock" was written for Disney's 1951 animated film Alice in Wonderland sung by Stan Freberg, but it was discarded, replaced with "'Twas Brillig", sung by the Cheshire Cat, that includes the first stanza of "Jabberwocky".
The Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park in Manhattan, New York City, has at its base, among other inscriptions, a line from "Jabberwocky".
The British group Boeing Duveen and The Beautiful Soup released a single (1968) called "Jabberwock" based on the poem. Singer and songwriter Donovan put the poem to music on his album HMS Donovan (1971).
The poem was a source of inspiration for Jan Švankmajer's 1971 short film Žvahlav aneb šatičky slaměného Huberta (released as Jabberwocky in English) and Terry Gilliam's 1977 feature film Jabberwocky.
In 1972, the American composer Sam Pottle put the poem to music. The stage musical Jabberwocky (1973) by Andrew Kay, Malcolm Middleton and Peter Phillips, follows the basic plot of the poem. Keyboardists Clive Nolan and Oliver Wakeman released a musical version Jabberwocky (1999) with the poem read in segments by Rick Wakeman. British contemporary lieder group Fall in Green set the poem to music for a single release (2021) on Cornutopia Music.
In 1978, the musical group Ambrosia included the text of Jabberwocky in the lyrics of "Moma Frog" (credited to musicians Puerta, North, Drummond, and Pack) on their debut album Ambrosia.
In 1980 The Muppet Show staged a full version of "Jabberwocky" for TV viewing, with the Jabberwock and other creatures played by Muppets closely based on Tenniel's original illustrations. According to Jaques and Giddens, it distinguished itself by stressing the humor and nonsense of the poem.
The Jabberwock appears in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010), voiced by Christopher Lee, and is referred to as "The Jabberwocky". An abridged version of the poem is spoken by the Mad Hatter (played by Johnny Depp). | [
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{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "John Tenniel reluctantly agreed to illustrate the book in 1871, and his illustrations are still the defining images of the poem. The illustration of the Jabberwock may reflect the contemporary Victorian obsession with natural history and the fast-evolving sciences of palaeontology and geology. Stephen Prickett notes that in the context of Darwin and Mantell's publications and vast exhibitions of dinosaurs, such as those at the Crystal Palace from 1854, it is unsurprising that Tenniel gave the Jabberwock \"the leathery wings of a pterodactyl and the long scaly neck and tail of a sauropod.\"",
"title": "Origin and publication"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "\"Jabberwocky\" 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. \"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!\" He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought. And as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. \"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!\" He chortled in his joy. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.",
"title": "Lexicon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "from Through the Looking-Glass, andWhat Alice Found There (1871)",
"title": "Lexicon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Many of the words in the poem are playful nonce words of Carroll's own invention, without intended explicit meaning. When Alice has finished reading the poem she gives her impressions:",
"title": "Lexicon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "\"It seems very pretty,\" she said when she had finished it, \"but it's rather hard to understand!\" (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) \"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate.\"",
"title": "Lexicon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "This may reflect Carroll's intention for his readership; the poem is, after all, part of a dream. In later writings he discussed some of his lexicon, commenting that he did not know the specific meanings or sources of some of the words; the linguistic ambiguity and uncertainty throughout both the book and the poem may largely be the point.",
"title": "Lexicon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In Through the Looking-Glass, the character of Humpty Dumpty, in response to Alice's request, explains to her the non-sense words from the first stanza of the poem, but Carroll's personal commentary on several of the words differ from Humpty Dumpty's. For example, following the poem, a \"rath\" is described by Humpty Dumpty as \"a sort of green pig\". Carroll's notes for the original in Mischmasch suggest a \"rath\" is \"a species of Badger\" that \"lived chiefly on cheese\" and had smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns like a stag. The appendices to certain Looking Glass editions state that the creature is \"a species of land turtle\" that lived on swallows and oysters. Later critics added their own interpretations of the lexicon, often without reference to Carroll's own contextual commentary. An extended analysis of the poem and Carroll's commentary is given in the book The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner.",
"title": "Lexicon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1868 Carroll asked his publishers, Macmillan, \"Have you any means, or can you find any, for printing a page or two in the next volume of Alice in reverse?\" It may be that Carroll was wanting to print the whole poem in mirror writing. Macmillan responded that it would cost a great deal more to do, and this may have dissuaded him.",
"title": "Lexicon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the author's note to the Christmas 1896 edition of Through the Looking-Glass Carroll writes, \"The new words, in the poem Jabberwocky, have given rise to some differences of opinion as to their pronunciation, so it may be well to give instructions on that point also. Pronounce 'slithy' as if it were the two words, 'sly, thee': make the 'g' hard in 'gyre' and 'gimble': and pronounce 'rath' to rhyme with 'bath'.\"",
"title": "Lexicon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the Preface to The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll wrote, \"[Let] me take this opportunity of answering a question that has often been asked me, how to pronounce 'slithy toves'. The 'i' in 'slithy' is long, as in 'writhe', and 'toves' is pronounced so as to rhyme with 'groves'. Again, the first \"o\" in \"borogoves\" is pronounced like the 'o' in 'borrow'. I have heard people try to give it the sound of the 'o' in 'worry'. Such is Human Perversity.\"",
"title": "Lexicon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Though the poem contains many nonsensical words, English syntax and poetic forms are observed, such as the quatrain verses, the general ABAB rhyme scheme and the iambic meter. Linguist Peter Lucas believes the \"nonsense\" term is inaccurate. The poem relies on a distortion of sense rather than \"non-sense\", allowing the reader to infer meaning and therefore engage with narrative while lexical allusions swim under the surface of the poem.",
"title": "Linguistics and poetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Marnie Parsons describes the work as a \"semiotic catastrophe\", arguing that the words create a discernible narrative within the structure of the poem, though the reader cannot know what they symbolise. She argues that Humpty Dumpty tries, after the recitation, to \"ground\" the unruly multiplicities of meaning with definitions, but cannot succeed as both the book and the poem are playgrounds for the \"carnivalised aspect of language\". Parsons suggests that this is mirrored in the prosody of the poem: in the tussle between the tetrameter in the first three lines of each stanza and trimeter in the last lines, such that one undercuts the other and we are left off balance, like the poem's hero.",
"title": "Linguistics and poetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Carroll wrote many poem parodies such as \"Twinkle, twinkle little bat\", \"You Are Old, Father William\" and \"How Doth the Little Crocodile?\" Some have become generally better known than the originals on which they are based, and this is certainly the case with \"Jabberwocky\". The poems' successes do not rely on any recognition or association of the poems that they parody. Lucas suggests that the original poems provide a strong container but Carroll's works are famous precisely because of their random, surreal quality. Carroll's grave playfulness has been compared with that of the poet Edward Lear; there are also parallels with the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the frequent use of soundplay, alliteration, created-language and portmanteau. Both writers were Carroll's contemporaries.",
"title": "Linguistics and poetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "\"Jabberwocky\" has been translated into 65 languages. The translation might be difficult because the poem holds to English syntax and many of the principal words of the poem are invented. Translators have generally dealt with them by creating equivalent words of their own. Often these are similar in spelling or sound to Carroll's while respecting the morphology of the language they are being translated into. In Frank L. Warrin's French translation, \"'Twas brillig\" becomes \"Il brilgue\". In instances like this, both the original and the invented words echo actual words of Carroll's lexicon, but not necessarily ones with similar meanings. Translators have invented words which draw on root words with meanings similar to the English roots used by Carroll. Douglas Hofstadter noted in his essay \"Translations of Jabberwocky\", the word 'slithy', for example, echoes the English 'slimy', 'slither', 'slippery', 'lithe' and 'sly'. A French translation that uses 'lubricilleux' for 'slithy', evokes French words like 'lubrifier' (to lubricate) to give an impression of a meaning similar to that of Carroll's word. In his exploration of the translation challenge, Hofstadter asks \"what if a word does exist, but it is very intellectual-sounding and Latinate ('lubricilleux'), rather than earthy and Anglo-Saxon ('slithy')? Perhaps 'huilasse' would be better than 'lubricilleux'? Or does the Latin origin of the word 'lubricilleux' not make itself felt to a speaker of French in the way that it would if it were an English word ('lubricilious', perhaps)? \".",
"title": "Translations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Hofstadter also notes that it makes a great difference whether the poem is translated in isolation or as part of a translation of the novel. In the latter case the translator must, through Humpty Dumpty, supply explanations of the invented words. But, he suggests, \"even in this pathologically difficult case of translation, there seems to be some rough equivalence obtainable, a kind of rough isomorphism, partly global, partly local, between the brains of all the readers\".",
"title": "Translations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1967, D.G. Orlovskaya wrote a popular Russian translation of \"Jabberwocky\" entitled \"Barmaglot\" (\"Бармаглот\"). She translated \"Barmaglot\" for \"Jabberwock\", \"Brandashmyg\" for \"Bandersnatch\" while \"myumsiki\" (\"мюмзики\") echoes \"mimsy\". Full translations of \"Jabberwocky\" into French and German can be found in The Annotated Alice along with a discussion of why some translation decisions were made. Chao Yuen Ren, a Chinese linguist, translated the poem into Chinese by inventing characters to imitate what Rob Gifford of National Public Radio refers to as the \"slithy toves that gyred and gimbled in the wabe of Carroll's original\". Satyajit Ray, a film-maker, translated the work into Bengali and concrete poet Augusto de Campos created a Brazilian Portuguese version. There is also an Arabic translation by Wael Al-Mahdi, and at least two into Croatian. Multiple translations into Latin were made within the first weeks of Carroll's original publication. In a 1964 article, M. L. West published two versions of the poem in Ancient Greek that exemplify the respective styles of the epic poets Homer and Nonnus.",
"title": "Translations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Sources:",
"title": "Translations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "According to Chesterton and Green and others, the original purpose of \"Jabberwocky\" was to satirise both pretentious verse and ignorant literary critics. It was designed as verse showing how not to write verse, but eventually became the subject of pedestrian translation or explanation and incorporated into classroom learning. It has also been interpreted as a parody of contemporary Oxford scholarship and specifically the story of how Benjamin Jowett, the notoriously agnostic Professor of Greek at Oxford, and Master of Balliol, came to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles, as an Anglican statement of faith, to save his job. The transformation of audience perception from satire to seriousness was in a large part predicted by G. K. Chesterton, who wrote in 1932, \"Poor, poor, little Alice! She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others.\"",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "It is often now cited as one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English, the source for countless parodies and tributes. In most cases the writers have changed the nonsense words into words relating to the parodied subject, as in Frank Jacobs's \"If Lewis Carroll Were a Hollywood Press Agent in the Thirties\" in Mad for Better or Verse. Other writers use the poem as a form, much like a sonnet, and create their own words for it as in \"Strunklemiss\" by Shay K. Azoulay or the poem \"Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly\" recited by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a 1979 book which contains numerous other references and homages to Carroll's work.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Oh freddled gruntbuggly thy micturations are to me As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee. Groop I implore thee my foonting turlingdromes And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles, Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Some of the words that Carroll created, such as \"chortled\" and \"galumphing\", have entered the English language and are listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. The word \"jabberwocky\" itself has come to refer to nonsense language.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In American Sign Language, Eric Malzkuhn invented the sign for \"chortled\". It unintentionally caught on and became a part of American Sign Language's lexicon as well.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "A song called \"Beware the Jabberwock\" was written for Disney's 1951 animated film Alice in Wonderland sung by Stan Freberg, but it was discarded, replaced with \"'Twas Brillig\", sung by the Cheshire Cat, that includes the first stanza of \"Jabberwocky\".",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park in Manhattan, New York City, has at its base, among other inscriptions, a line from \"Jabberwocky\".",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The British group Boeing Duveen and The Beautiful Soup released a single (1968) called \"Jabberwock\" based on the poem. Singer and songwriter Donovan put the poem to music on his album HMS Donovan (1971).",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The poem was a source of inspiration for Jan Švankmajer's 1971 short film Žvahlav aneb šatičky slaměného Huberta (released as Jabberwocky in English) and Terry Gilliam's 1977 feature film Jabberwocky.",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1972, the American composer Sam Pottle put the poem to music. The stage musical Jabberwocky (1973) by Andrew Kay, Malcolm Middleton and Peter Phillips, follows the basic plot of the poem. Keyboardists Clive Nolan and Oliver Wakeman released a musical version Jabberwocky (1999) with the poem read in segments by Rick Wakeman. British contemporary lieder group Fall in Green set the poem to music for a single release (2021) on Cornutopia Music.",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1978, the musical group Ambrosia included the text of Jabberwocky in the lyrics of \"Moma Frog\" (credited to musicians Puerta, North, Drummond, and Pack) on their debut album Ambrosia.",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 1980 The Muppet Show staged a full version of \"Jabberwocky\" for TV viewing, with the Jabberwock and other creatures played by Muppets closely based on Tenniel's original illustrations. According to Jaques and Giddens, it distinguished itself by stressing the humor and nonsense of the poem.",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Jabberwock appears in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010), voiced by Christopher Lee, and is referred to as \"The Jabberwocky\". An abridged version of the poem is spoken by the Mad Hatter (played by Johnny Depp).",
"title": "Media"
}
]
| "Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock". It was included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The book tells of Alice's adventures within the back-to-front world of the Looking-Glass world. In an early scene in which she first encounters the chess piece characters White King and White Queen, Alice finds a book written in a seemingly unintelligible language. Realising that she is travelling through an inverted world, she recognises that the verses on the pages are written in mirror-writing. She holds a mirror to one of the poems and reads the reflected verse of "Jabberwocky". She finds the nonsense verse as puzzling as the odd land she has passed into, later revealed as a dreamscape. "Jabberwocky" is considered one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English. Its playful, whimsical language has given English nonsense words and neologisms such as "galumphing" and "chortle". | 2001-07-29T20:47:47Z | 2023-12-09T21:56:21Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky |
15,908 | John Sparrow David Thompson | Sir John Sparrow David Thompson PC KCMG QC (November 10, 1845 – December 12, 1894) was a Canadian lawyer, judge and politician who served as the fourth prime minister of Canada from 1892 until his death. He had previously been fifth premier of Nova Scotia for a brief period in 1882.
Thompson was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He trained as a lawyer and was called to the bar in 1865. Thompson was elected to the Nova Scotia House of Assembly in 1877 as a representative of the Conservative Party. He became the provincial attorney general the following year, in Simon Holmes' government, replaced Holmes as premier in 1882. However, he served for only two months before losing the 1882 general election to the Liberal Party. After losing the premiership, he accepted an appointment to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court.
In 1885, Thompson entered federal politics at the personal request of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, becoming Minister of Justice. In that role he was the driving force behind the enactment of the Criminal Code. Thompson became prime minister in 1892, following the retirement of John Abbott. He was the first Roman Catholic to hold the position. On a trip to England in 1894, Thompson unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and died, aged 49. He is the second and most recent Canadian prime minister to have died in office, after John A. Macdonald.
Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to John Sparrow Thompson and Charlotte Pottinger, he was of Irish descent. Some sources say he was born on November 10, 1845, though others say 1844. Thompson married Annie Affleck (1842–1913) in 1870. Annie Thompson was strong-willed and had the same kind of spirit that had driven Agnes Macdonald (another prime minister's wife) to ride the cowcatcher of a Canadian Pacific Railway train through the British Columbia mountains. During their courtship, Thompson was forced to write love letters in shorthand because of his soon-to-be wife's disapproving parents. A daughter, Annie, died at 1, while youngest son David lived to be 2. Two other children died at birth, the Thompsons had five children survive childhood.
Thompson was called to the Nova Scotia Bar in July 1865, and from 1878 to 1882, he served as Attorney General in the provincial government of Simon H. Holmes. He briefly held the office of Nova Scotia premier in 1882, but his government was defeated in that year's election. Thompson was always a reluctant politician.
After his resignation from government, Thompson was immediately appointed to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court by the Prime Minister Macdonald. In this role, he was instrumental in founding the Dalhousie Law School in 1883. He taught law courses at Dalhousie in its early years.
After several failed overtures, Macdonald finally recruited Thompson to Ottawa in 1885. Macdonald generally thought highly of Thompson, remarking, "My one great discovery was my discovery of Thompson". Macdonald poked some fun at his recruit as well: "Thompson is a little too fond of satire, and a little too much of a Nova Scotian." However, his rise in government was probably because of the influence of Lady Aberdeen, the wife of Governor General Aberdeen and Macdonald's mentoring. She had great admiration for Thompson and wrote frequently about him in her "Canadian Journal".
Thompson was sworn in as Minister of Justice in September 1885 and won a seat in Parliament in October, representing Antigonish.
When he returned to Ottawa, the Louis Riel crisis was in full swing. The question of what to do with Riel, who had been sentenced to hang for leading the 1885 North-West Rebellion, was now the responsibility of Thompson. Although Thompson was ill with kidney stones at the time of Riel's execution, Thompson made his first major speech to Parliament during the subsequent debate by arguing that anyone who encouraged Canadians to act against the state could not escape justice. The speech was notable and helped to popularize Thompson, and he quickly rose to become a leading member of the Conservative government.
His achievements as Minister of Justice included the first Criminal Code, a consolidation and unification of the criminal law for Canada.
Thompson was the last minister to see Macdonald before his devastating stroke in May 1891. Following Macdonald's death a week later, there was a Cabinet crisis. The governor general, Lord Stanley of Preston, asked Thompson to form a government, but Thompson declined because of religious prejudice against the Roman Catholicism to which he had converted at his marriage. Thompson recommended John Abbott, who ultimately accepted. After 1893 Prince Edward Island House of Assembly passage of the amalgamation "Bill respecting the Legislature," Thompson, still wary of a Protestant backlash, reported to the Canadian Governor General that almost every article of the Prince Edward Island "amalgamation" statute, save for a punitive clause that violated with "little injury" the separation of powers between the Legislative Assembly and provincial court system, was "unobjectionable, and may be left to their operation." In a rejoinder to Neil McLeod (Leader of the Opposition in the provincial legislature), he concluded that there was as much probability of an amendment to increase the supermajority requirement to unanimity (for amending the bill) as there was probability that the entire "section itself may be repealed at any time by statute passed in the ordinary way." Then, in a demonstration that his tenure as Prime Minister would not result in a papal majority government, Thompson disregarded Conservative allegations of gerrymandering of French Acadian and otherwise Roman Catholic voters in Prince Edward Island. In 1894, Lord Stanley "approved" of this report months before Thompson's fatal heart attack.
Thompson assumed the office of Prime Minister in 1892, a year later, when John Abbott retired. Thompson retained the post of Attorney General while he was prime minister.
He came very close to bringing Newfoundland into Confederation, but that would not be achieved until 1949.
His first major speech as Prime Minister was given in Toronto in January 1893 and covered the topics of tolerance and Canadian nationalism in conjunction with loyalty to the British crown. At the time, Thompson was concerned about the possibility of the annexation of Canada by the United States, a goal that was being pursued within Canada by the Continental Union Association, a group of Ontario and Quebec Liberals. Despite his concern, Thompson ultimately realized that the conspiracy to make Canada part of the United States was confined to a small and noisy minority within the opposition party.
In March 1893, Thompson travelled to Paris as one of the judges on the tribunal to settle the dispute over the seal harvest in the Bering Sea. The tribunal ruled there was no justification for the American claim that the Bering Sea was closed to all but American seal hunters.
Other matters of concern during Thompson's tenure as Prime Minister included the reduction of trade tariffs and questions over schooling in Manitoba and in the North West Territories, where serious disputes existed over the role of Catholics and Protestants in administering the school system. The issue in the North West Territories would be resolved to Thompson's satisfaction but only after his death.
While in office, Thompson chose the following jurists to sit as justices of the Supreme Court of Canada:
Thompson had been Prime Minister of Canada for only two years when he died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of 49 on December 12, 1894. He was at England's Windsor Castle, where Queen Victoria had just made him a member of her Privy Council. Thompson's physical condition had deteriorated during his time in Ottawa; he was significantly overweight when he died (standing 5 feet 7 inches (1.70 m), he weighed about 225 pounds (102 kg)), and had always pushed himself very hard in his work.
Thompson was the second of two Canadian prime ministers to die in office (the first being John A. Macdonald), and the first of three who did not die in Canada (the other two being Charles Tupper and Richard Bedford Bennett).
After an elaborate funeral was staged for him in the United Kingdom by Queen Victoria, Thompson's remains were transported back to Canada aboard the armoured cruiser HMS Blenheim, which was painted black for the occasion. He was buried on January 3, 1895, in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Despite having held prime ministerial office, Thompson had little estate, so Parliament set up a fund to support his widow and children. The Canadian politician Margaret Mitchell, who died March 8, 2017, is considered the last of Thompson's descendants.
Thompson, then a young barrister, married in 1870 Annie E. Affleck, daughter of John Affleck, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and his wife, Catherine Saunders. Annie was born and educated in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The couple had nine children, only five of whom survived early childhood. After she was widowed December 12, 1894, a fund of $30,000 was raised for Lady Thompson, headed by Lord Strathcona with a subscription of $5,000; the Parliament of Canada contributed $25,000. The Governor-General, the Earl of Aberdeen undertook the education of the sons. Lady Thompson cofounded, with the Countess of Aberdeen, the National Council of Women, and served as one of its presidents. She served as a governor of the Victorian Order of Nurses. As a widow, she lived at Derwent Lodge, 631 Sherbourne Street in Toronto.
Thompson was designated a Person of National Historic Significance in 1937. His collected papers were donated in 1949 to the National Archives of Canada by his son, Colonel John Thompson.
A ranking of the Canadian Prime Ministers was published by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer in 1997. A survey of 26 Canadian historians determined that Thompson was ranked #10 of the 20 people who had at that time served as Canadian PM. He was identified as "The great "might-have-been" of Canadian Prime Ministers...", whose potentially promising career was cut short by his early death. A follow-up article co-authored by Hillmer in 2011 broadened the survey to include survey responses of over 100 historians; in this survey, Thompson was ranked 14th out the 22 who had by then served as PM.
The high school in the Canadian sitcom Life with Derek, SJST, is named after Thompson. Sir John Thompson Catholic Junior High School in Edmonton is named for him. Thompson appears as a prominent character in Paul Marlowe's novel Knights of the Sea (set in 1887 when Thompson was Minister of Justice).
Since 1996, Sir John Thompson's former home in Ottawa at 237 Metcalfe Street has served as the national office of the Canadian Soccer Association.
Nova Scotian artist William Valentine painted Thompson's portrait.
Media related to John Sparrow David Thompson at Wikimedia Commons | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Sir John Sparrow David Thompson PC KCMG QC (November 10, 1845 – December 12, 1894) was a Canadian lawyer, judge and politician who served as the fourth prime minister of Canada from 1892 until his death. He had previously been fifth premier of Nova Scotia for a brief period in 1882.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Thompson was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He trained as a lawyer and was called to the bar in 1865. Thompson was elected to the Nova Scotia House of Assembly in 1877 as a representative of the Conservative Party. He became the provincial attorney general the following year, in Simon Holmes' government, replaced Holmes as premier in 1882. However, he served for only two months before losing the 1882 general election to the Liberal Party. After losing the premiership, he accepted an appointment to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "In 1885, Thompson entered federal politics at the personal request of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, becoming Minister of Justice. In that role he was the driving force behind the enactment of the Criminal Code. Thompson became prime minister in 1892, following the retirement of John Abbott. He was the first Roman Catholic to hold the position. On a trip to England in 1894, Thompson unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and died, aged 49. He is the second and most recent Canadian prime minister to have died in office, after John A. Macdonald.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to John Sparrow Thompson and Charlotte Pottinger, he was of Irish descent. Some sources say he was born on November 10, 1845, though others say 1844. Thompson married Annie Affleck (1842–1913) in 1870. Annie Thompson was strong-willed and had the same kind of spirit that had driven Agnes Macdonald (another prime minister's wife) to ride the cowcatcher of a Canadian Pacific Railway train through the British Columbia mountains. During their courtship, Thompson was forced to write love letters in shorthand because of his soon-to-be wife's disapproving parents. A daughter, Annie, died at 1, while youngest son David lived to be 2. Two other children died at birth, the Thompsons had five children survive childhood.",
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"text": "Thompson was called to the Nova Scotia Bar in July 1865, and from 1878 to 1882, he served as Attorney General in the provincial government of Simon H. Holmes. He briefly held the office of Nova Scotia premier in 1882, but his government was defeated in that year's election. Thompson was always a reluctant politician.",
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"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "After his resignation from government, Thompson was immediately appointed to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court by the Prime Minister Macdonald. In this role, he was instrumental in founding the Dalhousie Law School in 1883. He taught law courses at Dalhousie in its early years.",
"title": "Law, politics, and professorship"
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{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "After several failed overtures, Macdonald finally recruited Thompson to Ottawa in 1885. Macdonald generally thought highly of Thompson, remarking, \"My one great discovery was my discovery of Thompson\". Macdonald poked some fun at his recruit as well: \"Thompson is a little too fond of satire, and a little too much of a Nova Scotian.\" However, his rise in government was probably because of the influence of Lady Aberdeen, the wife of Governor General Aberdeen and Macdonald's mentoring. She had great admiration for Thompson and wrote frequently about him in her \"Canadian Journal\".",
"title": "Federal Minister of Justice"
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"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Thompson was sworn in as Minister of Justice in September 1885 and won a seat in Parliament in October, representing Antigonish.",
"title": "Federal Minister of Justice"
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{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "When he returned to Ottawa, the Louis Riel crisis was in full swing. The question of what to do with Riel, who had been sentenced to hang for leading the 1885 North-West Rebellion, was now the responsibility of Thompson. Although Thompson was ill with kidney stones at the time of Riel's execution, Thompson made his first major speech to Parliament during the subsequent debate by arguing that anyone who encouraged Canadians to act against the state could not escape justice. The speech was notable and helped to popularize Thompson, and he quickly rose to become a leading member of the Conservative government.",
"title": "Federal Minister of Justice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "His achievements as Minister of Justice included the first Criminal Code, a consolidation and unification of the criminal law for Canada.",
"title": "Federal Minister of Justice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Thompson was the last minister to see Macdonald before his devastating stroke in May 1891. Following Macdonald's death a week later, there was a Cabinet crisis. The governor general, Lord Stanley of Preston, asked Thompson to form a government, but Thompson declined because of religious prejudice against the Roman Catholicism to which he had converted at his marriage. Thompson recommended John Abbott, who ultimately accepted. After 1893 Prince Edward Island House of Assembly passage of the amalgamation \"Bill respecting the Legislature,\" Thompson, still wary of a Protestant backlash, reported to the Canadian Governor General that almost every article of the Prince Edward Island \"amalgamation\" statute, save for a punitive clause that violated with \"little injury\" the separation of powers between the Legislative Assembly and provincial court system, was \"unobjectionable, and may be left to their operation.\" In a rejoinder to Neil McLeod (Leader of the Opposition in the provincial legislature), he concluded that there was as much probability of an amendment to increase the supermajority requirement to unanimity (for amending the bill) as there was probability that the entire \"section itself may be repealed at any time by statute passed in the ordinary way.\" Then, in a demonstration that his tenure as Prime Minister would not result in a papal majority government, Thompson disregarded Conservative allegations of gerrymandering of French Acadian and otherwise Roman Catholic voters in Prince Edward Island. In 1894, Lord Stanley \"approved\" of this report months before Thompson's fatal heart attack.",
"title": "Declines post of prime minister as a Roman Catholic"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Thompson assumed the office of Prime Minister in 1892, a year later, when John Abbott retired. Thompson retained the post of Attorney General while he was prime minister.",
"title": "Prime Minister (1892–1894)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "He came very close to bringing Newfoundland into Confederation, but that would not be achieved until 1949.",
"title": "Prime Minister (1892–1894)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "His first major speech as Prime Minister was given in Toronto in January 1893 and covered the topics of tolerance and Canadian nationalism in conjunction with loyalty to the British crown. At the time, Thompson was concerned about the possibility of the annexation of Canada by the United States, a goal that was being pursued within Canada by the Continental Union Association, a group of Ontario and Quebec Liberals. Despite his concern, Thompson ultimately realized that the conspiracy to make Canada part of the United States was confined to a small and noisy minority within the opposition party.",
"title": "Prime Minister (1892–1894)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In March 1893, Thompson travelled to Paris as one of the judges on the tribunal to settle the dispute over the seal harvest in the Bering Sea. The tribunal ruled there was no justification for the American claim that the Bering Sea was closed to all but American seal hunters.",
"title": "Prime Minister (1892–1894)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Other matters of concern during Thompson's tenure as Prime Minister included the reduction of trade tariffs and questions over schooling in Manitoba and in the North West Territories, where serious disputes existed over the role of Catholics and Protestants in administering the school system. The issue in the North West Territories would be resolved to Thompson's satisfaction but only after his death.",
"title": "Prime Minister (1892–1894)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "While in office, Thompson chose the following jurists to sit as justices of the Supreme Court of Canada:",
"title": "Supreme Court appointments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Thompson had been Prime Minister of Canada for only two years when he died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of 49 on December 12, 1894. He was at England's Windsor Castle, where Queen Victoria had just made him a member of her Privy Council. Thompson's physical condition had deteriorated during his time in Ottawa; he was significantly overweight when he died (standing 5 feet 7 inches (1.70 m), he weighed about 225 pounds (102 kg)), and had always pushed himself very hard in his work.",
"title": "Death in office"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Thompson was the second of two Canadian prime ministers to die in office (the first being John A. Macdonald), and the first of three who did not die in Canada (the other two being Charles Tupper and Richard Bedford Bennett).",
"title": "Death in office"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "After an elaborate funeral was staged for him in the United Kingdom by Queen Victoria, Thompson's remains were transported back to Canada aboard the armoured cruiser HMS Blenheim, which was painted black for the occasion. He was buried on January 3, 1895, in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia.",
"title": "Death in office"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Despite having held prime ministerial office, Thompson had little estate, so Parliament set up a fund to support his widow and children. The Canadian politician Margaret Mitchell, who died March 8, 2017, is considered the last of Thompson's descendants.",
"title": "Death in office"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Thompson, then a young barrister, married in 1870 Annie E. Affleck, daughter of John Affleck, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and his wife, Catherine Saunders. Annie was born and educated in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The couple had nine children, only five of whom survived early childhood. After she was widowed December 12, 1894, a fund of $30,000 was raised for Lady Thompson, headed by Lord Strathcona with a subscription of $5,000; the Parliament of Canada contributed $25,000. The Governor-General, the Earl of Aberdeen undertook the education of the sons. Lady Thompson cofounded, with the Countess of Aberdeen, the National Council of Women, and served as one of its presidents. She served as a governor of the Victorian Order of Nurses. As a widow, she lived at Derwent Lodge, 631 Sherbourne Street in Toronto.",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Thompson was designated a Person of National Historic Significance in 1937. His collected papers were donated in 1949 to the National Archives of Canada by his son, Colonel John Thompson.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "A ranking of the Canadian Prime Ministers was published by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer in 1997. A survey of 26 Canadian historians determined that Thompson was ranked #10 of the 20 people who had at that time served as Canadian PM. He was identified as \"The great \"might-have-been\" of Canadian Prime Ministers...\", whose potentially promising career was cut short by his early death. A follow-up article co-authored by Hillmer in 2011 broadened the survey to include survey responses of over 100 historians; in this survey, Thompson was ranked 14th out the 22 who had by then served as PM.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The high school in the Canadian sitcom Life with Derek, SJST, is named after Thompson. Sir John Thompson Catholic Junior High School in Edmonton is named for him. Thompson appears as a prominent character in Paul Marlowe's novel Knights of the Sea (set in 1887 when Thompson was Minister of Justice).",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Since 1996, Sir John Thompson's former home in Ottawa at 237 Metcalfe Street has served as the national office of the Canadian Soccer Association.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Nova Scotian artist William Valentine painted Thompson's portrait.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Media related to John Sparrow David Thompson at Wikimedia Commons",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Sir John Sparrow David Thompson was a Canadian lawyer, judge and politician who served as the fourth prime minister of Canada from 1892 until his death. He had previously been fifth premier of Nova Scotia for a brief period in 1882. Thompson was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He trained as a lawyer and was called to the bar in 1865. Thompson was elected to the Nova Scotia House of Assembly in 1877 as a representative of the Conservative Party. He became the provincial attorney general the following year, in Simon Holmes' government, replaced Holmes as premier in 1882. However, he served for only two months before losing the 1882 general election to the Liberal Party. After losing the premiership, he accepted an appointment to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court. In 1885, Thompson entered federal politics at the personal request of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, becoming Minister of Justice. In that role he was the driving force behind the enactment of the Criminal Code. Thompson became prime minister in 1892, following the retirement of John Abbott. He was the first Roman Catholic to hold the position. On a trip to England in 1894, Thompson unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and died, aged 49. He is the second and most recent Canadian prime minister to have died in office, after John A. Macdonald. | 2001-07-30T02:35:28Z | 2023-11-25T04:02:54Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sparrow_David_Thompson |
15,910 | List of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach | Johann Sebastian Bach's vocal music includes cantatas, motets, masses, Magnificats, Passions, oratorios, four-part chorales, songs and arias. His instrumental music includes concertos, suites, sonatas, fugues, and other works for organ, harpsichord, lute, violin, viola da gamba, cello, flute, chamber ensemble and orchestra.
There are over 1000 known compositions by Bach. Nearly all of them are listed in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV), which is the best known and most widely used catalogue of Bach's compositions.
Some of the early biographies of Johann Sebastian Bach contain lists of his compositions. For instance, his obituary contains a list of the instrumental compositions printed during the composer's lifetime, followed by an approximate list of his unpublished work. The first separately published biography of the composer, by Johann Nikolaus Forkel, follows the same approach: its ninth chapter first lists printed works (adding four-part chorales which had been published in the second half of the 18th century), followed by a rough overview of the unpublished ones. In the first half of the 19th century more works were published, so the next biographies (Schauer and Hilgenfeldt in 1850) had more elaborate appendices listing printed works, referring to these works by publisher, and the number or page number given to the works in these publications. So, for example, the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat major can be indicated as "C. F. Peters Vol. III No. 1", or any of the variants ("Griepenkerl and Roitzsch Vol. 3 p. 2", "Peters Book 242 p. 2", "P. S. V., Cah. 3 (242), No. 1", etc.)
In the second half of the 19th century the Bach-Gesellschaft (BG) published all of Bach's works in around 50 volumes, the so-called Bach Gesellschaft Ausgabe (BGA). This offered a unique identification of all of Bach's known works, a system that was quickly adopted, for instance by the biographers: Philipp Spitta used it complementarily to the Peters edition numbering for the BG volumes that had appeared when he was writing his Bach-biography in the second half of the 19th century (e.g. "B. G., III., p. 173" for the above-mentioned Prelude in E-flat major), and Terry used it in the third Appendix to his 20th-century translation of Forkel's biography.
But there was still a lot of confusion: some authors preferred to list Bach's works according to Novello's editions, or Augener's, or Schirmer's,... giving rise to various conversion tables at the end of books on Bach's compositions (e.g. Harvey Grace's in a 1922 book on Bach's organ compositions).
In 1900 the BG published its last volume, and dissolved itself, as its primary goal, publishing all of Bach's known works, was accomplished. The BG was succeeded by the Neue Bachgesellschaft (NBG), with a new set of goals (Bach yearbook, Bach festivals, and a Bach museum). Occasionally however the NBG published newly discovered works, or variants not published in the BGA. For instance the 1740s version of O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht was published in NBG XVII in 1916 (the 1730s version of the same piece, with a different orchestration, had been published in BG 24, pp. 185–192).
In 1950 the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis was published, allocating a unique number to every known composition by Bach. Wolfgang Schmieder, the editor of that catalogue, grouped the compositions by genre, largely following BG for the collation (e.g. BG cantata number = BWV number of the cantata):
For instance, the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat major now became BWV 552, situated in the range of the works for organ. In contrast to other catalogues such as the Köchel catalogue for Mozart's compositions there is no attempt at chronological organization in the BWV numbering, for instance BWV 992 is an early composition by Bach. Exceptionally BWV numbers are also indicated as Schmieder (S) numbers (e.g. S. 225 = BWV 225).
Another consequence of the ordering principles of the BWV was that it tore known collections apart, for instance Clavier-Übung III was partly in the organ compositions range (BWV 552 and 669–689), with the four duets listed among the keyboard compositions (BWV 802–805).
The Anhang (Anh.), i.e. Appendix, of the BWV listed works that were not suitable for the main catalogue, in three sections:
Within each section of the Anhang the works are sorted by genre, following the same sequence of genres as the main catalogue.
Schmieder published the BWV's second edition in 1990, with some modifications regarding authenticity discriminations, and more works added to the main catalogue and the Anhang. A strict numerical collation was abandoned to insert additions, or when for another reason compositions were regrouped. For example, BWV 11, formerly listed as a Cantata, was moved to the fourth chapter of the main catalogue as an Oratorio. Rather than renumbering a composition, an arrow indicated where the composition was inserted: "BWV 11/249b→" meaning "BWV 11, inserted after BWV 249b" (4th chapter). Similarly, BWV 1083/243a→ meant BWV 1083, inserted after BWV 243a (3rd chapter). Also authenticity discriminations, based on new research, could lead to such repositionings within the catalogue, e.g. "BWV Anh. II 114" became "Anh. II 114/Anh. III 183→ indicating it was now considered a spurious work.
In 1998 Alfred Dürr and Yoshitake Kobayashi published a small edition of the catalogue, based on the 1990 second edition. This edition, known as BWV, contained a few further updates and collation rearrangements.
New additions (Nachträge) to BWV/BWV included:
A few exceptions to the principle that compositions were not renumbered were when a composition from the Anhang could be recovered or authenticated as Bach's, so that it deserved a place in the main catalogue, in which case it was given a number above 1080. So, for example, BWV Anh. 205 (BWV) → BWV 1121 (BWV, where it is in section 7 as a work for organ).
Other renumberings and additional numbers involved alternative or earlier versions of basically the same composition, which were indicated by adding a lower case letter to the BWV number. Examples:
Some versions were completely removed from the catalogue, e.g. BWV 655b and c.
Slashes indicate movements: e.g. BWV 149/1 indicates the first movement of the Cantata BWV 149. Another example: the Agnus Dei of the Mass in B minor can be indicated as BWV 232/22 (22nd movement of the composition), or alternatively as BWV 232/4 (BWV 232, fourth movement of Part IV).
Numbers above BWV 1126 were added in the 21st century.
An upper case R added to a BWV number indicates a reconstructed version, that is a conjectured earlier version of a known composition. One of such reconstructions, the Concerto for oboe and violin, as published in NBA VII/7 (Supplement) p. 75, based on the double harpsichord concerto BWV 1060, is known as BWV 1060R.
As of mid-2018 the Bach digital website started to implement the new numbers of the 3rd edition of the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, which has been announced for publication in 2020. For example, the Leipzig version of the Christ lag in Todes Banden cantata used to be BWV 4 in previous versions of the catalogue, and, in BWV, has become BWV 4.2.
In the meantime, the New Bach Edition (Neue Bach-Ausgabe, abbreviated as NBA) was being published, offering a new system to refer to Bach's works, e.g. NBA IV/4: 2, 105, which is Series IV, Volume 4, p. 2 (Prelude) and p. 105 (Fugue), for BWV 552.
Some years after the completion of the NBA in 2007 its publisher Bärenreiter joined with the Bach Archive again to publish revised editions of some of Bach's scores. These revised editions, aligning with the NBA editions (format, layout), but outside that group of publications, were published under the name Johann Sebastian Bach: New Edition of the Complete Works – Revised Edition (Johann Sebastian Bach: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke – Revidierte Edition), in short: New Bach Edition – Revised (Neue Bach-Ausgabe – Revidierte Edition), abbreviated as NBArev. Where the original NBA editions were exclusively in German, the volumes of the Revised series have their introductions both in German and English. Its first volume, NBArev 1, was a new edition of the Mass in B minor, appearing in 2010.
The Bach Compendium (BC), a catalogue covering Bach's vocal works was published in 1985. Occasionally works that have no BWV number can be identified by their BC number, e.g. BC C 8 for "Der Gerechte kömmt um" an arrangement attributed to Bach on stylistic grounds, however unmentioned in the BWV.
Bachs Notenbibliothek (BNB) is a list of works Bach had at his disposition. Works of other composers which were arranged by Bach or which he (had) copied for performance usually have a BNB number.
The Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin = SBB) holds an important collection of composition manuscripts relating to Bach. Some versions of works are best known by their principal manuscript in the SBB, for instance BWV 525a = SBB St 345, or according to the abbreviations used at the Bach-digital website D-B Mus. ms. Bach St 345.
Apart from indicating his first published keyboard composition as Opus 1, Bach did not use opus numbers. Lists following publication chronologies are for example implied in the first list in Bach's obituary, and BG numbers (within the BGA sequence of publication) – overall lists covering all of Bach's compositions in order of first publication are however not a way Bach's compositions are usually presented.
Listing Bach's works according to their time of composition cannot be done comprehensively: for many works the period in which they were composed is a very wide range. For Bach's larger vocal works (cantatas, Passions,...) research has led to some more or less generally accepted chronologies, covering most of these works: a catalogue in this sense is Philippe (and Gérard) Zwang's list giving a chronological number to the cantatas BWV 1–215 and 248–249. This list was published in 1982 as Guide pratique des cantates de Bach in Paris, ISBN 2-221-00749-2. A revised edition was published in 2005 (ISBN 2747598888).
Various catalogues with works by other composers have intersections with collections of works associated with Bach:
There are over 1500 works that feature in a catalogue of works by Bach, like the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, or in a collection of works associated with Bach (e.g. in one of the Notebooks for Anna Magdalena Bach). Of these around a thousand are original compositions by Bach, that is: more than a mere copy or transcription of an earlier work by himself or another composer.
In the 1950 first edition of the BWV the cantatas were largely listed according to their BGA number:
Additionally Anh. I of the first edition of the BWV started with a list of some 20 lost cantatas, while Anh. III of that edition listed a few cantata (movements) by other composers (Anh. 156–158).
BWV added many more lost cantatas (BWV Anh. 190–199 and 209–212) and alternative versions to known works indicating (partially) lost cantatas or cantata versions, e.g. BWV 244a, the music of which was partially preserved in the St Matthew Passion, BWV 244.
There are over a dozen motets attributed to Bach, about half of which are authentic by all accounts:
Bach's involvement with Latin church music, as composer, arranger or copyist, includes:
Passions and oratorios composed or contributed to by Bach include:
Bach's chorale settings (usually for SATB choir) are included in:
Songs and (separate) arias by Bach are included in several collections:
Associated with the Songs and Arias group:
Bach's organ compositions include:
Bach's works for harpsichord, clavichord and other keyboard instruments include:
Bach's compositions for lute or lute-harpsichord (Lautenwerck) include:
Bach wrote chamber music for solo violin, cello or flute, sonatas for harpsichord and an instrumental soloist, and trio sonatas:
Bach wrote concertos and orchestral suites:
Separate canons by Bach are listed in the 12th chapter of the BWV:
The list of late contrapuntal works contains only two items:
Additions as published in BWV
BWV Anh. 190–213 were added between the 1950 and 1990s editions of the catalogue
BWV numbers assigned after the publication of BWV:
There is not much system in the way works derived from Bach's compositions are listed. The "R" addition to the BWV number is only well-established for the reconstructions included in NBA VII/7 (e.g. solo violin reconstructions of BWV 565 are not usually indicated as BWV 565R, neither is the system used for reconstructed vocal works). For some series of transcriptions and arrangements works catalogues of these transcribers/arrangers may hold sublists with works derived from compositions by Bach.
Each reconstructed concerto is created after the harpsichord concerto for the presumed original instrument. Such reconstructions are commonly referred to as, for example, BWV 1052R (where the R stands for 'reconstructed'). Other reconstructions and completions of for instance BWV 1059 have been indicated as BWV 1059, or BWV 1059a.
Transcriptions and arrangements in the catalogues of works by other composers include:
For abbreviations used in the references see also Bibliography at www.bachdigital.de
Bibliography | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Johann Sebastian Bach's vocal music includes cantatas, motets, masses, Magnificats, Passions, oratorios, four-part chorales, songs and arias. His instrumental music includes concertos, suites, sonatas, fugues, and other works for organ, harpsichord, lute, violin, viola da gamba, cello, flute, chamber ensemble and orchestra.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "There are over 1000 known compositions by Bach. Nearly all of them are listed in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV), which is the best known and most widely used catalogue of Bach's compositions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Some of the early biographies of Johann Sebastian Bach contain lists of his compositions. For instance, his obituary contains a list of the instrumental compositions printed during the composer's lifetime, followed by an approximate list of his unpublished work. The first separately published biography of the composer, by Johann Nikolaus Forkel, follows the same approach: its ninth chapter first lists printed works (adding four-part chorales which had been published in the second half of the 18th century), followed by a rough overview of the unpublished ones. In the first half of the 19th century more works were published, so the next biographies (Schauer and Hilgenfeldt in 1850) had more elaborate appendices listing printed works, referring to these works by publisher, and the number or page number given to the works in these publications. So, for example, the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat major can be indicated as \"C. F. Peters Vol. III No. 1\", or any of the variants (\"Griepenkerl and Roitzsch Vol. 3 p. 2\", \"Peters Book 242 p. 2\", \"P. S. V., Cah. 3 (242), No. 1\", etc.)",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In the second half of the 19th century the Bach-Gesellschaft (BG) published all of Bach's works in around 50 volumes, the so-called Bach Gesellschaft Ausgabe (BGA). This offered a unique identification of all of Bach's known works, a system that was quickly adopted, for instance by the biographers: Philipp Spitta used it complementarily to the Peters edition numbering for the BG volumes that had appeared when he was writing his Bach-biography in the second half of the 19th century (e.g. \"B. G., III., p. 173\" for the above-mentioned Prelude in E-flat major), and Terry used it in the third Appendix to his 20th-century translation of Forkel's biography.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "But there was still a lot of confusion: some authors preferred to list Bach's works according to Novello's editions, or Augener's, or Schirmer's,... giving rise to various conversion tables at the end of books on Bach's compositions (e.g. Harvey Grace's in a 1922 book on Bach's organ compositions).",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1900 the BG published its last volume, and dissolved itself, as its primary goal, publishing all of Bach's known works, was accomplished. The BG was succeeded by the Neue Bachgesellschaft (NBG), with a new set of goals (Bach yearbook, Bach festivals, and a Bach museum). Occasionally however the NBG published newly discovered works, or variants not published in the BGA. For instance the 1740s version of O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht was published in NBG XVII in 1916 (the 1730s version of the same piece, with a different orchestration, had been published in BG 24, pp. 185–192).",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1950 the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis was published, allocating a unique number to every known composition by Bach. Wolfgang Schmieder, the editor of that catalogue, grouped the compositions by genre, largely following BG for the collation (e.g. BG cantata number = BWV number of the cantata):",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "For instance, the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat major now became BWV 552, situated in the range of the works for organ. In contrast to other catalogues such as the Köchel catalogue for Mozart's compositions there is no attempt at chronological organization in the BWV numbering, for instance BWV 992 is an early composition by Bach. Exceptionally BWV numbers are also indicated as Schmieder (S) numbers (e.g. S. 225 = BWV 225).",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Another consequence of the ordering principles of the BWV was that it tore known collections apart, for instance Clavier-Übung III was partly in the organ compositions range (BWV 552 and 669–689), with the four duets listed among the keyboard compositions (BWV 802–805).",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Anhang (Anh.), i.e. Appendix, of the BWV listed works that were not suitable for the main catalogue, in three sections:",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Within each section of the Anhang the works are sorted by genre, following the same sequence of genres as the main catalogue.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Schmieder published the BWV's second edition in 1990, with some modifications regarding authenticity discriminations, and more works added to the main catalogue and the Anhang. A strict numerical collation was abandoned to insert additions, or when for another reason compositions were regrouped. For example, BWV 11, formerly listed as a Cantata, was moved to the fourth chapter of the main catalogue as an Oratorio. Rather than renumbering a composition, an arrow indicated where the composition was inserted: \"BWV 11/249b→\" meaning \"BWV 11, inserted after BWV 249b\" (4th chapter). Similarly, BWV 1083/243a→ meant BWV 1083, inserted after BWV 243a (3rd chapter). Also authenticity discriminations, based on new research, could lead to such repositionings within the catalogue, e.g. \"BWV Anh. II 114\" became \"Anh. II 114/Anh. III 183→ indicating it was now considered a spurious work.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1998 Alfred Dürr and Yoshitake Kobayashi published a small edition of the catalogue, based on the 1990 second edition. This edition, known as BWV, contained a few further updates and collation rearrangements.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "New additions (Nachträge) to BWV/BWV included:",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "A few exceptions to the principle that compositions were not renumbered were when a composition from the Anhang could be recovered or authenticated as Bach's, so that it deserved a place in the main catalogue, in which case it was given a number above 1080. So, for example, BWV Anh. 205 (BWV) → BWV 1121 (BWV, where it is in section 7 as a work for organ).",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Other renumberings and additional numbers involved alternative or earlier versions of basically the same composition, which were indicated by adding a lower case letter to the BWV number. Examples:",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Some versions were completely removed from the catalogue, e.g. BWV 655b and c.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Slashes indicate movements: e.g. BWV 149/1 indicates the first movement of the Cantata BWV 149. Another example: the Agnus Dei of the Mass in B minor can be indicated as BWV 232/22 (22nd movement of the composition), or alternatively as BWV 232/4 (BWV 232, fourth movement of Part IV).",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Numbers above BWV 1126 were added in the 21st century.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "An upper case R added to a BWV number indicates a reconstructed version, that is a conjectured earlier version of a known composition. One of such reconstructions, the Concerto for oboe and violin, as published in NBA VII/7 (Supplement) p. 75, based on the double harpsichord concerto BWV 1060, is known as BWV 1060R.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "As of mid-2018 the Bach digital website started to implement the new numbers of the 3rd edition of the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, which has been announced for publication in 2020. For example, the Leipzig version of the Christ lag in Todes Banden cantata used to be BWV 4 in previous versions of the catalogue, and, in BWV, has become BWV 4.2.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In the meantime, the New Bach Edition (Neue Bach-Ausgabe, abbreviated as NBA) was being published, offering a new system to refer to Bach's works, e.g. NBA IV/4: 2, 105, which is Series IV, Volume 4, p. 2 (Prelude) and p. 105 (Fugue), for BWV 552.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Some years after the completion of the NBA in 2007 its publisher Bärenreiter joined with the Bach Archive again to publish revised editions of some of Bach's scores. These revised editions, aligning with the NBA editions (format, layout), but outside that group of publications, were published under the name Johann Sebastian Bach: New Edition of the Complete Works – Revised Edition (Johann Sebastian Bach: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke – Revidierte Edition), in short: New Bach Edition – Revised (Neue Bach-Ausgabe – Revidierte Edition), abbreviated as NBArev. Where the original NBA editions were exclusively in German, the volumes of the Revised series have their introductions both in German and English. Its first volume, NBArev 1, was a new edition of the Mass in B minor, appearing in 2010.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Bach Compendium (BC), a catalogue covering Bach's vocal works was published in 1985. Occasionally works that have no BWV number can be identified by their BC number, e.g. BC C 8 for \"Der Gerechte kömmt um\" an arrangement attributed to Bach on stylistic grounds, however unmentioned in the BWV.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Bachs Notenbibliothek (BNB) is a list of works Bach had at his disposition. Works of other composers which were arranged by Bach or which he (had) copied for performance usually have a BNB number.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin = SBB) holds an important collection of composition manuscripts relating to Bach. Some versions of works are best known by their principal manuscript in the SBB, for instance BWV 525a = SBB St 345, or according to the abbreviations used at the Bach-digital website D-B Mus. ms. Bach St 345.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Apart from indicating his first published keyboard composition as Opus 1, Bach did not use opus numbers. Lists following publication chronologies are for example implied in the first list in Bach's obituary, and BG numbers (within the BGA sequence of publication) – overall lists covering all of Bach's compositions in order of first publication are however not a way Bach's compositions are usually presented.",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Listing Bach's works according to their time of composition cannot be done comprehensively: for many works the period in which they were composed is a very wide range. For Bach's larger vocal works (cantatas, Passions,...) research has led to some more or less generally accepted chronologies, covering most of these works: a catalogue in this sense is Philippe (and Gérard) Zwang's list giving a chronological number to the cantatas BWV 1–215 and 248–249. This list was published in 1982 as Guide pratique des cantates de Bach in Paris, ISBN 2-221-00749-2. A revised edition was published in 2005 (ISBN 2747598888).",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Various catalogues with works by other composers have intersections with collections of works associated with Bach:",
"title": "Listing Bach's compositions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "There are over 1500 works that feature in a catalogue of works by Bach, like the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, or in a collection of works associated with Bach (e.g. in one of the Notebooks for Anna Magdalena Bach). Of these around a thousand are original compositions by Bach, that is: more than a mere copy or transcription of an earlier work by himself or another composer.",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In the 1950 first edition of the BWV the cantatas were largely listed according to their BGA number:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Additionally Anh. I of the first edition of the BWV started with a list of some 20 lost cantatas, while Anh. III of that edition listed a few cantata (movements) by other composers (Anh. 156–158).",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "BWV added many more lost cantatas (BWV Anh. 190–199 and 209–212) and alternative versions to known works indicating (partially) lost cantatas or cantata versions, e.g. BWV 244a, the music of which was partially preserved in the St Matthew Passion, BWV 244.",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "There are over a dozen motets attributed to Bach, about half of which are authentic by all accounts:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Bach's involvement with Latin church music, as composer, arranger or copyist, includes:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Passions and oratorios composed or contributed to by Bach include:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Bach's chorale settings (usually for SATB choir) are included in:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Songs and (separate) arias by Bach are included in several collections:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Associated with the Songs and Arias group:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Bach's organ compositions include:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Bach's works for harpsichord, clavichord and other keyboard instruments include:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Bach's compositions for lute or lute-harpsichord (Lautenwerck) include:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Bach wrote chamber music for solo violin, cello or flute, sonatas for harpsichord and an instrumental soloist, and trio sonatas:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Bach wrote concertos and orchestral suites:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Separate canons by Bach are listed in the 12th chapter of the BWV:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The list of late contrapuntal works contains only two items:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Additions as published in BWV",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "BWV Anh. 190–213 were added between the 1950 and 1990s editions of the catalogue",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "BWV numbers assigned after the publication of BWV:",
"title": "Works in Bach's catalogues and collections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "There is not much system in the way works derived from Bach's compositions are listed. The \"R\" addition to the BWV number is only well-established for the reconstructions included in NBA VII/7 (e.g. solo violin reconstructions of BWV 565 are not usually indicated as BWV 565R, neither is the system used for reconstructed vocal works). For some series of transcriptions and arrangements works catalogues of these transcribers/arrangers may hold sublists with works derived from compositions by Bach.",
"title": "Derivative works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Each reconstructed concerto is created after the harpsichord concerto for the presumed original instrument. Such reconstructions are commonly referred to as, for example, BWV 1052R (where the R stands for 'reconstructed'). Other reconstructions and completions of for instance BWV 1059 have been indicated as BWV 1059, or BWV 1059a.",
"title": "Derivative works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Transcriptions and arrangements in the catalogues of works by other composers include:",
"title": "Derivative works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "For abbreviations used in the references see also Bibliography at www.bachdigital.de",
"title": "References"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Bibliography",
"title": "References"
}
]
| Johann Sebastian Bach's vocal music includes cantatas, motets, masses, Magnificats, Passions, oratorios, four-part chorales, songs and arias. His instrumental music includes concertos, suites, sonatas, fugues, and other works for organ, harpsichord, lute, violin, viola da gamba, cello, flute, chamber ensemble and orchestra. There are over 1000 known compositions by Bach. Nearly all of them are listed in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV), which is the best known and most widely used catalogue of Bach's compositions. | 2001-09-15T12:56:04Z | 2023-12-31T21:56:31Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Johann_Sebastian_Bach |
15,911 | July 30 | July 30 is the 211th day of the year (212th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 154 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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"text": "July 30 is the 211th day of the year (212th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 154 days remain until the end of the year.",
"title": ""
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| July 30 is the 211th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 154 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-08-13T11:56:06Z | 2023-12-01T02:15:45Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_30 |
15,912 | John A. Macdonald | Sir John Alexander Macdonald GCB PC QC (January 10 or 11, 1815 – June 6, 1891) was the first prime minister of Canada, serving from 1867 to 1873 and from 1878 to 1891. He was the dominant figure of Canadian Confederation, and had a political career that spanned almost half a century.
Macdonald was born in Scotland; when he was a boy his family immigrated to Kingston in the Province of Upper Canada (today in eastern Ontario). As a lawyer, he was involved in several high-profile cases and quickly became prominent in Kingston, which elected him in 1844 to the legislature of the Province of Canada. By 1857, he had become premier under the colony's unstable political system. In 1864, when no party proved capable of governing for long, Macdonald agreed to a proposal from his political rival, George Brown, that the parties unite in a Great Coalition to seek federation and political reform. Macdonald was the leading figure in the subsequent discussions and conferences, which resulted in the British North America Act and the establishment of Canada as a nation on July 1, 1867.
Macdonald was the first prime minister of the new nation, and served 19 years; only William Lyon Mackenzie King has served longer. In his first term, Macdonald established the North-West Mounted Police and expanded Canada by annexing the North-Western Territory, Rupert's Land, British Columbia, and Prince Edward Island. In 1873, he resigned from office over a scandal in which his party took bribes from businessmen seeking the contract to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. However, he was re-elected in 1878. Macdonald's greatest achievements were building and guiding a successful national government for the new Dominion, using patronage to forge a strong Conservative Party, promoting the protective tariff of the National Policy, and completing the railway. He fought to block provincial efforts to take power back from the national government in Ottawa. He approved the execution of Métis leader Louis Riel for treason in 1885 which alienated many francophones from his Conservative Party. He continued as prime minister until his death in 1891. He remains the oldest prime minister in Canadian history.
In the 21st century, Macdonald has come under criticism for his role in the Chinese Head Tax and federal policies towards Indigenous peoples, including his actions during the North-West Rebellion that resulted in Riel's execution, and the development of the residential school system designed to assimilate Indigenous children. Macdonald, however, remains respected for his key role in the formation of Canada. Historical rankings in surveys of experts in Canadian political history have consistently placed Macdonald as one of the highest-rated prime ministers in Canadian history.
John Alexander Macdonald was born in Ramshorn parish in Glasgow, Scotland, on January 10 (official record) or 11 (father's journal) 1815. His father Hugh, an unsuccessful merchant, had married John's mother, Helen Shaw, on October 21, 1811. John Alexander Macdonald was the third of five children. After Hugh's business ventures left him in debt, the family immigrated to Kingston, in Upper Canada (today the southern and eastern portions of Ontario), in 1820, as the family had several relatives and connections there.
The family initially lived together, then resided over a store which Hugh Macdonald ran. Soon after their arrival, John's younger brother James died from a blow to the head by a servant charged with taking care of the boys. After Hugh's store failed, the family moved to Hay Bay (south of Napanee, Ontario), west of Kingston, where Hugh unsuccessfully ran another shop. In 1829, his father was appointed as a magistrate for the Midland District. John Macdonald's mother was a lifelong influence on her son, helping him in his difficult first marriage and remaining influential in his life until her 1862 death.
Macdonald initially attended local schools. When he was aged 10, his family gathered enough money to send him to Midland District Grammar School in Kingston. Macdonald's formal schooling ended at 15, a common school-leaving age at a time when only children from the most prosperous families were able to attend university. Macdonald later regretted leaving school when he did, remarking to his secretary Joseph Pope that if he had attended university, he might have embarked on a literary career.
Macdonald's parents decided he should become a lawyer after leaving school. As Donald Creighton (who penned a two-volume biography of Macdonald in the 1950s) wrote, "law was a broad, well-trodden path to comfort, influence, even to power". It was also "the obvious choice for a boy who seemed as attracted to study as he was uninterested in trade." Macdonald needed to start earning money immediately to support his family because his father's businesses were failing. "I had no boyhood," he complained many years later. "From the age of 15, I began to earn my own living."
Macdonald travelled by steamboat to Toronto (known until 1834 as York), where he passed an examination set by The Law Society of Upper Canada. British North America had no law schools in 1830; students were examined when beginning and ending their tutelage. Between the two examinations, they were apprenticed, or articled to established lawyers. Macdonald began his apprenticeship with George Mackenzie, a prominent young lawyer who was a well-regarded member of Kingston's rising Scottish community. Mackenzie practised corporate law, a lucrative speciality that Macdonald himself would later pursue. Macdonald was a promising student, and in the summer of 1833, managed the Mackenzie office when his employer went on a business trip to Montreal and Quebec in Lower Canada (today the southern portion of the province of Quebec). Later that year, Macdonald was sent to manage the law office of a Mackenzie cousin who had fallen ill.
In August 1834, George Mackenzie died of cholera. With his supervising lawyer dead, Macdonald remained at the cousin's law office in Hallowell (today Picton, Ontario). In 1835, Macdonald returned to Kingston, and even though not yet of age nor qualified, began his practice as a lawyer, hoping to gain his former employer's clients. Macdonald's parents and sisters also returned to Kingston.
Soon after Macdonald was called to the Bar in February 1836, he arranged to take in two students; both became, like Macdonald, Fathers of Confederation. Oliver Mowat became premier of Ontario, and Alexander Campbell a federal cabinet minister and Lieutenant Governor of Ontario. One early client was Eliza Grimason, an Irish immigrant then aged sixteen, who sought advice concerning a shop she and her husband wanted to buy. Grimason would become one of Macdonald's richest and most loyal supporters, and may have also become his lover. Macdonald joined many local organisations, seeking to become well known in the town. He also sought out high-profile cases, representing accused child rapist William Brass. Brass was hanged for his crime, but Macdonald attracted positive press comments for the quality of his defence. According to one of his biographers, Richard Gwyn:
As a criminal lawyer who took on dramatic cases, Macdonald got himself noticed well beyond the narrow confines of the Kingston business community. He was operating now in the arena where he would spend by far the greatest part of his life – the court of public opinion. And, while there, he was learning the arts of argument and of persuasion that would serve him all his political life.
All male Upper Canadians between 18 and 60 years of age were members of the Sedentary Militia, which was called into active duty during the Rebellions of 1837. Macdonald served as a Private in Captain George Well's Company of the Commercial Bank Guard.
Macdonald and the militia marched to Toronto to confront the rebels, and Sir Joseph Pope, Macdonald's private secretary, recalled Macdonald's account of his experience during the march:
"I carried my musket in '37", he was wont to say in after years. One day he gave me an account of a long march his company made, I forget from what place, but Toronto was the objective point: "The day was hot, my feet were blistered — I was but a weary boy — and I thought I should have dropped under the weight of the old flint musket which galled my shoulder. But I managed to keep up with my companion, a grim old soldier who seemed impervious to fatigue."
The Bank Guard served on active duty in Toronto guarding the Commercial Bank of the Midland District on King Street. The company was present at the Battle of Montgomery's Tavern and Macdonald recalled in an 1887 letter to Sir James Gowan that:
"I was in the Second or Third Company behind the cannon that opened out on Montgomery’s House. During the week of the rebellion I was [in] the Commercial Bank Guard in the house on King Street, afterward the habitat of George Brown’s 'Globe'."
The Bank Guard was taken off active service on December 17, 1837, and returned to Kingston.
On February 15, 1838, Macdonald was appointed an Ensign in the 3rd (East) Regiment of Frontenac Militia but did not take up the position, serving briefly as a Private in the regiment, patrolling the area around Kingston. The town saw no real action during 1838 and Macdonald was not called upon to fire on the enemy, however the Frontenac Militia regiments were on active duty in Kingston while the Battle of the Windmill occurred.
Although most of the trials resulting from the Upper Canada Rebellion took place in Toronto, Macdonald represented one of the defendants in the one trial to take place in Kingston. All the Kingston defendants were acquitted, and a local paper described Macdonald as "one of the youngest barristers in the Province [who] is rapidly rising in his profession".
In late 1838, Macdonald agreed to advise one of a group of American raiders who had crossed the border to liberate Canada from what they saw as the yoke of British colonial oppression. The invaders had been captured after the Battle of the Windmill near Prescott, Upper Canada. Public opinion was inflamed against the prisoners, as they were accused of mutilating the body of a dead Canadian lieutenant. Macdonald could not represent the prisoners, as they were tried by court-martial and civilian counsel had no standing. At the request of Kingston relatives of Daniel George, paymaster of the ill-fated invasion, Macdonald agreed to advise George, who, like the other prisoners, had to conduct his own defence. George was convicted and hanged. According to Macdonald biographer Donald Swainson, "By 1838, Macdonald's position was secure. He was a public figure, a popular young man, and a senior lawyer."
Macdonald continued to expand his practice while being appointed director of many companies, mainly in Kingston. He became both a director of and a lawyer for the new Commercial Bank of the Midland District. Throughout the 1840s, Macdonald invested heavily in real estate, including commercial properties in downtown Toronto. Meanwhile, he was suffering from some illness, and in 1841, his father died. Sick and grieving, he decided to take a lengthy holiday in Britain in early 1842. He left for the journey well supplied with money, as he spent the last three days before his departure gambling at the card game loo and winning substantially. Sometime during his two months in Britain, he met his first cousin, Isabella Clark. As Macdonald did not mention her in his letters home, the circumstances of their meeting are not known. In late 1842, Isabella journeyed to Kingston to visit with a sister. The visit stretched for nearly a year before John and Isabella Macdonald married on September 1, 1843.
On March 29, 1843, Macdonald was elected as alderman in Kingston's Fourth Ward, with 156 votes against 43 for his opponent, Colonel Jackson. He also suffered what he termed his first downfall, as his supporters, carrying the victorious candidate, accidentally dropped him onto a slushy street.
The British Parliament had merged Upper and Lower Canada into the Province of Canada in 1841. Kingston became the initial capital of the new province; Upper Canada and Lower Canada became known as Canada West and Canada East. In March 1844, Macdonald was asked by local businessmen to stand as Conservative candidate for Kingston in the upcoming legislative election. Macdonald followed the contemporary custom of supplying the voters with large quantities of alcohol. Votes were publicly declared in this election, and Macdonald defeated his opponent, Anthony Manahan, by 275 "shouts" to 42 when the election concluded on October 15, 1844. Macdonald was never an orator, and especially disliked the bombastic addresses of the time. Instead, he found a niche in becoming an expert on election law and parliamentary procedure.
In 1844, Isabella fell ill. She recovered, but the illness recurred the following year, and she became an invalid. John took his wife to Savannah, Georgia, in the United States in 1845, hoping that the sea air and warmth would cure her ailments. John returned to Canada after six months and Isabella remained in the United States for three years. He visited her again in New York at the end of 1846 and returned several months later when she informed him she was pregnant. In August 1847 their son John Alexander Macdonald Jr. was born in New York, but as Isabella remained ill, relatives cared for the infant.
Although he was often absent due to his wife's illness, Macdonald was able to gain professional and political advancement. In 1846, he was made a Queen's Counsel. The same year, he was offered the non-cabinet post of solicitor general, but declined it. In 1847, Macdonald became receiver general. Accepting the government post required Macdonald to give up his law firm income and spend most of his time in Montreal, away from Isabella. When elections were held in December 1848 and January 1849, Macdonald was easily reelected for Kingston, but the Conservatives lost seats and were forced to resign when the legislature reconvened in March 1848. Macdonald returned to Kingston when the legislature was not sitting, and Isabella joined him there in June. In August, their child died suddenly. In March 1850, Isabella Macdonald gave birth to another boy, Hugh John Macdonald, and his father wrote, "We have got Johnny back again, almost his image." Macdonald began to drink heavily around this time, both in public and in private, which Patricia Phenix, who studied Macdonald's private life, attributes to his family troubles.
The Liberals, or Grits, maintained power in the 1851 election but were soon divided by a parliamentary scandal. In September, the government resigned, and a coalition government uniting parties from both parts of the province under Allan MacNab took power. Macdonald did much of the work of putting the government together and served as attorney general. The coalition, which came to power in 1854, became known as the Liberal-Conservatives (referred to, for short, as the Conservatives). In 1855, George-Étienne Cartier of Canada East (today Quebec) joined the Cabinet. Until Cartier's 1873 death, he would be Macdonald's political partner. In 1856, MacNab was eased out as premier by Macdonald, who became the leader of the Canada West Conservatives. Macdonald remained as attorney general when Étienne-Paschal Taché became premier.
In July 1857, Macdonald departed for Britain to promote Canadian government projects. On his return to Canada, he was appointed premier in place of the retiring Taché, just in time to lead the Conservatives in a general election. Macdonald was elected in Kingston by 1,189 votes to 9 for John Shaw; other Conservatives, however, did badly in Canada West, and only French-Canadian support kept Macdonald in power. On December 28, Isabella Macdonald died, leaving John a widower with a seven-year-old son. Hugh John Macdonald would be principally raised by his paternal aunt and her husband.
The Assembly had voted to move the seat of government permanently to Quebec City. Macdonald opposed this and used his power to force the Assembly to reconsider in 1857. Macdonald proposed that Queen Victoria decide which city should be Canada's capital. Opponents, especially from Canada East, argued that the Queen would not make the decision in isolation; she would be bound to receive informal advice from her Canadian ministers. Macdonald's scheme was adopted, with Canada East support assured by allowing Quebec City to serve a three-year term as the seat of government before the Assembly moved to the permanent capital. Macdonald privately asked the Colonial Office to ensure that the Queen would not respond for at least 10 months, or until after the general election. In February 1858, the Queen's choice was announced, much to the dismay of many legislators from both parts of the province: the isolated Canada West town of Ottawa became the capital.
On July 28, 1858, an opposition Canada East member proposed an address to the Queen informing her that Ottawa was an unsuitable place for a national capital. Macdonald's Canada East party members crossed the floor to vote for the address, and the government was defeated. Macdonald resigned, and the Governor General, Sir Edmund Walker Head, invited opposition leader George Brown to form a government. Under the law at that time, Brown and his ministers lost their seats in the Assembly by accepting their positions, and had to face by-elections. This gave Macdonald a majority pending the by-elections, and he promptly defeated the government. Head refused Brown's request for a dissolution of the Assembly, and Brown and his ministers resigned. Head then asked Macdonald to form a government. The law allowed anyone who had held a ministerial position within the last thirty days to accept a new position without needing to face a by-election; Macdonald and his ministers accepted new positions, then completed what was dubbed the "Double Shuffle" by returning to their old posts. In an effort to give the appearance of fairness, Head insisted that Cartier be the titular premier, with Macdonald as his deputy.
In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Canada enjoyed a period of great prosperity, while the railroad and telegraph improved communications. According to Macdonald biographer Richard Gwyn, "In short, Canadians began to become a single community." At the same time, the provincial government became increasingly difficult to manage. An act affecting both Canada East and Canada West required a "double majority"—a majority of legislators from each of the two sections of the province. This led to increasing deadlock in the Assembly. The two sections each elected 65 legislators, even though Canada West had a larger population. One of Brown's major demands was representation by population, which would lead to Canada West having more seats; this was bitterly opposed by Canada East.
The American Civil War led to fears in Canada and in Britain that once the Americans had concluded their internal warfare, they would invade Canada again. Canada was sometimes a safe haven for Confederate Secret Service operations against the U.S. ; many Canadian citizens and politicians were sympathetic to the Confederacy. This led to events such as the Chesapeake Affair, the St. Albans Raid, and a failed attempt to burn down New York City. As attorney general of Canada West, Macdonald refused to prosecute Confederate operatives who were using British territory to launch attacks on U.S. soil across the border.
With Canadians fearing invasion from the U.S., the British asked that Canadians pay a part of the expense of defence, and a Militia Bill was introduced in the Assembly in 1862. The opposition objected to the expense, and Canada East representatives feared that French-Canadians would have to fight in a British-instigated war. Macdonald was drinking heavily and failed to provide much leadership on behalf of the bill. The government fell over the bill, and the Grits took over under the leadership of John Sandfield Macdonald (no relation to John A. Macdonald). The parties held an almost equal number of seats, with a handful of independents able to destroy any government. The new government fell in May 1863, but Head allowed a new election, which did little to change party standings. In December 1863, Canada West MP Albert Norton Richards accepted the post of solicitor general, and so had to face a by-election. John A. Macdonald campaigned against Richards personally, and Richards was defeated by a Conservative. The switch in seats cost the Grits their majority, and they resigned in March. John A. Macdonald returned to office with Taché as titular premier. The Taché-Macdonald government was defeated in June. The parties were deadlocked to such an extent that, according to Swainson, "It was clear to everybody that the constitution of the Province of Canada was dead".
As his government had fallen again, Macdonald approached the new governor general, Lord Monck, to dissolve the legislature. Before Macdonald could act on this, Brown approached him through intermediaries; the Grit leader believed that the crisis gave the parties the opportunity to join together for constitutional reform. Brown had led a parliamentary committee on confederation among the British North American colonies, which had reported back just before the Taché-Macdonald government fell. Brown was more interested in representation by population; Macdonald's priority was a federation that the other colonies could join. The two compromised and agreed that the new government would support the "federative principle"—a conveniently elastic phrase. The discussions were not public knowledge and Macdonald stunned the Assembly by announcing that the dissolution was being postponed because of progress in negotiations with Brown—the two men were not only political rivals, but were known to hate each other.
The parties resolved their differences, joining in the Great Coalition, with only the Parti rouge of Canada East, led by Jean-Baptiste-Éric Dorion, remaining apart. A conference, called by the Colonial Office, was scheduled for September 1, 1864, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; the Maritimes were to consider a union. The Canadians obtained permission to send a delegation—led by Macdonald, Cartier, and Brown—to what became known as the Charlottetown Conference. At its conclusion, the Maritime delegations expressed a willingness to join a confederation if the details could be successfully negotiated.
In October 1864, delegates for Confederation met in Quebec City for the Quebec Conference, where they agreed to the Seventy-Two Resolutions, the basis of Canada's government. The Great Coalition was endangered by Taché's 1865 death; Lord Monck asked Macdonald to become premier, but Brown felt that he had as good a claim on the position as his coalition partner. The disagreement was resolved by appointing another compromise candidate to serve as titular premier, Narcisse-Fortunat Belleau.
In 1865, after lengthy debates, Canada's legislative assembly approved confederation by 91 votes to 33. None of the Maritimes, however, had approved the plan. In 1866, Macdonald and his colleagues financed pro-confederation candidates in the New Brunswick general election, resulting in a pro-confederation assembly. Shortly after the election, Nova Scotia's premier, Charles Tupper, pushed a pro-confederation resolution through that colony's legislature. A final conference, to be held in London, was needed before the British parliament could formalise the union. Maritime delegates left for London in July 1866, but Macdonald, who was drinking heavily again, did not leave until November, angering the Maritimers. In December 1866, Macdonald both led the London Conference, winning acclaim for his handling of the discussions, and courted and married his second wife, Agnes Bernard. Bernard was the sister of Macdonald's private secretary, Hewitt Bernard; the couple first met in Quebec in 1860, but Macdonald had seen and admired her as early as 1856. In January 1867, while still in London, he was seriously burned in his hotel room when his candle set fire to the chair he had fallen asleep in, but Macdonald refused to miss any sessions of the conference. In February, he married Agnes at St George's, Hanover Square. On March 8, the British North America Act, 1867, which would thereafter serve as the major part of Canada's constitution, passed the House of Commons (it had previously passed the House of Lords). Queen Victoria gave the bill Royal Assent on March 29, 1867.
Macdonald had favoured the union coming into force on July 15, fearing that the preparations would not be completed any earlier. The British favoured an earlier date and, on May 22, it was announced that Canada would come into existence on July 1. Lord Monck appointed Macdonald as the new nation's first prime minister. With the birth of the new nation, Canada East and Canada West became separate provinces, known as Quebec and Ontario, respectively. Macdonald was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) on that first observance of what came to be known as Dominion Day, later called Canada Day, on July 1, 1867.
Macdonald and his government faced immediate problems upon the formation of the new country. Much work remained to do in creating a federal government. Nova Scotia was already threatening to withdraw from the union; the Intercolonial Railway, which would both conciliate the Maritimes and bind them closer to the rest of Canada, was not yet built. Anglo-American relations were in a poor state, and Canadian foreign relations were matters handled from London. The withdrawal of the Americans in 1866 from the Reciprocity Treaty had increased tariffs on Canadian goods in US markets. American and British opinion was that the experiment of Confederation would quickly unravel, and the nascent nation absorbed by the United States.
In August 1867, the new nation's first general election was held; Macdonald's party won easily, with strong support in both large provinces, and a majority from New Brunswick. By 1869, Nova Scotia had agreed to remain part of Canada after a promise of better financial terms—the first of many provinces to negotiate concessions from Ottawa. Pressure from London and Ottawa failed to gain the accession of Newfoundland, whose voters rejected a Confederation platform in a general election in October 1869.
In 1869, John and Agnes Macdonald had a daughter, Mary. It soon became apparent that Mary had ongoing developmental issues; she was never able to walk, nor did she ever fully develop mentally. Hewitt Bernard, Deputy Minister of Justice and Macdonald's former secretary, also lived in the Macdonald house in Ottawa, together with Bernard's widowed mother. In May 1870, John Macdonald fell ill with gallstones; coupled with his frequent drinking, he may have developed a severe case of acute pancreatitis. In July, he moved to Prince Edward Island to convalesce, most likely conducting discussions aimed at drawing the island into Confederation at a time when some there supported joining the United States. The island joined Confederation in 1873.
Macdonald had once been tepid on the question of westward expansion of the Canadian provinces; as prime minister, he became a strong supporter of a bicoastal Canada. Immediately upon Confederation, he sent commissioners to London who in due course successfully negotiated the transfer of Rupert's Land and the North-Western Territory to Canada. The Hudson's Bay Company received £300,000 (CA$1,500,000) in compensation, and retained some trading posts as well as one-twentieth of the best farmland. Prior to the date of acquisition, the Canadian government faced unrest in the Red River Colony (today southeastern Manitoba, centred on Winnipeg). The local people, including the Métis, were fearful that rule would be imposed on them which did not take into account their interests, and rose in the Red River Rebellion led by Louis Riel. Unwilling to pay for a territory in insurrection, Macdonald had troops put down the uprising before the formal transfer; as a result of the unrest, the Red River Colony joined Confederation as the province of Manitoba, while the rest of the purchased lands became the North-West Territories.
Macdonald also wished to secure the colony of British Columbia. There was interest in the United States in bringing about the colony's annexation, and Macdonald wished to ensure his new nation had a Pacific outlet. The colony had an extremely large debt that would have to be assumed should it join Confederation. Negotiations were conducted in 1870, principally during Macdonald's illness and recuperation, with Cartier leading the Canadian delegation. Cartier offered British Columbia a railway linking it to the eastern provinces within ten years. The British Columbians, who privately had been prepared to accept far less generous terms, quickly agreed and joined Confederation in 1871. The Canadian Parliament ratified the terms after a debate over the high cost that cabinet member Alexander Morris described as the worst fight the Conservatives had had since Confederation.
There were continuing disputes with the Americans over deep-sea fishing rights, and in early 1871, an Anglo-American commission was appointed to settle outstanding matters between the British (and Canadians) and the Americans. Canada was hoping to secure compensation for damage done by Fenians raiding Canada from bases in the United States. Macdonald was appointed a British commissioner, a post he was reluctant to accept as he realised Canadian interests might be sacrificed for the mother country. This proved to be the case; Canada received no compensation for the raids and no significant trade advantages in the settlement, which required Canada to open her waters to American fishermen. Macdonald returned home to defend the Treaty of Washington against a political firestorm.
In the run-up to the 1872 election, Macdonald had yet to formulate a railway policy, or to devise the loan guarantees that would be needed to secure the construction. During the previous year, Macdonald had met with potential railway financiers such as Hugh Allan and considerable financial discussion took place. The greatest political problem Macdonald faced was the Washington treaty, which had not yet been debated in Parliament.
In early 1872, Macdonald submitted the treaty for ratification, and it passed the Commons with a majority of 66. The general election was held through late August and early September. Redistribution had given Ontario increased representation in the House; Macdonald spent much time campaigning in the province, for the most part outside Kingston. Widespread bribery of voters took place throughout Canada, a practice especially effective in the era when votes were publicly declared. Macdonald and the Conservatives saw their majority reduced from 35 to 8. The Liberals (as the Grits were coming to be known) did better than the Conservatives in Ontario, forcing the government to rely on the votes of Western and Maritime MPs who did not fully support the party.
Macdonald had hoped to award the charter for the Canadian Pacific Railway in early 1872, but negotiations dragged on between the government and the financiers. Macdonald's government awarded the Allan group the charter in late 1872. In 1873, when Parliament opened, Liberal MP Lucius Seth Huntington charged that government ministers had been bribed with large, undisclosed political contributions to award the charter. Documents soon came to light which substantiated what came to be known as the Pacific Scandal. The Allan-led financiers, who were secretly backed by the United States's Northern Pacific Railway, had donated $179,000 to the Tory election funds, they had received the charter, and Opposition newspapers began to publish telegrams signed by government ministers requesting large sums from the railway interest at the time the charter was under consideration. Macdonald had taken $45,000 in contributions from the railway interest himself. Substantial sums went to Cartier, who waged an expensive fight to try to retain his seat in Montreal East (he was defeated, but was subsequently returned for the Manitoba seat of Provencher). During the campaign Cartier had fallen ill with Bright's disease, which may have been causing his judgment to lapse; he died in May 1873 while seeking treatment in London.
Before Cartier's death, Macdonald attempted to use delay to extricate the government. The Opposition responded by leaking documents to friendly newspapers. On July 18, three papers published a telegram dated August 1872 from Macdonald requesting another $10,000 and promising "it will be the last time of asking". Macdonald was able to get a prorogation of Parliament in August by appointing a Royal Commission to look into the matter, but when Parliament reconvened in late October, the Liberals, feeling Macdonald could be defeated over the issue, applied immense pressure to wavering members. On November 3, Macdonald rose in the Commons to defend the government, and according to one of his biographer, P.B. Waite, he gave "the speech of his life, and, in a sense, for his life". He began his speech at 9 p.m., looking frail and ill, an appearance which quickly improved. As he spoke, he consumed numerous glasses of gin and water. He denied that there had been a corrupt bargain, and stated that such contributions were common to both political parties. After five hours, Macdonald concluded,
I leave it with this House with every confidence. I am equal to either fortune. I can see past the decision of this House either for or against me, but whether it be against me or for me, I know, and it is no vain boast to say so, for even my enemies will admit that I am no boaster, that there does not exist in Canada a man who has given more of his time, more of his heart, more of his wealth, or more of his intellect and power, as it may be, for the good of this Dominion of Canada.
Macdonald's speech was seen as a personal triumph, but it did little to salvage the fortunes of his government. With eroding support both in the Commons and among the public, Macdonald went to the Governor General, Lord Dufferin on November 5, and resigned; Liberal leader Alexander Mackenzie became the second prime minister of Canada. He is not known to have spoken of the events of the Pacific Scandal again.
On November 6, 1873, Macdonald offered his resignation as party leader to his caucus; it was refused. Mackenzie called an election for January 1874; the Conservatives were reduced to 70 seats out of the 206 in the Commons, giving Mackenzie a massive majority. The Conservatives bested the Liberals only in British Columbia; Mackenzie had called the terms by which the province had joined Confederation "impossible". Macdonald was returned in Kingston but was unseated on an election contest when bribery was proven; he won the ensuing by-election by 17 votes. According to Swainson, most observers viewed Macdonald as finished in politics, "a used-up and dishonoured man".
Macdonald was content to lead the Conservatives in a relaxed manner in opposition and await Liberal mistakes. He took long holidays and resumed his law practice, moving his family to Toronto and going into partnership with his son Hugh John. One mistake that Macdonald believed the Liberals had made was a free-trade agreement with Washington, negotiated in 1874; Macdonald had come to believe that protection was necessary to build Canadian industry. The Panic of 1873 had led to a worldwide depression; the Liberals found it difficult to finance the railway in such a climate, and were generally opposed to the line anyway—the slow pace of construction led to British Columbia claims that the agreement under which it had entered Confederation was in jeopardy of being broken.
By 1876, Macdonald and the Conservatives had adopted protectionism as party policy. This view was widely promoted in speeches at a number of political picnics, held across Ontario during the summer of 1876. Macdonald's proposals were popular with the public, and the Conservatives began to win a string of by-elections. By the end of 1876, the Tories had picked up 14 seats as a result of by-elections, reducing Mackenzie's Liberal majority from 70 to 42. Despite the success, Macdonald considered retirement, wishing only to reverse the voters' verdict of 1874—he considered Charles Tupper his heir apparent.
When Parliament convened in 1877, the Conservatives were confident and the Liberals defensive. After the Tories had a successful session in the early part of the year, another series of picnics commenced in the areas around Toronto. Macdonald even campaigned in Quebec, which he had rarely done, leaving speechmaking there to Cartier. More picnics followed in 1878, promoting proposals which would come to be collectively called the "National Policy": high tariffs, rapid construction of the transcontinental railway (the Canadian Pacific Railway or CPR), rapid agricultural development of the West using the railway, and policies which would attract immigrants to Canada. These picnics allowed Macdonald venues to show off his talents at campaigning, and were often lighthearted—at one, the Tory leader blamed agricultural pests on the Grits, and promised the insects would go away if the Conservatives were elected.
The final days of the 3rd Canadian Parliament were marked by explosive conflict, as Macdonald and Tupper alleged that MP and railway financier Donald Smith had been allowed to build the Pembina branch of the CPR (connecting to American lines) as a reward for betraying the Conservatives during the Pacific Scandal. The altercation continued even after the Commons had been summoned to the Senate to hear the dissolution read, as Macdonald spoke the final words recorded in the 3rd Parliament: "That fellow Smith is the biggest liar I ever saw!"
The election was called for September 17, 1878. Fearful that Macdonald would be defeated in Kingston, his supporters tried to get him to run in the safe Conservative riding of Cardwell; having represented his hometown for 35 years, he stood there again. In the election, Macdonald was defeated in his riding by Alexander Gunn, but the Conservatives swept to victory. Macdonald remained in the House of Commons, having quickly secured his election for Marquette, Manitoba; elections there were held later than in Ontario. His acceptance of office vacated his parliamentary seat, and Macdonald decided to stand for the British Columbia seat of Victoria, where the election was to be held on October 21. Macdonald was duly returned for Victoria, although he had never visited either Marquette or Victoria.
Part of the National Policy was implemented in the budget presented in February 1879. Under that budget, Canada became a high-tariff nation like the United States and Germany. The tariffs were designed to protect and build Canadian industry—finished textiles received a tariff of 34%, but the machinery to make them entered Canada free. Macdonald continued to fight for higher tariffs for the remainder of his life.
In January 1879, Macdonald commissioned politician Nicholas Flood Davin to write a report regarding the industrial boarding-school system in the United States. Now known as the Davin Report, the Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds was submitted to Ottawa on March 14, 1879, providing the basis for the Canadian Indian residential school system. It made the case for a cooperative approach between the Canadian government and the church to implement the "aggressive assimilation" pursued by President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. In 1883, Parliament approved $43,000 for three industrial schools and the first, Battleford Industrial School, opened on December 1 of that year. By 1900, there were 61 schools in operation. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the assimilation amounted to cultural genocide.
By the 1880s, Macdonald was becoming frailer, but he maintained his political acuity. In 1883, he secured the "Intoxicating Liquors Bill" which took the regulation system away from the provinces, in part to stymie his foe Premier Mowat. In his own case, Macdonald took better control of his drinking and binges had ended. "The great drinking-bouts, the gargantuan in sobriety's of his middle years, were dwindling away now into memories." As the budget moved forward, Macdonald found that the railway was progressing well: although little money had been spent on the project under Mackenzie, several hundred miles of track had been built and nearly the entire route surveyed. In 1880, Macdonald found a syndicate, led by George Stephen, willing to undertake the CPR project. Donald Smith (later Lord Strathcona) was a major partner in the syndicate, but because of the ill will between him and the Conservatives, Smith's participation was initially not made public, though it was well-known to Macdonald. In 1880, the Dominion took over Britain's remaining Arctic territories, which extended Canada to its present-day boundaries, with the exception of Newfoundland, which would not enter Confederation until 1949. Also in 1880, Canada sent its first diplomatic representative abroad, Sir Alexander Galt as High Commissioner to Britain. With good economic times, Macdonald and the Conservatives were returned with a slightly decreased majority in 1882. Macdonald was returned for the Ontario riding of Carleton.
The transcontinental railroad project was heavily subsidised by the government. The CPR was granted 25,000,000 acres (100,000 km; 39,000 sq mi) of land along the route of the railroad, and $25 million from the government. In addition, the government had to spend $32 million on the construction of other railways to support the CPR. The entire project was extremely costly, especially for a nation with only 4.1 million people in 1881. Between 1880 and 1885, as the railway was slowly built, the CPR repeatedly came close to financial ruin. The terrain in the Rocky Mountains was difficult and the route north of Lake Superior proved treacherous, as tracks and engines sank into the muskeg. When Canadian guarantees of the CPR's bonds failed to make them salable in a declining economy, Macdonald obtained a loan to the corporation from the Treasury—the bill authorizing it passed the Senate just before the firm would have become insolvent.
The Northwest again saw unrest. Many of the Manitoban Métis had moved into the territories and negotiations between the Métis and the Government to settle grievances over land rights proved difficult. Riel, who lived in exile in the United States since 1870, journeyed to Regina with the connivance of Macdonald's government, who believed he would prove a leader they could deal with. Instead, the Métis rose the following year under Riel in the North-West Rebellion. Macdonald put down the rebellion with militia troops transported by rail, and Riel was captured, tried for treason, convicted, and hanged. Macdonald refused to consider reprieving Riel, who was of uncertain mental health. The hanging of Riel was controversial, and alienated many Quebecers from the Conservatives and they were, like Riel, Catholic and culturally French Canadian; they soon realigned with the Liberals. Following the North-West Rebellion of 1885, Macdonald's government implemented restrictions upon the movement of indigenous groups, requiring them to receive formal permission from an Indian Department Official in order to go off-reserve.
The CPR was almost bankrupt, but its role in rushing troops to the crisis showed that it was helpful to maintain British control of the territory and Parliament provided money for its completion. On November 7, 1885, CPR manager William Van Horne wired Macdonald from Craigellachie, British Columbia that the last spike was inserted into the track, completing the railway. That same year, the Macdonald government enacted the Chinese Immigration Act, 1885. Macdonald told the House of Commons that, if the Chinese were not excluded from Canada, "the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed". In the summer of 1886, Macdonald travelled by rail to western Canada. On August 13, 1886, Macdonald used a silver hammer and pounded a gold spike to complete the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway.
In 1886, another dispute arose over fishing rights with the United States. Americans fishermen had been using treaty provisions allowing them to land in Canada to take on wood and water as a cover for clandestine inshore fishing. Several vessels were detained in Canadian ports, to the outrage of Americans, who demanded their release. Macdonald sought to pass a Fisheries Act which would override some of the treaty provisions, to the dismay of the British, who were still responsible for external relations. The British government instructed the Governor General, Lord Lansdowne, to reserve the bill for Royal Assent, effectively placing it on hold without vetoing it. After considerable discussion, the British government allowed Royal Assent at the end of 1886, and indicated it would send a warship to protect the fisheries if no agreement was reached with the Americans.
Fearing continued loss of political strength as poor economic times continued, Macdonald planned to hold an election by the end of 1886, but had not yet issued the writ when an Ontario provincial election was called by Liberal Ontario Premier Oliver Mowat. The provincial election was seen as a bellwether for the federal poll. Despite considerable campaigning by Macdonald, Mowat's Liberals were re-elected in Ontario and increased their majority. Macdonald dissolved the federal Parliament on January 15, 1887 for an election on February 22. During the campaign, the Quebec provincial Liberals formed a government (four months after the October 1886 Quebec election), forcing the Conservatives from power in Quebec City. Nevertheless, Macdonald and his cabinet campaigned hard in the winter election, with Tupper (the new High Commissioner to London) postponing his departure to try to bolster Conservative votes in Nova Scotia. The Liberal leader, Edward Blake, ran an uninspiring campaign, and the Conservatives were returned nationally with a majority of 35, winning easily in Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Manitoba. The Tories also took a narrow majority of Quebec's seats despite resentment over Riel's hanging. Macdonald became MP for Kingston once again. Even the younger ministers, such as future Prime Minister John Thompson, who sometimes differed with Macdonald on policy, admitted Macdonald was an essential electoral asset for the Conservatives.
Blake resigned after the defeat and was replaced by Wilfrid Laurier. Under Laurier's early leadership, the Liberals, who previously supported much of the National Policy, campaigned against it and called for "unrestricted reciprocity", or free trade, with the United States. Macdonald was willing to see some reciprocity with the United States, but was reluctant to lower many tariffs. American advocates of what they dubbed "commercial union" saw it as a prelude to political union, and did not scruple to say so, causing additional controversy in Canada.
Macdonald called an election for March 5, 1891. The Liberals were heavily financed by American interests; the Conservatives drew much financial support from the CPR. The 76-year-old prime minister collapsed during the campaign, and conducted political activities from his brother-in-law's house in Kingston. The Conservatives gained slightly in the popular vote, but their majority was reduced to 27. The parties broke even in the central part of the country but the Conservatives dominated in the Maritimes and Western Canada, leading Liberal MP Richard John Cartwright to claim that Macdonald's majority was dependent on "the shreds and patches of Confederation". After the election, Laurier and his Liberals grudgingly accepted the National Policy; when Laurier later became prime minister, he adopted it with only minor changes.
In May 1891, Macdonald suffered a stroke which left him partially paralysed and unable to speak. His health continued to deteriorate and he died in the late evening of June 6, 1891. Thousands filed by his open casket in the Senate Chamber; his body was transported by funeral train to his hometown of Kingston, with crowds greeting the train at each stop. On arrival in Kingston, Macdonald lay in state in City Hall, wearing the uniform of an Imperial Privy Counsellor. He was buried in Cataraqui Cemetery in Kingston, his grave near that of his first wife, Isabella.
Macdonald served just under 19 years as prime minister, a length of service only surpassed by William Lyon Mackenzie King. In polls, Macdonald has consistently been ranked as one of the greatest prime ministers in Canadian history. No cities or political subdivisions are named for Macdonald (with the exception of a small Manitoba village), nor are there any massive monuments. A peak in the Rockies, Mount Macdonald (c. 1887) at Rogers Pass, is named for him. In 2001, Parliament designated January 11 as Sir John A. Macdonald Day, but the day is not a federal holiday and generally passes unremarked. He appears on Canadian ten-dollar notes printed between 1971 and 2018. In 2015, the Royal Canadian Mint featured Macdonald's face on the Canadian two dollar coin, the Toonie, to celebrate his 200th birthday. Macdonald's name is also used in Ottawa's Ottawa Macdonald–Cartier International Airport (renamed in 1993) and Ontario Highway 401 (the Macdonald–Cartier Freeway c. 1968). His name is being phased out on Ottawa's Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway (River Parkway before 2012), being renamed to an indigenous term, Kichi Zibi Mikan.
A number of sites associated with Macdonald are preserved. His gravesite has been designated a National Historic Site of Canada. Bellevue House in Kingston, where the Macdonald family lived in the 1840s, is also a National Historic Site administered by Parks Canada, and has been restored to that time period. His Ottawa home, Earnscliffe, is the official residence of the British High Commissioner to Canada. Statues have been erected to Macdonald across Canada; one stands on Parliament Hill in Ottawa (by Louis-Philippe Hebert c. 1895). A statue of Macdonald stands atop a granite plinth originally intended for a statue of Queen Victoria in Toronto's Queen's Park, looking south on University Avenue. Macdonald's statue also stood in Kingston's City Park; the Kingston Historical Society annually holds a memorial service in his honour. On June 18, 2021, following the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the statue of Macdonald was removed from Kingston's City Park after city council voted 12–1 in favour of its removal, and is set to be installed at Cataraqui Cemetery where Macdonald is buried. In 2018, a statue of Macdonald was removed from outside Victoria City Hall, as part of the city's program for reconciliation with local First Nations. The Macdonald Monument in Montreal has been repeatedly vandalized, and on August 29, 2020, the statue in the monument was vandalized, toppled and decapitated. Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante condemned the actions and said the city plans to restore the statue.
Macdonald's biographers note his contribution to establishing Canada as a nation. Swainson suggests that Macdonald's desire for a free and tolerant Canada became part of its national outlook and contributed immeasurably to its character. Gwyn said Macdonald's accomplishments of Confederation and building the Canadian railroad were great, but he was also responsible for scandals and bad government policy for the execution of Riel and the head tax on Chinese workers. In 2017, the Canadian Historical Association had voted to remove Macdonald's name from their prize for best scholarly book about Canadian history. Historian James Daschuk acknowledges Macdonald's contributions as a founding figure of Canada, but states "He built the country. But he built the country on the backs of the Indigenous people." A biographical online article about Macdonald was deleted from the Scottish government's website in August 2018. A spokesperson for the Scottish government stated: "We acknowledge controversy around Sir John A Macdonald's legacy and the legitimate concerns expressed by Indigenous communities". On July 5, 2021, Canada's national library, Library and Archives Canada, deleted its web page on Canada's prime ministers, "First Among Equals", calling it "outdated and redundant".
Macdonald was awarded the following honorary degrees: | [
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"text": "Sir John Alexander Macdonald GCB PC QC (January 10 or 11, 1815 – June 6, 1891) was the first prime minister of Canada, serving from 1867 to 1873 and from 1878 to 1891. He was the dominant figure of Canadian Confederation, and had a political career that spanned almost half a century.",
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"text": "Macdonald was born in Scotland; when he was a boy his family immigrated to Kingston in the Province of Upper Canada (today in eastern Ontario). As a lawyer, he was involved in several high-profile cases and quickly became prominent in Kingston, which elected him in 1844 to the legislature of the Province of Canada. By 1857, he had become premier under the colony's unstable political system. In 1864, when no party proved capable of governing for long, Macdonald agreed to a proposal from his political rival, George Brown, that the parties unite in a Great Coalition to seek federation and political reform. Macdonald was the leading figure in the subsequent discussions and conferences, which resulted in the British North America Act and the establishment of Canada as a nation on July 1, 1867.",
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{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Macdonald was the first prime minister of the new nation, and served 19 years; only William Lyon Mackenzie King has served longer. In his first term, Macdonald established the North-West Mounted Police and expanded Canada by annexing the North-Western Territory, Rupert's Land, British Columbia, and Prince Edward Island. In 1873, he resigned from office over a scandal in which his party took bribes from businessmen seeking the contract to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. However, he was re-elected in 1878. Macdonald's greatest achievements were building and guiding a successful national government for the new Dominion, using patronage to forge a strong Conservative Party, promoting the protective tariff of the National Policy, and completing the railway. He fought to block provincial efforts to take power back from the national government in Ottawa. He approved the execution of Métis leader Louis Riel for treason in 1885 which alienated many francophones from his Conservative Party. He continued as prime minister until his death in 1891. He remains the oldest prime minister in Canadian history.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In the 21st century, Macdonald has come under criticism for his role in the Chinese Head Tax and federal policies towards Indigenous peoples, including his actions during the North-West Rebellion that resulted in Riel's execution, and the development of the residential school system designed to assimilate Indigenous children. Macdonald, however, remains respected for his key role in the formation of Canada. Historical rankings in surveys of experts in Canadian political history have consistently placed Macdonald as one of the highest-rated prime ministers in Canadian history.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "John Alexander Macdonald was born in Ramshorn parish in Glasgow, Scotland, on January 10 (official record) or 11 (father's journal) 1815. His father Hugh, an unsuccessful merchant, had married John's mother, Helen Shaw, on October 21, 1811. John Alexander Macdonald was the third of five children. After Hugh's business ventures left him in debt, the family immigrated to Kingston, in Upper Canada (today the southern and eastern portions of Ontario), in 1820, as the family had several relatives and connections there.",
"title": "Early years, 1815–1830"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The family initially lived together, then resided over a store which Hugh Macdonald ran. Soon after their arrival, John's younger brother James died from a blow to the head by a servant charged with taking care of the boys. After Hugh's store failed, the family moved to Hay Bay (south of Napanee, Ontario), west of Kingston, where Hugh unsuccessfully ran another shop. In 1829, his father was appointed as a magistrate for the Midland District. John Macdonald's mother was a lifelong influence on her son, helping him in his difficult first marriage and remaining influential in his life until her 1862 death.",
"title": "Early years, 1815–1830"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Macdonald initially attended local schools. When he was aged 10, his family gathered enough money to send him to Midland District Grammar School in Kingston. Macdonald's formal schooling ended at 15, a common school-leaving age at a time when only children from the most prosperous families were able to attend university. Macdonald later regretted leaving school when he did, remarking to his secretary Joseph Pope that if he had attended university, he might have embarked on a literary career.",
"title": "Early years, 1815–1830"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Macdonald's parents decided he should become a lawyer after leaving school. As Donald Creighton (who penned a two-volume biography of Macdonald in the 1950s) wrote, \"law was a broad, well-trodden path to comfort, influence, even to power\". It was also \"the obvious choice for a boy who seemed as attracted to study as he was uninterested in trade.\" Macdonald needed to start earning money immediately to support his family because his father's businesses were failing. \"I had no boyhood,\" he complained many years later. \"From the age of 15, I began to earn my own living.\"",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Macdonald travelled by steamboat to Toronto (known until 1834 as York), where he passed an examination set by The Law Society of Upper Canada. British North America had no law schools in 1830; students were examined when beginning and ending their tutelage. Between the two examinations, they were apprenticed, or articled to established lawyers. Macdonald began his apprenticeship with George Mackenzie, a prominent young lawyer who was a well-regarded member of Kingston's rising Scottish community. Mackenzie practised corporate law, a lucrative speciality that Macdonald himself would later pursue. Macdonald was a promising student, and in the summer of 1833, managed the Mackenzie office when his employer went on a business trip to Montreal and Quebec in Lower Canada (today the southern portion of the province of Quebec). Later that year, Macdonald was sent to manage the law office of a Mackenzie cousin who had fallen ill.",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In August 1834, George Mackenzie died of cholera. With his supervising lawyer dead, Macdonald remained at the cousin's law office in Hallowell (today Picton, Ontario). In 1835, Macdonald returned to Kingston, and even though not yet of age nor qualified, began his practice as a lawyer, hoping to gain his former employer's clients. Macdonald's parents and sisters also returned to Kingston.",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Soon after Macdonald was called to the Bar in February 1836, he arranged to take in two students; both became, like Macdonald, Fathers of Confederation. Oliver Mowat became premier of Ontario, and Alexander Campbell a federal cabinet minister and Lieutenant Governor of Ontario. One early client was Eliza Grimason, an Irish immigrant then aged sixteen, who sought advice concerning a shop she and her husband wanted to buy. Grimason would become one of Macdonald's richest and most loyal supporters, and may have also become his lover. Macdonald joined many local organisations, seeking to become well known in the town. He also sought out high-profile cases, representing accused child rapist William Brass. Brass was hanged for his crime, but Macdonald attracted positive press comments for the quality of his defence. According to one of his biographers, Richard Gwyn:",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "As a criminal lawyer who took on dramatic cases, Macdonald got himself noticed well beyond the narrow confines of the Kingston business community. He was operating now in the arena where he would spend by far the greatest part of his life – the court of public opinion. And, while there, he was learning the arts of argument and of persuasion that would serve him all his political life.",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "All male Upper Canadians between 18 and 60 years of age were members of the Sedentary Militia, which was called into active duty during the Rebellions of 1837. Macdonald served as a Private in Captain George Well's Company of the Commercial Bank Guard.",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Macdonald and the militia marched to Toronto to confront the rebels, and Sir Joseph Pope, Macdonald's private secretary, recalled Macdonald's account of his experience during the march:",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "\"I carried my musket in '37\", he was wont to say in after years. One day he gave me an account of a long march his company made, I forget from what place, but Toronto was the objective point: \"The day was hot, my feet were blistered — I was but a weary boy — and I thought I should have dropped under the weight of the old flint musket which galled my shoulder. But I managed to keep up with my companion, a grim old soldier who seemed impervious to fatigue.\"",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Bank Guard served on active duty in Toronto guarding the Commercial Bank of the Midland District on King Street. The company was present at the Battle of Montgomery's Tavern and Macdonald recalled in an 1887 letter to Sir James Gowan that:",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "\"I was in the Second or Third Company behind the cannon that opened out on Montgomery’s House. During the week of the rebellion I was [in] the Commercial Bank Guard in the house on King Street, afterward the habitat of George Brown’s 'Globe'.\"",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Bank Guard was taken off active service on December 17, 1837, and returned to Kingston.",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "On February 15, 1838, Macdonald was appointed an Ensign in the 3rd (East) Regiment of Frontenac Militia but did not take up the position, serving briefly as a Private in the regiment, patrolling the area around Kingston. The town saw no real action during 1838 and Macdonald was not called upon to fire on the enemy, however the Frontenac Militia regiments were on active duty in Kingston while the Battle of the Windmill occurred.",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Although most of the trials resulting from the Upper Canada Rebellion took place in Toronto, Macdonald represented one of the defendants in the one trial to take place in Kingston. All the Kingston defendants were acquitted, and a local paper described Macdonald as \"one of the youngest barristers in the Province [who] is rapidly rising in his profession\".",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In late 1838, Macdonald agreed to advise one of a group of American raiders who had crossed the border to liberate Canada from what they saw as the yoke of British colonial oppression. The invaders had been captured after the Battle of the Windmill near Prescott, Upper Canada. Public opinion was inflamed against the prisoners, as they were accused of mutilating the body of a dead Canadian lieutenant. Macdonald could not represent the prisoners, as they were tried by court-martial and civilian counsel had no standing. At the request of Kingston relatives of Daniel George, paymaster of the ill-fated invasion, Macdonald agreed to advise George, who, like the other prisoners, had to conduct his own defence. George was convicted and hanged. According to Macdonald biographer Donald Swainson, \"By 1838, Macdonald's position was secure. He was a public figure, a popular young man, and a senior lawyer.\"",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Macdonald continued to expand his practice while being appointed director of many companies, mainly in Kingston. He became both a director of and a lawyer for the new Commercial Bank of the Midland District. Throughout the 1840s, Macdonald invested heavily in real estate, including commercial properties in downtown Toronto. Meanwhile, he was suffering from some illness, and in 1841, his father died. Sick and grieving, he decided to take a lengthy holiday in Britain in early 1842. He left for the journey well supplied with money, as he spent the last three days before his departure gambling at the card game loo and winning substantially. Sometime during his two months in Britain, he met his first cousin, Isabella Clark. As Macdonald did not mention her in his letters home, the circumstances of their meeting are not known. In late 1842, Isabella journeyed to Kingston to visit with a sister. The visit stretched for nearly a year before John and Isabella Macdonald married on September 1, 1843.",
"title": "Legal career, 1830–1843"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "On March 29, 1843, Macdonald was elected as alderman in Kingston's Fourth Ward, with 156 votes against 43 for his opponent, Colonel Jackson. He also suffered what he termed his first downfall, as his supporters, carrying the victorious candidate, accidentally dropped him onto a slushy street.",
"title": "Political rise, 1843–1864"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The British Parliament had merged Upper and Lower Canada into the Province of Canada in 1841. Kingston became the initial capital of the new province; Upper Canada and Lower Canada became known as Canada West and Canada East. In March 1844, Macdonald was asked by local businessmen to stand as Conservative candidate for Kingston in the upcoming legislative election. Macdonald followed the contemporary custom of supplying the voters with large quantities of alcohol. Votes were publicly declared in this election, and Macdonald defeated his opponent, Anthony Manahan, by 275 \"shouts\" to 42 when the election concluded on October 15, 1844. Macdonald was never an orator, and especially disliked the bombastic addresses of the time. Instead, he found a niche in becoming an expert on election law and parliamentary procedure.",
"title": "Political rise, 1843–1864"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1844, Isabella fell ill. She recovered, but the illness recurred the following year, and she became an invalid. John took his wife to Savannah, Georgia, in the United States in 1845, hoping that the sea air and warmth would cure her ailments. John returned to Canada after six months and Isabella remained in the United States for three years. He visited her again in New York at the end of 1846 and returned several months later when she informed him she was pregnant. In August 1847 their son John Alexander Macdonald Jr. was born in New York, but as Isabella remained ill, relatives cared for the infant.",
"title": "Political rise, 1843–1864"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Although he was often absent due to his wife's illness, Macdonald was able to gain professional and political advancement. In 1846, he was made a Queen's Counsel. The same year, he was offered the non-cabinet post of solicitor general, but declined it. In 1847, Macdonald became receiver general. Accepting the government post required Macdonald to give up his law firm income and spend most of his time in Montreal, away from Isabella. When elections were held in December 1848 and January 1849, Macdonald was easily reelected for Kingston, but the Conservatives lost seats and were forced to resign when the legislature reconvened in March 1848. Macdonald returned to Kingston when the legislature was not sitting, and Isabella joined him there in June. In August, their child died suddenly. In March 1850, Isabella Macdonald gave birth to another boy, Hugh John Macdonald, and his father wrote, \"We have got Johnny back again, almost his image.\" Macdonald began to drink heavily around this time, both in public and in private, which Patricia Phenix, who studied Macdonald's private life, attributes to his family troubles.",
"title": "Political rise, 1843–1864"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Liberals, or Grits, maintained power in the 1851 election but were soon divided by a parliamentary scandal. In September, the government resigned, and a coalition government uniting parties from both parts of the province under Allan MacNab took power. Macdonald did much of the work of putting the government together and served as attorney general. The coalition, which came to power in 1854, became known as the Liberal-Conservatives (referred to, for short, as the Conservatives). In 1855, George-Étienne Cartier of Canada East (today Quebec) joined the Cabinet. Until Cartier's 1873 death, he would be Macdonald's political partner. In 1856, MacNab was eased out as premier by Macdonald, who became the leader of the Canada West Conservatives. Macdonald remained as attorney general when Étienne-Paschal Taché became premier.",
"title": "Political rise, 1843–1864"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In July 1857, Macdonald departed for Britain to promote Canadian government projects. On his return to Canada, he was appointed premier in place of the retiring Taché, just in time to lead the Conservatives in a general election. Macdonald was elected in Kingston by 1,189 votes to 9 for John Shaw; other Conservatives, however, did badly in Canada West, and only French-Canadian support kept Macdonald in power. On December 28, Isabella Macdonald died, leaving John a widower with a seven-year-old son. Hugh John Macdonald would be principally raised by his paternal aunt and her husband.",
"title": "Political rise, 1843–1864"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Assembly had voted to move the seat of government permanently to Quebec City. Macdonald opposed this and used his power to force the Assembly to reconsider in 1857. Macdonald proposed that Queen Victoria decide which city should be Canada's capital. Opponents, especially from Canada East, argued that the Queen would not make the decision in isolation; she would be bound to receive informal advice from her Canadian ministers. Macdonald's scheme was adopted, with Canada East support assured by allowing Quebec City to serve a three-year term as the seat of government before the Assembly moved to the permanent capital. Macdonald privately asked the Colonial Office to ensure that the Queen would not respond for at least 10 months, or until after the general election. In February 1858, the Queen's choice was announced, much to the dismay of many legislators from both parts of the province: the isolated Canada West town of Ottawa became the capital.",
"title": "Political rise, 1843–1864"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "On July 28, 1858, an opposition Canada East member proposed an address to the Queen informing her that Ottawa was an unsuitable place for a national capital. Macdonald's Canada East party members crossed the floor to vote for the address, and the government was defeated. Macdonald resigned, and the Governor General, Sir Edmund Walker Head, invited opposition leader George Brown to form a government. Under the law at that time, Brown and his ministers lost their seats in the Assembly by accepting their positions, and had to face by-elections. This gave Macdonald a majority pending the by-elections, and he promptly defeated the government. Head refused Brown's request for a dissolution of the Assembly, and Brown and his ministers resigned. Head then asked Macdonald to form a government. The law allowed anyone who had held a ministerial position within the last thirty days to accept a new position without needing to face a by-election; Macdonald and his ministers accepted new positions, then completed what was dubbed the \"Double Shuffle\" by returning to their old posts. In an effort to give the appearance of fairness, Head insisted that Cartier be the titular premier, with Macdonald as his deputy.",
"title": "Political rise, 1843–1864"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Canada enjoyed a period of great prosperity, while the railroad and telegraph improved communications. According to Macdonald biographer Richard Gwyn, \"In short, Canadians began to become a single community.\" At the same time, the provincial government became increasingly difficult to manage. An act affecting both Canada East and Canada West required a \"double majority\"—a majority of legislators from each of the two sections of the province. This led to increasing deadlock in the Assembly. The two sections each elected 65 legislators, even though Canada West had a larger population. One of Brown's major demands was representation by population, which would lead to Canada West having more seats; this was bitterly opposed by Canada East.",
"title": "Political rise, 1843–1864"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The American Civil War led to fears in Canada and in Britain that once the Americans had concluded their internal warfare, they would invade Canada again. Canada was sometimes a safe haven for Confederate Secret Service operations against the U.S. ; many Canadian citizens and politicians were sympathetic to the Confederacy. This led to events such as the Chesapeake Affair, the St. Albans Raid, and a failed attempt to burn down New York City. As attorney general of Canada West, Macdonald refused to prosecute Confederate operatives who were using British territory to launch attacks on U.S. soil across the border.",
"title": "Political rise, 1843–1864"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "With Canadians fearing invasion from the U.S., the British asked that Canadians pay a part of the expense of defence, and a Militia Bill was introduced in the Assembly in 1862. The opposition objected to the expense, and Canada East representatives feared that French-Canadians would have to fight in a British-instigated war. Macdonald was drinking heavily and failed to provide much leadership on behalf of the bill. The government fell over the bill, and the Grits took over under the leadership of John Sandfield Macdonald (no relation to John A. Macdonald). The parties held an almost equal number of seats, with a handful of independents able to destroy any government. The new government fell in May 1863, but Head allowed a new election, which did little to change party standings. In December 1863, Canada West MP Albert Norton Richards accepted the post of solicitor general, and so had to face a by-election. John A. Macdonald campaigned against Richards personally, and Richards was defeated by a Conservative. The switch in seats cost the Grits their majority, and they resigned in March. John A. Macdonald returned to office with Taché as titular premier. The Taché-Macdonald government was defeated in June. The parties were deadlocked to such an extent that, according to Swainson, \"It was clear to everybody that the constitution of the Province of Canada was dead\".",
"title": "Political rise, 1843–1864"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "As his government had fallen again, Macdonald approached the new governor general, Lord Monck, to dissolve the legislature. Before Macdonald could act on this, Brown approached him through intermediaries; the Grit leader believed that the crisis gave the parties the opportunity to join together for constitutional reform. Brown had led a parliamentary committee on confederation among the British North American colonies, which had reported back just before the Taché-Macdonald government fell. Brown was more interested in representation by population; Macdonald's priority was a federation that the other colonies could join. The two compromised and agreed that the new government would support the \"federative principle\"—a conveniently elastic phrase. The discussions were not public knowledge and Macdonald stunned the Assembly by announcing that the dissolution was being postponed because of progress in negotiations with Brown—the two men were not only political rivals, but were known to hate each other.",
"title": "Confederation of Canada, 1864–1867"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The parties resolved their differences, joining in the Great Coalition, with only the Parti rouge of Canada East, led by Jean-Baptiste-Éric Dorion, remaining apart. A conference, called by the Colonial Office, was scheduled for September 1, 1864, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; the Maritimes were to consider a union. The Canadians obtained permission to send a delegation—led by Macdonald, Cartier, and Brown—to what became known as the Charlottetown Conference. At its conclusion, the Maritime delegations expressed a willingness to join a confederation if the details could be successfully negotiated.",
"title": "Confederation of Canada, 1864–1867"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In October 1864, delegates for Confederation met in Quebec City for the Quebec Conference, where they agreed to the Seventy-Two Resolutions, the basis of Canada's government. The Great Coalition was endangered by Taché's 1865 death; Lord Monck asked Macdonald to become premier, but Brown felt that he had as good a claim on the position as his coalition partner. The disagreement was resolved by appointing another compromise candidate to serve as titular premier, Narcisse-Fortunat Belleau.",
"title": "Confederation of Canada, 1864–1867"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 1865, after lengthy debates, Canada's legislative assembly approved confederation by 91 votes to 33. None of the Maritimes, however, had approved the plan. In 1866, Macdonald and his colleagues financed pro-confederation candidates in the New Brunswick general election, resulting in a pro-confederation assembly. Shortly after the election, Nova Scotia's premier, Charles Tupper, pushed a pro-confederation resolution through that colony's legislature. A final conference, to be held in London, was needed before the British parliament could formalise the union. Maritime delegates left for London in July 1866, but Macdonald, who was drinking heavily again, did not leave until November, angering the Maritimers. In December 1866, Macdonald both led the London Conference, winning acclaim for his handling of the discussions, and courted and married his second wife, Agnes Bernard. Bernard was the sister of Macdonald's private secretary, Hewitt Bernard; the couple first met in Quebec in 1860, but Macdonald had seen and admired her as early as 1856. In January 1867, while still in London, he was seriously burned in his hotel room when his candle set fire to the chair he had fallen asleep in, but Macdonald refused to miss any sessions of the conference. In February, he married Agnes at St George's, Hanover Square. On March 8, the British North America Act, 1867, which would thereafter serve as the major part of Canada's constitution, passed the House of Commons (it had previously passed the House of Lords). Queen Victoria gave the bill Royal Assent on March 29, 1867.",
"title": "Confederation of Canada, 1864–1867"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Macdonald had favoured the union coming into force on July 15, fearing that the preparations would not be completed any earlier. The British favoured an earlier date and, on May 22, it was announced that Canada would come into existence on July 1. Lord Monck appointed Macdonald as the new nation's first prime minister. With the birth of the new nation, Canada East and Canada West became separate provinces, known as Quebec and Ontario, respectively. Macdonald was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) on that first observance of what came to be known as Dominion Day, later called Canada Day, on July 1, 1867.",
"title": "Confederation of Canada, 1864–1867"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Macdonald and his government faced immediate problems upon the formation of the new country. Much work remained to do in creating a federal government. Nova Scotia was already threatening to withdraw from the union; the Intercolonial Railway, which would both conciliate the Maritimes and bind them closer to the rest of Canada, was not yet built. Anglo-American relations were in a poor state, and Canadian foreign relations were matters handled from London. The withdrawal of the Americans in 1866 from the Reciprocity Treaty had increased tariffs on Canadian goods in US markets. American and British opinion was that the experiment of Confederation would quickly unravel, and the nascent nation absorbed by the United States.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In August 1867, the new nation's first general election was held; Macdonald's party won easily, with strong support in both large provinces, and a majority from New Brunswick. By 1869, Nova Scotia had agreed to remain part of Canada after a promise of better financial terms—the first of many provinces to negotiate concessions from Ottawa. Pressure from London and Ottawa failed to gain the accession of Newfoundland, whose voters rejected a Confederation platform in a general election in October 1869.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In 1869, John and Agnes Macdonald had a daughter, Mary. It soon became apparent that Mary had ongoing developmental issues; she was never able to walk, nor did she ever fully develop mentally. Hewitt Bernard, Deputy Minister of Justice and Macdonald's former secretary, also lived in the Macdonald house in Ottawa, together with Bernard's widowed mother. In May 1870, John Macdonald fell ill with gallstones; coupled with his frequent drinking, he may have developed a severe case of acute pancreatitis. In July, he moved to Prince Edward Island to convalesce, most likely conducting discussions aimed at drawing the island into Confederation at a time when some there supported joining the United States. The island joined Confederation in 1873.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Macdonald had once been tepid on the question of westward expansion of the Canadian provinces; as prime minister, he became a strong supporter of a bicoastal Canada. Immediately upon Confederation, he sent commissioners to London who in due course successfully negotiated the transfer of Rupert's Land and the North-Western Territory to Canada. The Hudson's Bay Company received £300,000 (CA$1,500,000) in compensation, and retained some trading posts as well as one-twentieth of the best farmland. Prior to the date of acquisition, the Canadian government faced unrest in the Red River Colony (today southeastern Manitoba, centred on Winnipeg). The local people, including the Métis, were fearful that rule would be imposed on them which did not take into account their interests, and rose in the Red River Rebellion led by Louis Riel. Unwilling to pay for a territory in insurrection, Macdonald had troops put down the uprising before the formal transfer; as a result of the unrest, the Red River Colony joined Confederation as the province of Manitoba, while the rest of the purchased lands became the North-West Territories.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Macdonald also wished to secure the colony of British Columbia. There was interest in the United States in bringing about the colony's annexation, and Macdonald wished to ensure his new nation had a Pacific outlet. The colony had an extremely large debt that would have to be assumed should it join Confederation. Negotiations were conducted in 1870, principally during Macdonald's illness and recuperation, with Cartier leading the Canadian delegation. Cartier offered British Columbia a railway linking it to the eastern provinces within ten years. The British Columbians, who privately had been prepared to accept far less generous terms, quickly agreed and joined Confederation in 1871. The Canadian Parliament ratified the terms after a debate over the high cost that cabinet member Alexander Morris described as the worst fight the Conservatives had had since Confederation.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "There were continuing disputes with the Americans over deep-sea fishing rights, and in early 1871, an Anglo-American commission was appointed to settle outstanding matters between the British (and Canadians) and the Americans. Canada was hoping to secure compensation for damage done by Fenians raiding Canada from bases in the United States. Macdonald was appointed a British commissioner, a post he was reluctant to accept as he realised Canadian interests might be sacrificed for the mother country. This proved to be the case; Canada received no compensation for the raids and no significant trade advantages in the settlement, which required Canada to open her waters to American fishermen. Macdonald returned home to defend the Treaty of Washington against a political firestorm.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In the run-up to the 1872 election, Macdonald had yet to formulate a railway policy, or to devise the loan guarantees that would be needed to secure the construction. During the previous year, Macdonald had met with potential railway financiers such as Hugh Allan and considerable financial discussion took place. The greatest political problem Macdonald faced was the Washington treaty, which had not yet been debated in Parliament.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In early 1872, Macdonald submitted the treaty for ratification, and it passed the Commons with a majority of 66. The general election was held through late August and early September. Redistribution had given Ontario increased representation in the House; Macdonald spent much time campaigning in the province, for the most part outside Kingston. Widespread bribery of voters took place throughout Canada, a practice especially effective in the era when votes were publicly declared. Macdonald and the Conservatives saw their majority reduced from 35 to 8. The Liberals (as the Grits were coming to be known) did better than the Conservatives in Ontario, forcing the government to rely on the votes of Western and Maritime MPs who did not fully support the party.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Macdonald had hoped to award the charter for the Canadian Pacific Railway in early 1872, but negotiations dragged on between the government and the financiers. Macdonald's government awarded the Allan group the charter in late 1872. In 1873, when Parliament opened, Liberal MP Lucius Seth Huntington charged that government ministers had been bribed with large, undisclosed political contributions to award the charter. Documents soon came to light which substantiated what came to be known as the Pacific Scandal. The Allan-led financiers, who were secretly backed by the United States's Northern Pacific Railway, had donated $179,000 to the Tory election funds, they had received the charter, and Opposition newspapers began to publish telegrams signed by government ministers requesting large sums from the railway interest at the time the charter was under consideration. Macdonald had taken $45,000 in contributions from the railway interest himself. Substantial sums went to Cartier, who waged an expensive fight to try to retain his seat in Montreal East (he was defeated, but was subsequently returned for the Manitoba seat of Provencher). During the campaign Cartier had fallen ill with Bright's disease, which may have been causing his judgment to lapse; he died in May 1873 while seeking treatment in London.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Before Cartier's death, Macdonald attempted to use delay to extricate the government. The Opposition responded by leaking documents to friendly newspapers. On July 18, three papers published a telegram dated August 1872 from Macdonald requesting another $10,000 and promising \"it will be the last time of asking\". Macdonald was able to get a prorogation of Parliament in August by appointing a Royal Commission to look into the matter, but when Parliament reconvened in late October, the Liberals, feeling Macdonald could be defeated over the issue, applied immense pressure to wavering members. On November 3, Macdonald rose in the Commons to defend the government, and according to one of his biographer, P.B. Waite, he gave \"the speech of his life, and, in a sense, for his life\". He began his speech at 9 p.m., looking frail and ill, an appearance which quickly improved. As he spoke, he consumed numerous glasses of gin and water. He denied that there had been a corrupt bargain, and stated that such contributions were common to both political parties. After five hours, Macdonald concluded,",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "I leave it with this House with every confidence. I am equal to either fortune. I can see past the decision of this House either for or against me, but whether it be against me or for me, I know, and it is no vain boast to say so, for even my enemies will admit that I am no boaster, that there does not exist in Canada a man who has given more of his time, more of his heart, more of his wealth, or more of his intellect and power, as it may be, for the good of this Dominion of Canada.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Macdonald's speech was seen as a personal triumph, but it did little to salvage the fortunes of his government. With eroding support both in the Commons and among the public, Macdonald went to the Governor General, Lord Dufferin on November 5, and resigned; Liberal leader Alexander Mackenzie became the second prime minister of Canada. He is not known to have spoken of the events of the Pacific Scandal again.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "On November 6, 1873, Macdonald offered his resignation as party leader to his caucus; it was refused. Mackenzie called an election for January 1874; the Conservatives were reduced to 70 seats out of the 206 in the Commons, giving Mackenzie a massive majority. The Conservatives bested the Liberals only in British Columbia; Mackenzie had called the terms by which the province had joined Confederation \"impossible\". Macdonald was returned in Kingston but was unseated on an election contest when bribery was proven; he won the ensuing by-election by 17 votes. According to Swainson, most observers viewed Macdonald as finished in politics, \"a used-up and dishonoured man\".",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Macdonald was content to lead the Conservatives in a relaxed manner in opposition and await Liberal mistakes. He took long holidays and resumed his law practice, moving his family to Toronto and going into partnership with his son Hugh John. One mistake that Macdonald believed the Liberals had made was a free-trade agreement with Washington, negotiated in 1874; Macdonald had come to believe that protection was necessary to build Canadian industry. The Panic of 1873 had led to a worldwide depression; the Liberals found it difficult to finance the railway in such a climate, and were generally opposed to the line anyway—the slow pace of construction led to British Columbia claims that the agreement under which it had entered Confederation was in jeopardy of being broken.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "By 1876, Macdonald and the Conservatives had adopted protectionism as party policy. This view was widely promoted in speeches at a number of political picnics, held across Ontario during the summer of 1876. Macdonald's proposals were popular with the public, and the Conservatives began to win a string of by-elections. By the end of 1876, the Tories had picked up 14 seats as a result of by-elections, reducing Mackenzie's Liberal majority from 70 to 42. Despite the success, Macdonald considered retirement, wishing only to reverse the voters' verdict of 1874—he considered Charles Tupper his heir apparent.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "When Parliament convened in 1877, the Conservatives were confident and the Liberals defensive. After the Tories had a successful session in the early part of the year, another series of picnics commenced in the areas around Toronto. Macdonald even campaigned in Quebec, which he had rarely done, leaving speechmaking there to Cartier. More picnics followed in 1878, promoting proposals which would come to be collectively called the \"National Policy\": high tariffs, rapid construction of the transcontinental railway (the Canadian Pacific Railway or CPR), rapid agricultural development of the West using the railway, and policies which would attract immigrants to Canada. These picnics allowed Macdonald venues to show off his talents at campaigning, and were often lighthearted—at one, the Tory leader blamed agricultural pests on the Grits, and promised the insects would go away if the Conservatives were elected.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The final days of the 3rd Canadian Parliament were marked by explosive conflict, as Macdonald and Tupper alleged that MP and railway financier Donald Smith had been allowed to build the Pembina branch of the CPR (connecting to American lines) as a reward for betraying the Conservatives during the Pacific Scandal. The altercation continued even after the Commons had been summoned to the Senate to hear the dissolution read, as Macdonald spoke the final words recorded in the 3rd Parliament: \"That fellow Smith is the biggest liar I ever saw!\"",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The election was called for September 17, 1878. Fearful that Macdonald would be defeated in Kingston, his supporters tried to get him to run in the safe Conservative riding of Cardwell; having represented his hometown for 35 years, he stood there again. In the election, Macdonald was defeated in his riding by Alexander Gunn, but the Conservatives swept to victory. Macdonald remained in the House of Commons, having quickly secured his election for Marquette, Manitoba; elections there were held later than in Ontario. His acceptance of office vacated his parliamentary seat, and Macdonald decided to stand for the British Columbia seat of Victoria, where the election was to be held on October 21. Macdonald was duly returned for Victoria, although he had never visited either Marquette or Victoria.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Part of the National Policy was implemented in the budget presented in February 1879. Under that budget, Canada became a high-tariff nation like the United States and Germany. The tariffs were designed to protect and build Canadian industry—finished textiles received a tariff of 34%, but the machinery to make them entered Canada free. Macdonald continued to fight for higher tariffs for the remainder of his life.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In January 1879, Macdonald commissioned politician Nicholas Flood Davin to write a report regarding the industrial boarding-school system in the United States. Now known as the Davin Report, the Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds was submitted to Ottawa on March 14, 1879, providing the basis for the Canadian Indian residential school system. It made the case for a cooperative approach between the Canadian government and the church to implement the \"aggressive assimilation\" pursued by President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. In 1883, Parliament approved $43,000 for three industrial schools and the first, Battleford Industrial School, opened on December 1 of that year. By 1900, there were 61 schools in operation. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the assimilation amounted to cultural genocide.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "By the 1880s, Macdonald was becoming frailer, but he maintained his political acuity. In 1883, he secured the \"Intoxicating Liquors Bill\" which took the regulation system away from the provinces, in part to stymie his foe Premier Mowat. In his own case, Macdonald took better control of his drinking and binges had ended. \"The great drinking-bouts, the gargantuan in sobriety's of his middle years, were dwindling away now into memories.\" As the budget moved forward, Macdonald found that the railway was progressing well: although little money had been spent on the project under Mackenzie, several hundred miles of track had been built and nearly the entire route surveyed. In 1880, Macdonald found a syndicate, led by George Stephen, willing to undertake the CPR project. Donald Smith (later Lord Strathcona) was a major partner in the syndicate, but because of the ill will between him and the Conservatives, Smith's participation was initially not made public, though it was well-known to Macdonald. In 1880, the Dominion took over Britain's remaining Arctic territories, which extended Canada to its present-day boundaries, with the exception of Newfoundland, which would not enter Confederation until 1949. Also in 1880, Canada sent its first diplomatic representative abroad, Sir Alexander Galt as High Commissioner to Britain. With good economic times, Macdonald and the Conservatives were returned with a slightly decreased majority in 1882. Macdonald was returned for the Ontario riding of Carleton.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The transcontinental railroad project was heavily subsidised by the government. The CPR was granted 25,000,000 acres (100,000 km; 39,000 sq mi) of land along the route of the railroad, and $25 million from the government. In addition, the government had to spend $32 million on the construction of other railways to support the CPR. The entire project was extremely costly, especially for a nation with only 4.1 million people in 1881. Between 1880 and 1885, as the railway was slowly built, the CPR repeatedly came close to financial ruin. The terrain in the Rocky Mountains was difficult and the route north of Lake Superior proved treacherous, as tracks and engines sank into the muskeg. When Canadian guarantees of the CPR's bonds failed to make them salable in a declining economy, Macdonald obtained a loan to the corporation from the Treasury—the bill authorizing it passed the Senate just before the firm would have become insolvent.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The Northwest again saw unrest. Many of the Manitoban Métis had moved into the territories and negotiations between the Métis and the Government to settle grievances over land rights proved difficult. Riel, who lived in exile in the United States since 1870, journeyed to Regina with the connivance of Macdonald's government, who believed he would prove a leader they could deal with. Instead, the Métis rose the following year under Riel in the North-West Rebellion. Macdonald put down the rebellion with militia troops transported by rail, and Riel was captured, tried for treason, convicted, and hanged. Macdonald refused to consider reprieving Riel, who was of uncertain mental health. The hanging of Riel was controversial, and alienated many Quebecers from the Conservatives and they were, like Riel, Catholic and culturally French Canadian; they soon realigned with the Liberals. Following the North-West Rebellion of 1885, Macdonald's government implemented restrictions upon the movement of indigenous groups, requiring them to receive formal permission from an Indian Department Official in order to go off-reserve.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The CPR was almost bankrupt, but its role in rushing troops to the crisis showed that it was helpful to maintain British control of the territory and Parliament provided money for its completion. On November 7, 1885, CPR manager William Van Horne wired Macdonald from Craigellachie, British Columbia that the last spike was inserted into the track, completing the railway. That same year, the Macdonald government enacted the Chinese Immigration Act, 1885. Macdonald told the House of Commons that, if the Chinese were not excluded from Canada, \"the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed\". In the summer of 1886, Macdonald travelled by rail to western Canada. On August 13, 1886, Macdonald used a silver hammer and pounded a gold spike to complete the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In 1886, another dispute arose over fishing rights with the United States. Americans fishermen had been using treaty provisions allowing them to land in Canada to take on wood and water as a cover for clandestine inshore fishing. Several vessels were detained in Canadian ports, to the outrage of Americans, who demanded their release. Macdonald sought to pass a Fisheries Act which would override some of the treaty provisions, to the dismay of the British, who were still responsible for external relations. The British government instructed the Governor General, Lord Lansdowne, to reserve the bill for Royal Assent, effectively placing it on hold without vetoing it. After considerable discussion, the British government allowed Royal Assent at the end of 1886, and indicated it would send a warship to protect the fisheries if no agreement was reached with the Americans.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Fearing continued loss of political strength as poor economic times continued, Macdonald planned to hold an election by the end of 1886, but had not yet issued the writ when an Ontario provincial election was called by Liberal Ontario Premier Oliver Mowat. The provincial election was seen as a bellwether for the federal poll. Despite considerable campaigning by Macdonald, Mowat's Liberals were re-elected in Ontario and increased their majority. Macdonald dissolved the federal Parliament on January 15, 1887 for an election on February 22. During the campaign, the Quebec provincial Liberals formed a government (four months after the October 1886 Quebec election), forcing the Conservatives from power in Quebec City. Nevertheless, Macdonald and his cabinet campaigned hard in the winter election, with Tupper (the new High Commissioner to London) postponing his departure to try to bolster Conservative votes in Nova Scotia. The Liberal leader, Edward Blake, ran an uninspiring campaign, and the Conservatives were returned nationally with a majority of 35, winning easily in Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Manitoba. The Tories also took a narrow majority of Quebec's seats despite resentment over Riel's hanging. Macdonald became MP for Kingston once again. Even the younger ministers, such as future Prime Minister John Thompson, who sometimes differed with Macdonald on policy, admitted Macdonald was an essential electoral asset for the Conservatives.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Blake resigned after the defeat and was replaced by Wilfrid Laurier. Under Laurier's early leadership, the Liberals, who previously supported much of the National Policy, campaigned against it and called for \"unrestricted reciprocity\", or free trade, with the United States. Macdonald was willing to see some reciprocity with the United States, but was reluctant to lower many tariffs. American advocates of what they dubbed \"commercial union\" saw it as a prelude to political union, and did not scruple to say so, causing additional controversy in Canada.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Macdonald called an election for March 5, 1891. The Liberals were heavily financed by American interests; the Conservatives drew much financial support from the CPR. The 76-year-old prime minister collapsed during the campaign, and conducted political activities from his brother-in-law's house in Kingston. The Conservatives gained slightly in the popular vote, but their majority was reduced to 27. The parties broke even in the central part of the country but the Conservatives dominated in the Maritimes and Western Canada, leading Liberal MP Richard John Cartwright to claim that Macdonald's majority was dependent on \"the shreds and patches of Confederation\". After the election, Laurier and his Liberals grudgingly accepted the National Policy; when Laurier later became prime minister, he adopted it with only minor changes.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In May 1891, Macdonald suffered a stroke which left him partially paralysed and unable to speak. His health continued to deteriorate and he died in the late evening of June 6, 1891. Thousands filed by his open casket in the Senate Chamber; his body was transported by funeral train to his hometown of Kingston, with crowds greeting the train at each stop. On arrival in Kingston, Macdonald lay in state in City Hall, wearing the uniform of an Imperial Privy Counsellor. He was buried in Cataraqui Cemetery in Kingston, his grave near that of his first wife, Isabella.",
"title": "Prime Minister of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Macdonald served just under 19 years as prime minister, a length of service only surpassed by William Lyon Mackenzie King. In polls, Macdonald has consistently been ranked as one of the greatest prime ministers in Canadian history. No cities or political subdivisions are named for Macdonald (with the exception of a small Manitoba village), nor are there any massive monuments. A peak in the Rockies, Mount Macdonald (c. 1887) at Rogers Pass, is named for him. In 2001, Parliament designated January 11 as Sir John A. Macdonald Day, but the day is not a federal holiday and generally passes unremarked. He appears on Canadian ten-dollar notes printed between 1971 and 2018. In 2015, the Royal Canadian Mint featured Macdonald's face on the Canadian two dollar coin, the Toonie, to celebrate his 200th birthday. Macdonald's name is also used in Ottawa's Ottawa Macdonald–Cartier International Airport (renamed in 1993) and Ontario Highway 401 (the Macdonald–Cartier Freeway c. 1968). His name is being phased out on Ottawa's Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway (River Parkway before 2012), being renamed to an indigenous term, Kichi Zibi Mikan.",
"title": "Legacy and memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "A number of sites associated with Macdonald are preserved. His gravesite has been designated a National Historic Site of Canada. Bellevue House in Kingston, where the Macdonald family lived in the 1840s, is also a National Historic Site administered by Parks Canada, and has been restored to that time period. His Ottawa home, Earnscliffe, is the official residence of the British High Commissioner to Canada. Statues have been erected to Macdonald across Canada; one stands on Parliament Hill in Ottawa (by Louis-Philippe Hebert c. 1895). A statue of Macdonald stands atop a granite plinth originally intended for a statue of Queen Victoria in Toronto's Queen's Park, looking south on University Avenue. Macdonald's statue also stood in Kingston's City Park; the Kingston Historical Society annually holds a memorial service in his honour. On June 18, 2021, following the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the statue of Macdonald was removed from Kingston's City Park after city council voted 12–1 in favour of its removal, and is set to be installed at Cataraqui Cemetery where Macdonald is buried. In 2018, a statue of Macdonald was removed from outside Victoria City Hall, as part of the city's program for reconciliation with local First Nations. The Macdonald Monument in Montreal has been repeatedly vandalized, and on August 29, 2020, the statue in the monument was vandalized, toppled and decapitated. Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante condemned the actions and said the city plans to restore the statue.",
"title": "Legacy and memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Macdonald's biographers note his contribution to establishing Canada as a nation. Swainson suggests that Macdonald's desire for a free and tolerant Canada became part of its national outlook and contributed immeasurably to its character. Gwyn said Macdonald's accomplishments of Confederation and building the Canadian railroad were great, but he was also responsible for scandals and bad government policy for the execution of Riel and the head tax on Chinese workers. In 2017, the Canadian Historical Association had voted to remove Macdonald's name from their prize for best scholarly book about Canadian history. Historian James Daschuk acknowledges Macdonald's contributions as a founding figure of Canada, but states \"He built the country. But he built the country on the backs of the Indigenous people.\" A biographical online article about Macdonald was deleted from the Scottish government's website in August 2018. A spokesperson for the Scottish government stated: \"We acknowledge controversy around Sir John A Macdonald's legacy and the legitimate concerns expressed by Indigenous communities\". On July 5, 2021, Canada's national library, Library and Archives Canada, deleted its web page on Canada's prime ministers, \"First Among Equals\", calling it \"outdated and redundant\".",
"title": "Legacy and memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Macdonald was awarded the following honorary degrees:",
"title": "Honorary degrees"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "",
"title": "References"
}
]
| Sir John Alexander Macdonald was the first prime minister of Canada, serving from 1867 to 1873 and from 1878 to 1891. He was the dominant figure of Canadian Confederation, and had a political career that spanned almost half a century. Macdonald was born in Scotland; when he was a boy his family immigrated to Kingston in the Province of Upper Canada. As a lawyer, he was involved in several high-profile cases and quickly became prominent in Kingston, which elected him in 1844 to the legislature of the Province of Canada. By 1857, he had become premier under the colony's unstable political system. In 1864, when no party proved capable of governing for long, Macdonald agreed to a proposal from his political rival, George Brown, that the parties unite in a Great Coalition to seek federation and political reform. Macdonald was the leading figure in the subsequent discussions and conferences, which resulted in the British North America Act and the establishment of Canada as a nation on July 1, 1867. Macdonald was the first prime minister of the new nation, and served 19 years; only William Lyon Mackenzie King has served longer. In his first term, Macdonald established the North-West Mounted Police and expanded Canada by annexing the North-Western Territory, Rupert's Land, British Columbia, and Prince Edward Island. In 1873, he resigned from office over a scandal in which his party took bribes from businessmen seeking the contract to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. However, he was re-elected in 1878. Macdonald's greatest achievements were building and guiding a successful national government for the new Dominion, using patronage to forge a strong Conservative Party, promoting the protective tariff of the National Policy, and completing the railway. He fought to block provincial efforts to take power back from the national government in Ottawa. He approved the execution of Métis leader Louis Riel for treason in 1885 which alienated many francophones from his Conservative Party. He continued as prime minister until his death in 1891. He remains the oldest prime minister in Canadian history. In the 21st century, Macdonald has come under criticism for his role in the Chinese Head Tax and federal policies towards Indigenous peoples, including his actions during the North-West Rebellion that resulted in Riel's execution, and the development of the residential school system designed to assimilate Indigenous children. Macdonald, however, remains respected for his key role in the formation of Canada. Historical rankings in surveys of experts in Canadian political history have consistently placed Macdonald as one of the highest-rated prime ministers in Canadian history. | 2001-07-29T10:41:12Z | 2023-12-11T18:02:04Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Macdonald |
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