PISCI
List activity
2 views
• 0 this weekCreate a new list
List your movie, TV & celebrity picks.
37 people
- Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Writer, born in Bromley, Kent. He was apprenticed to a draper, tried teaching, studied biology in London, then made his mark in journalism and literature. He played a vital part in disseminating the progressive ideas which characterized the first part of the 20th-c. He achieved fame with scientific fantasies such as The Time Machine (1895) and War of the Worlds (1898), and wrote a range of comic social novels which proved highly popular, notably Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). Both kinds of novel made successful (sometimes classic) early films. A member of the Fabian Society, he was often engaged in public controversy, and wrote several socio-political works dealing with the role of science and the need for world peace, such as The Outline of History (1920) and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, named David Poe Jr., and his mother, named Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were touring actors. Both parents died in 1811, and Poe became an orphan before he was 3 years old. He was adopted by John Allan, a tobacco merchant in Richmond, Virginia, and was sent to a boarding school in London, England. He later attended the University of Virginia for one year, but dropped out and ran up massive gambling debts after spending all of his tuition money. John Allan broke off Poe's engagement to his fiancée Sarah Royster. Poe was heartbroken, traumatized, and broke. He had no way out and enlisted in the army in May of 1827. At the same time Poe published his first book, "Tamerlane and Other Poems" (1827). In 1829, he became a West Point cadet, but was dismissed after 6 months for disobedience. By that time he published "Al Aaraf" (1929) and "Poems by Edgar A. Poe" (1831), with the funds contributed by his fellow cadets. His early poetry, though written in the manner of Lord Byron, already shows the musical effects of his verses.
Poe moved in with his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm, and her teenage daughter, Virginia Eliza Clemm, whom he married before she was 14 years old. He earned respect as a critic and writer. In his essays "The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe formulated important literary theories. But his career suffered from his compulsive behavior and from alcoholism. He did produce, however, a constant flow of highly musical poems, of which "The Raven" (1845) and "The Bells" (1849) are the finest examples. Among his masterful short stories are "Ligeia" (1838), "The Fall of the House of Usher"(1839) and "The Masque of the Red Death". Following his own theory of creating "a certain unique or single effect", Poe invented the genre of the detective story. His works: "The Murder in the Rue Morgue" (1841) is probably the first detective story ever published.
Just when his life began to settle, Poe was devastated by the death of his wife Virginia in 1847. Two years later he returned to Richmond and resumed a relationship with his former fiancée, Sarah Royster, who, by that time, was a widow. But shortly after their happy reconciliation he was found unconscious on a street in Baltimore. Poe was taken to the Washington College Hospital where Doctor John Moran diagnosed "lesions on the brain" (the Doctor believed Poe was mugged). He died 4 days later, briefly coming in and out of consciousness, just to whisper his last words, "Lord, help my poor soul." The real cause of his death is still unknown and his death certificate has disappeared. Poe's critic and personal enemy, named Rufus Griswold, published an insulting obituary; later he visited Poe's home and took away all of the writer's manuscripts (which he never returned), and published his "Memoir" of Poe, in which he forged a madman image of the writer.
The name of the woman in Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" was used by Vladimir Nabokov in 'Lolita' as the name for Humbert's first love, Annabelle Leigh. Nabokov also used in 'Lolita' some phrases borrowed from the poem of Edgar Allan Poe. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was set to music by Claude Debussy as an opera. Sergei Rachmaninoff created a musical tribute to Poe by making his favorite poem "The Bells" into the eponymous Choral Symphony.- Writer
- Producer
- Actor
Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital in Portland. His parents were Nellie Ruth (Pillsbury), who worked as a caregiver at a mental institute, and Donald Edwin King, a merchant seaman. His father was born under the surname "Pollock," but used the last name "King," under which Stephen was born. He has an older brother, David. The Kings were a typical family until one night, when Donald said he was stepping out for cigarettes and was never heard from again. Ruth took over raising the family with help from relatives. They traveled throughout many states over several years, finally moving back to Durham, Maine, in 1958.
Stephen began his actual writing career in January of 1959, when David and Stephen decided to publish their own local newspaper named "Dave's Rag". David bought a mimeograph machine, and they put together a paper they sold for five cents an issue. Stephen attended Lisbon High School, in Lisbon, in 1962. Collaborating with his best friend Chris Chesley in 1963, they published a collection of 18 short stories called "People, Places, and Things--Volume I". King's stories included "Hotel at the End of the Road", "I've Got to Get Away!", "The Dimension Warp", "The Thing at the Bottom of the Well", "The Stranger", "I'm Falling", "The Cursed Expedition", and "The Other Side of the Fog." A year later, King's amateur press, Triad and Gaslight Books, published a two-part book titled "The Star Invaders".
King made his first actual published appearance in 1965 in the magazine Comics Review with his story "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber." The story ran about 6,000 words in length. In 1966 he graduated from high school and took a scholarship to attend the University of Maine. Looking back on his high school days, King recalled that "my high school career was totally undistinguished. I was not at the top of my class, nor at the bottom." Later that summer King began working on a novel called "Getting It On", about some kids who take over a classroom and try unsuccessfully to ward off the National Guard. During his first year at college, King completed his first full-length novel, "The Long Walk." He submitted the novel to Bennett Cerf/Random House only to have it rejected. King took the rejection badly and filed the book away.
He made his first small sale--$35--with the story "The Glass Floor". In June 1970 King graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelor of Science degree in English and a certificate to teach high school. King's next idea came from the poem by Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." He found bright colored green paper in the library and began work on "The Dark Tower" saga, but his chronic shortage of money meant that he was unable to further pursue the novel, and it, too, was filed away. King took a job at a filling station pumping gas for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour. Soon he began to earn money for his writings by submitting his short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier.
On January 2, 1971, he married Tabitha King (born Tabitha Jane Spruce). In the fall of 1971 King took a teaching job at Hampden Academy, earning $6,400 a year. The Kings then moved to Hermon, a town west of Bangor. Stephen then began work on a short story about a teenage girl named Carietta White. After completing a few pages, he decided it was not a worthy story and crumpled the pages up and tossed them into the trash. Fortunately, Tabitha took the pages out and read them. She encouraged her husband to continue the story, which he did. In January 1973 he submitted "Carrie" to Doubleday. In March Doubleday bought the book. On May 12 the publisher sold the paperback rights for the novel to New American Library for $400,000. His contract called for his getting half of that sum, and he quit his teaching job to pursue writing full time. The rest, as they say, is history.
Since then King has had numerous short stories and novels published and movies made from his work. He has been called the "Master of Horror". His books have been translated into 33 different languages, published in over 35 different countries. There are over 300 million copies of his novels in publication. He continues to live in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, and writes out of his home.
In June 1999 King was severely injured in an accident, he was walking alongside a highway and was hit by a van, that left him in critical condition with injuries to his lung, broken ribs, a broken leg and a severely fractured hip. After three weeks of operations, he was released from the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.- Writer
- Producer
- Actor
Born in Liverpool, England, UK, Clive Barker is an English writer, director, and visual artist, best known for his works in the genres of horror and dark fantasy. His mother Joan Ruby (née Revill) was a painter and school welfare officer and his father Leonard Barker was a personnel director for an industrial relations firm. He studied English and philosophy at the University of Liverpool. His first artistic endeavors took place while at school, where he was a part of students' theatre. In the early days of his artistic career, he supported himself by working as a male prostitute. In 1978 he co-founded a theatre group called The Dog Company, among whose members was Doug Bradley who later went on to star in Barker's Hellraiser movie series. In 1985 he published his debut novel, The Damnation Game, and the same year he wrote his first feature movie scripts: Underworld (1985) and Rawhead Rex (1986). The end effect of these two movies disappointed Barker so much that he decided to adapt his prose into a movie he would direct himself, leading to the creation of Hellraiser (1987). The movie achieved cult status and turned into a multimedia franchise, although Barker lost control over it at one point, only to regain it in 2020. In addition to his work in literature and movies, he is also a visual artist, often illustrating his own books and was involved in a number of television, comic book, and visual arts projects.- Writer
- Additional Crew
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associated with that town. Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. He published his first work in 1828, the novel Fanshawe; he later tried to suppress it, feeling that it was not equal to the standard of his later work. He published several short stories in periodicals, which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The following year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at the Boston Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment as consul took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to Concord in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children. Much of Hawthorne's writing centers on New England, many works featuring moral metaphors with an anti-Puritan inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity. His published works include novels, short stories, and a biography of his college friend Franklin Pierce, the 14th President of the United States.- Writer
- Additional Crew
Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905) was one of the most famous French novelists of all time. His major work is the "Extraordinary Journeys", a series of more than sixty adventure novels including "Journey to the Center of the Earth", "Around the World in 80 Days", "20.000 Leagues under the Seas" and "The Mysterious Island" which had multiple cinematographic adaptations. Nicknamed "The father of science fiction", he is the second most translated author in the world after Agatha Christie.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer from Edinburgh. His most popular works include the pirate-themed adventure novel "Treasure Island" (1883), the poetry collection "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885), the Gothic horror novella "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" (1886) which depicted a man with two distinct personalities, and the historical novels "Kidnapped" (1886) and "The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses" (1888). Stevenson spend the last years of his life in Samoa, where he tried to act as an advocate for the political rights of Polynesians.
In 1850, Stevenson was born in Edinburgh. His father was Thomas Stevenson (1818-1887), a civil engineer, lighthouse designer, and meteorologist. Thomas was a co-founder of the Scottish Meteorological Society, and one of the sons of the famed engineer Robert Stevenson (1772-1850). Thomas' brothers were the engineers David Stevenson and Alan Stevenson. Stevenson's mother (and Thomas' wife) was Margaret Isabella Balfour, a member of a centuries-old gentry family. Stevenson's maternal grandfather was Lewis Balfour (1777-1860), a minister of the Church of Scotland. Lewis was himself a grandson of the philosopher James Balfour (1705-1795).
Both Stevenson's mother and his maternal grandfather had chronic problems with coughs and fevers. Stevenson demonstrated the same problems throughout his childhood. His contemporaries suspected that he was suffering from tuberculosis. Modern biographers have suggested that he was instead suffering from bronchiectasis (a congenital disorder of the respiratory system) or sarcoidosis (an autoimmune disease which affects the lungs).
Stevenson's parents were Presbyterians, but they were not particularly interested in indoctrinating their son. Stevenson's nurse was Alison "Cummy" Cunningham, a fervently religious woman. While tending to Stevenson during his recurring illnesses, she read to him passages from the Bible and from the works of the Puritan preacher John Bunyan (1628-1688). She also narrated to him tales of the Covenanters, a 17th-century religious movement.
Stevenson's poor health as a child kept him away from school for extended periods. His parents had to hire private tutors for him. He did not learn to read until he was 7 or 8-years-old. However, he developed an interest in narrating stories in early childhood. When he learned to write, he started writing tales as a hobby. His father Thomas was happy about this hobby, as he was also an amateur writer in his early life. In 1866, Stevenson completed his first book. It was "The Pentland Rising: A Page of History, 1666", a historical narrative of a Covenanter revolt. It was published at his father's expense.
In November 1867, Stevenson entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering. He showed little interest in the subject matter. He joined both the debating club Speculative Society, and an amateur drama group organized by professor Fleeming Jenkin (1833-1885). During the annual holidays, Stevenson repeatedly joined his father in travels to inspect the family's engineering works. He displayed little interest in engineering, but the travels turned his interests towards travel writing.
In April 1871, Stevenson announced to his father that he wanted to become a professional writer. His father agreed, on the condition that Stevenson should also study to gain a law degree. In the early 1870s, Stevenson started dressing in a Bohemian manner, wore his hair long, and joined an atheist club. In January 1873, Stevenson explained to his father that he no longer believed in God, and that he had grown tired of pretending to be pious. He would eventually rejoin Christianity, but remained hostile to organized religion until his death.
In late 1873, Stevenson visited London. He had an essay published in the local art magazine "The Portfolio" (1870-1893), and started socializing with the city's professional writers. Among his new friends was the poet William Ernest Henley (1849-1903). Henley had a wooden leg, due to a childhood illness which led to amputation. Stevenson later used Henley as his inspiration for the one-legged pirate Long John Silver.
Stevenson qualified for the Scottish bar in July 1875, at the age of 24. He never practiced law, though his legal studies inspired aspect of his works. In September 1876, Stevenson was introduced to the American short-story writer Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne (1840-1914). She had separated from her unfaithful husband, and lived with her daughter in France. Fanny remained in his thoughts for months, and they became lovers in 1877. They parted ways in August 1878, when she decided to move back to San Francisco.
In August 1879, Stevenson decided to travel to the United States in search of Fanny. He arrived to New York City with little incident. The journey from New York City to California negatively affected his health, and he was near death by the time he arrived in Monterey, California. He and Fanny reunited in December 1879, but she had to nurse him to recovery. His father cabled him money to help in his recovery.
Stevenson and Fanny married in May 1880. Th groom was 29-years-old, and the bride was 40-years-old. They spend their honeymoon at an abandoned mining camp on Mount Saint Helena. The couple sailed back to the United Kingdom in August 1880. Fanny helped Stevenson to reconcile with his father.
Stevenson and his wife moved frequently from place to place in the early 1880s. In 1884, they settled in their own home in the seaside town of Bournemouth, Dorset. Stevenson named their new residence "Skerryvore". He used the name of a lighthouse which his uncle Alan had constructed. In 1885, Stevenson reacquainted himself to his old friend, the novelist Henry James (1843-1916). James had moved to Bournemouth to care for his invalid sister. Stevenson and James started having daily meetings to converse over various topics. Stevenson wrote several of his popular works while living in Bournemouth, though he was frequently bedridden.
In 1887, Thomas Stevenson died. Stevenson felt that nothing tied him to the United Kingdom, and his physician had advised him that a complete change of climate might improve his health. Stevenson and much of his surviving family (including his widowed mother) traveled to the state of New York. They spend the winter at a cottage in the Adirondacks, with Stevenson starting to work on the adventure novel "The Master of Ballantrae" (1889).
In June 1888, Stevenson chartered the yacht "Casco" to transport him and his family to San Francisco. The sea air helped restore his health for a while. Stevenson decided to spend the next few years wandering in the Pacific islands. He visited the Hawaiian Islands, and befriended the local monarch Kalakaua (1836-1891, reigned 1874-1891) and his niece Ka'iulani (1875-1899). Stevenson's other voyages took him to the Gilbert Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand and the Samoan Islands.
In December 1889, Stevenson and his family at the port of Apia in the Samoan islands. He decided to settle in Samoa. In January 1890, he purchased an estate on the island. He started building Samoa's two-story house, and also started collecting local folktales. He completed an English translation of the moral fable "The Bottle Imp".\
Stevenson grew concerned with the ongoing rivalry between Britain, Germany and the United States over their influence in Samoa. He feared that the indigenous clan society would be displaced by foreigners. He published various texts in defense of the Polynesians and their culture. He also worked on "A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa" (1892), a detailed chronicle of the Samoan Civil War (1886-1894) and the international events leading up to it.
Stevenson's last fiction writings indicated his growing interest in the realist movement, and his disdain for colonialism. In December 1894, Stevenson suffered a stroke while conversing with his wife. He died hours later, at the age of 44. The local Samoans provided a watch-guard to protect his body until a tomb could be prepared for it. Stevenson was buried at Mount Vaea, on a spot overlooking the sea. A requiem composed by Stevenson himself was inscribed on the tomb.
Stevenson was seen as an influential writer of children's literature and horror fiction for much of the 20th century, but literary critics and historians had little interest in his works. He was re-evaluated in the late 20th century "as an artist of great range and insight", with scholarly studies devoted entirely to him. The Index Translationum, UNESCO's database of book translations, has ranked him as the 26th most translated writer on a global level. Stevenson ranked below Charles Dickens (25th) in the index, and ahead of Oscar Wilde (28th). His works have received a large number of film adaptations.- Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri in 1835, grew up in Hannibal. He was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Throughout his career, Twain served as a writer, lecturer, reporter, editor, printer, and prospector. Twain took his pen name from an alert cry used on his steamboat - "by the mark, twain".- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
English writer, scholar and philologist, Tolkien's father was a bank manager in South Africa. Shortly before his father died (1896) his mother took him and his younger brother to his father's native village of Sarehole, near Birmingham, England. The landscapes and Nordic mythology of the Midlands may have been the source for Tolkien's fertile imagination to write about 'the Shire' and 'hobbits' in his later book the Hobbit (1937). After his mother's death in 1904 he was looked after by Father Francis Xavier Morgan a RC priest of the Congregation of the Oratory. Tolkien was educated at King Edward VI school in Birmingham. He studied linguistics at Exeter College, Oxford, and took his B.A. in 1915. In 1916 he fought in World War I with the Lancashire Fusiliers. It is believed that his experiences during the Battle of the Somne may have been fueled the darker side of his subsequent novels. Upon his return he worked as an assistant on the Oxford English Dictionary (1918-20) and took his M.A. in 1919. In 1920 he became a teacher in English at the University of Leeds. He then went on to Merton College in Oxford, where he became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon (1925-45) and Merton professor of English Language and Literature (1945-59). His first scholarly publication was an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925). He also wrote books on Chaucer (1934) and Beowulf (1937). In 1939 Tolkien gave the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland titled: "On Fairy-Stories". Tolkien will however be remembered most for his books the Hobbit (1937) and the Lord of the Rings (1954-55). The Hobbit began as a bedtime story for his children". He wrote Lord of the Rings over a period of about 14 years.
Tolkien also discussed parts of his novels with fellow Oxfordian and fantasy writer CS Lewis during their 'meetings'. He was trying to create a fantasy world so that he could explain how he had invented certain languages, and in doing so created 'Middle-earth'. However among his peers at Oxford his works were not well received as they were not considered 'scholarly'. It was after LOTR was published in paperback in the United States in 1965 that he developed his legendary cult following and also imitators. Tolkien was W. P. Ker lecturer at Glasgow University in 1953. In 1954 both the University of Liege and University College, Dublin, awarded him honorary doctorates. He received the CBE in 1972. He served as vice-president of the Philological Society and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an honorary fellow of Exeter College. Despite the immense popularity of his books today Tolkien did not greatly benefit from their sales. His son Christopher Tolkien was able to publish some of his works posthumously after his manuscripts were found.- Writer
- Additional Crew
Bram Stoker was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1847, and gained fame for his novel "Dracula" about an aristocratic vampire in Transylvania. The sequel, "Dracula's Guest," was not published for 17 years after the publication of "Dracula," two years after Stoker's death. Stoker also wrote "The Mystery of the Sea" and "Famous Imposters." He was the stage manager for actor Sir Henry Irving and wrote "Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving," after Irving's death.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles L. Dodgson, author of the children's classics "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass."
Born on January 27, 1832 in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, Charles Dodgson wrote and created games as a child. At age 20 he received a studentship at Christ Church and was appointed a lecturer in mathematics. Dodgson was shy but enjoyed creating stories for children. His books including "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" were published under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Dodgson died in 1898.
Early Life, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, best known by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, was born in the village of Daresbury, England, on January 27, 1832. The eldest boy in a family of 11 children, Carroll was rather adept at entertaining himself and his siblings. His father, a clergyman, raised them in the rectory. As a boy, Carroll excelled in mathematics and won many academic prizes. At age 20, he was awarded a studentship (called a scholarship in other colleges) to Christ College. Apart from serving as a lecturer in mathematics, he was an avid photographer and wrote essays, political pamphlets and poetry. "The Hunting of the Snark" displays his wonderful ability in the genre of literary nonsense.
Alice and Literary Success, Carroll suffered from a bad stammer, but he found himself vocally fluent when speaking with children. The relationships he had with young people in his adult years are of great interest, as they undoubtedly inspired his best-known writings and have been a point of disturbed speculation over the years. Carroll loved to entertain children, and it was Alice, the daughter of Henry George Liddell, who can be credited with his pinnacle inspiration. Alice Liddell remembers spending many hours with Carroll, sitting on his couch while he told fantastic tales of dream worlds. During an afternoon picnic with Alice and her two sisters, Carroll told the first iteration of what would later become Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. When Alice arrived home, she exclaimed that he must write the story down for her.
He fulfilled the small girl's request, and through a series of coincidences, the story fell into the hands of the novelist Henry Kingsley, who urged Carroll to publish it. The book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was released in 1865. It gained steady popularity, and as a result, Carroll wrote the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). By the time of his death, Alice had become the most popular children's book in England, and by 1932 it was one of the most popular in the world.
Photography and Legacy, besides writing, Carroll created a number of fine photographs. His notable portraits include those of the actress Ellen Terry and the poet Alfred Tennyson. He also photographed children in every possible costume and situation, eventually making nude studies of them. Despite conjecture, little real evidence of child abuse can be brought against him. Shortly before his 66th birthday, Lewis Carroll caught a severe case of influenza, which led to pneumonia. He died on January 14, 1898, leaving an enigma behind him.- Writer
- Actor
Dashiell Hammett was born May 27, 1894, in St. Mary's County, Maryland, to Richard Hammett and Mary Bond. He joined the Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1915. He enlisted in the US Army's Ambulance Corps in June 1918 and was posted to a camp 20 miles from Baltimore, where he caught the flu, which developed into tuberculosis. He was invalided out of the army in July 1919 and returned to Pinkerton's. Hammett entered the veterans hospital near Tacoma, Washington, with tuberculosis in 1920. Upon his release he worked at Pinkerton's Spokane branch. Hospitalized again with tuberculosis, he met and courted a nurse, Josephine Dolan. In February 1921 he was moved to an army hospital near San Diego. After he was released he married a now-pregnant Josie in San Francisco. Hammett worked for the San Francisco branch of Pinkerton's, but left the agency in 1921 or 22 due to ill health. He took a writing course and sold droll vignettes to "The Smart Set" magazine during 1922, and some short stories to other magazines. He began to sell detective stories to "The Black Mask" from 1923. After the birth of the couple's second daughter in 1926, Hammett gave up freelance writing and became an advertising copy writer for the jeweler Albert Samuels, but left after six months due to ill health. Forced by his tuberculosis to live apart from Jose and the children, the marriage eventually broke up. Hammett supported himself through writing, chiefly for "The Black Mask", now under editor Joe Shaw. Hammett's long short stories were republished in novel form by Alfred Knopf. In 1929 Hammett moved to New York. After the success of his novel "The Maltese Falcon", he was engaged as a screenwriter by Paramount Pictures and moved to Hollywood, where he met Lillian Hellman. He returned to New York in 1931, where he wrote "The Glass Key". "The Thin Man" was published as a magazine serial in 1933. Hammett was encouraged by Hearst to write the "Secret Agent X9" comic strip, which ran from 1934-35, his last original work. In 1942 he re-enlisted in the army and was posted to the Aleutian Islands off of Alaska, where he edited The Adakian. When discharged in 1945, he returned to New York and became President of the NY Civil Rights Congress. In July 1951 Hammett was subpoenaed to testify on the Civil Rights Congress' bail fund, and was jailed for refusing to answer questions. Upon his release from jail, he was presented with a bill by the Internal Revenue Service for $111,000 in back taxes. In failing health, he lived off and on with Hellman. In 1961 he was admitted to New York's Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, where he died on January 10.- Writer
- Actor
An American novelist, writer of crime fiction featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe, Raymond (Thornton) Chandler was born in Chicago of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother. He moved to England when his parents divorced. He attended Dulwich College and studied languages in France and Germany before returning to England in 1907 and becoming a naturalized British subject. He took a civil service job in the Admiralty, which he left in 1912 to return to America, settling in California. After the US entered World War I he enlisted in the Canadian Army, then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. After the armistice he returned to California and got a series of bookkeeping jobs, finally becoming a vice-president with the Dabney Oil syndicate.
All along, however, he had been submitting stories, poems, sketches and essays to a number of periodicals, but when the Depression hit and the bottom fell out of the oil business, he lost his job and turned to writing full-time. He found a niche with stories of the "hard-boiled" school popularized by Dashiell Hammett, and had many of his early stories accepted by Black Mask, the same mystery magazine that had first published Hammett. His first four novels--"The Big Sleep" (1939, filmed 1946 [The Big Sleep (1946)] and 1978 [The Big Sleep (1978)]); "Farewell My Lovely" (1940, filmed 1944 [Murder, My Sweet (1944)] and 1975 [Farewell, My Lovely (1975)]); "The High Window" (1942, filmed 1947 [The Brasher Doubloon (1947)]); and "The Lady in the Lake (1943, filmed 1946 [Lady in the Lake (1946)])--which reworked plots from some of his short stories, were his most successful.
He spent some time in Hollywood as a screenwriter, contributing to Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), the film noir classic The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951). He wrote realistically, in stark contrast to the English style of drawing-room puzzle mysteries where an amateur detective always knows more than the police and clues turn up at just the right moment. Chandler dismissed these plots as "having God sit in your lap."- Writer
- Producer
Cormac McCarthy was born on 20 July 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Road (2009), No Country for Old Men (2007) and The Counselor (2013). He was married to Jennifer Claire Winkley, Anne DeLisle and Lee Holleman. He died on 13 June 2023 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Actor
William Shakespeare's birthdate is assumed from his baptism on April 25. His father John was the son of a farmer who became a successful tradesman; his mother Mary Arden was gentry. He studied Latin works at Stratford Grammar School, leaving at about age 15. About this time his father suffered an unknown financial setback, though the family home remained in his possession. An affair with Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and a nearby farmer's daughter, led to pregnancy and a hasty marriage late in 1582. Susanna was born in May of 1583, twins Hamnet and Judith in January of 1585. By 1592 he was an established actor and playwright in London though his "career path" afterward (fugitive? butcher? soldier? actor?) is highly debated. When plague closed the London theatres for two years he apparently toured; he also wrote two long poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece". He may have spent this time at the estate of the Earl of Southampton. By December 1594 he was back in London as a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company he stayed with the rest of his life. In 1596 he seems to have purchased a coat of arms for his father; the same year Hamnet died at age 11. The following year he purchased the grand Stratford mansion New Place. A 1598 edition of "Love's Labors" was the first to bear his name, though he was already regarded as England's greatest playwright. He is believed to have written his "Sonnets" during the 1590s. In 1599 he became a partner in the new Globe Theatre, the company of which joined the royal household on the accession of James in 1603. That is the last year in which he appeared in a cast list. He seems to have retired to Stratford in 1612, where he continued to be active in real estate investment. The cause of his death is unknown.- Writer
- Soundtrack
Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, in his ancestral estate Yasnaya Polyana, South of Moscow, Russia. He was the fourth of five children in a wealthy family of Russian landed Gentry. His parents died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his elder brothers and relatives.
Leo Tolstoy studied languages and law at Kazan University for three years. He was dissatisfied with the school and left Kazan without a degree, returned to his estate and educated himself independently. In 1848 he moved to the capital, St. Petersburg, and there passed two tests for a law degree. He was abruptly called to return to his estate near Moscow, where he inherited 4000 acres of land and 350 serfs. There Tolstoy built a school for his serfs, and acted as a teacher. He briefly went to a Medical School in Moscow, but lost a fortune in gambling, and was pulled out by his brother. He took military training, became an Army officer, and moved to the Caucasus, where he lived a simple life for three years with Cossacs. There he wrote his first novel - "Childhood" (1852), it became a success. With writing "Boyhood" (1854) and "Youth" (1857) he concluded the autobiographical trilogy. In the Crimean War (1854-55) Tolstoy served as artillery commander in the Battle of Sevastopol, and was decorated for his courage. Between the battles he wrote three stories titled "Sevastopol Sketches", that won him wide attention, and a complement from the Czar Aleksandr II.
After the war, Tolstoy returned to St. Petersburg, where he enjoyed the friendship of Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai A. Nekrasov, Ivan Goncharov, and other writers. On his trips to Europe, he had discussions with Gertsen in London, and attended Darwin's lectures. In Brussels he had meetings with philosophers Prudhon and Lelewel. Tolstoy undertook a research of schools in Europe, and later he built and organized over 20 schools for poor people in Russia. At that time the secret police began surveillance, and searched his home. In 1862 he married Sofia Andreevna Bers, and fathered 13 children with his wife. Four of their babies died, and the couple raised the remaining nine children. His wife was also his literary secretary, and also contributed to his best works, "War and Peace" (1863-69) and "Anna Karenina" (1873-77). In his "Confession" (1879) Tolstoy revealed his own version of Christianity, blended with socialism, that won him many followers. Tolstoyan communities sprang up in America and Europe, and he assisted the Russian non-Orthodox Christians (Dukhobors) in migrating to USA and Canada. He split from aristocratic class and developed an ascetic lifestyle, becoming a vegetarian, and a farmer. He sponsored and organized free meals for the poor. He transfered his copyright on all of his writings after 1880 to public domain. In his later age Tolstoy was pursuing the path of a wandering ascetic. He corresponded with Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was directly influenced by Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God is Within You" (1894), which was praised by many nonviolent movements.
In 1900 Tolstoy criticized the Tsar's government in a series of publications, calling for separation of Chuch and State. Tsar Nicholas II retaliated through the Church, by expulsion of Tolstoy from Orthodox Cristianity as a "heretic". He fell ill, and suffered from a severe depression; he was suicidal and even had to eliminate all hunting guns from his home, because of his suicidal mode. He was treated by the famous doctor Dahl, and was visited by composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and basso Feodor Chaliapin Sr., who performed for Tolstoy on many occasions. Later he went to convalesce in Yalta, in Crimea, where he spent time with Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. Tolstoy was an obvious candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but was initially omitted by the Nobel Committee for his views. The omission caused a strong response from a group of Swedish writers and artists. They sent an address to Tolstoy, but the writer answered by declining any future prize nomination.
In 1902 Tolstoy wrote a letter to the Tsar, calling for social justice, to prevent a civil war, and in 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War, Tolstoy wrote a condemnation of war. The Tsar replied by increasing police surveillance on Tolstoy. In November of 1910 he left his estate, probably taking the path of a wandering ascetic, which he had been pursuing for decades. He left home without explanations and took a train, in which he caught pneumonia, and died at a remote station of Astapovo. He was laid to rest in his estate of Yasnaya Polyana, which was made a Tolstoy National Museum.
His youngest daughter, named Alexandra Tolstoy, was the director of the Tolstoy Museum, and was arrested by the Communists five times. She emigrated from Russia to the United States, where she founded the Tolstoy Foundation. She helped many prominent Russian intellectuals, such as Vladimir Nabokov and Sergei Rachmaninoff among many others.- Writer
- Soundtrack
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Russia. He was the second of seven children of Mikhail Andreevich and Maria Dostoevsky. His father, a doctor, was a member of the Russian nobility, owned serfs and had a considerable estate near Moscow where he lived with his family. It's believed that he was murdered by his own serfs in revenge for the violence he would commit against them while in drunken rages. As a child Fyodor was traumatized when he witnessed the rape of a young female serf and suffered from epileptic seizures. He was sent to a boarding school, where he studied sciences, languages and literature. He was devastated when his favorite writer, Alexander Pushkin, was killed in a duel in St. Petersburg in 1837. That same year Dostoevsky's mother died, and he moved to St. Petersburg. There he graduated from the Military Engineering Academy, and served in the Tsar's government for a year.
Dostoevsky was active in St. Petersburg literary life; he grew out of his early influence by Nikolay Gogol, translated "Eugenia Grande" by Honoré de Balzac in 1844 and published his own first novel, "Poor Folk", in 1845, and became friends with Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai A. Nekrasov, but it ended abruptly after they criticized his writing. At that time he became indirectly involved in a revolutionary movement, for which he was arrested in 1849, convicted of treason and sentenced to death. His execution was scheduled for a freezing winter day in St. Petersburg, and at the appointed hour he was blindfolded and ordered to stand before the firing squad, waiting to be shot. The execution was called off at the last minute, however, and his sentence was commuted to a prison term and exile in Siberia, where his health declined amid increased epileptic seizures. After serving ten years in prison and exile, he regained his title in the nobility and returned to St. Petersburg with permission from the Tsar. He abandoned his formerly liberal views and became increasingly conservative and religious. That, however, didn't stop him from developing an acute gambling problem, and he accumulated massive gambling debts.
In 1862, after returning from his first major tour of Western Europe, Dostoevsky wrote that "Russia needs to be reformed, by learning the new ideas that are developing in Europe." On his next trip to Europe, in 1863, he spent all of his money on a manipulative woman, A. Suslova, went on a losing gambling spree, returned home flat broke and sank into a depression. At that time he wrote "Notes from Underground" (1864), preceding existentialism in literature. His first wife died in 1864, after six years of a childless marriage, and he adopted her son from her previous marriage. Painful experiences caused him to fall further into depression, but it was during this period that he wrote what many consider his finest work: "Crime and Punishment" (1866).
After completion of "The Gambler" (1867), the 47-year-old Dostoevsky married his loyal friend and literary secretary, 20-year-old Anna Snitkina, and they had four children. His first baby died at three months of age, causing him to sink further into depression and triggering more epileptic seizures. At that time Dostoevsky expressed his disillusionment with the Utopian ideas in his novels "The Idiot" (1868) and "The Devils" (aka "The Possessed") (1871), where the "devils" are destructive people, such as revolutionaries and terrorists. Dostoevsky was the main speaker at the opening of the monument to Alexander Pushkin in 1880, calling Pushkin a "wandering Russian, searching for universal happiness". In his final great novel, "The Brothers Karamazov" (1880), Dostoevsky revealed the components of his own split personality, depicted in four main characters; humble monk Alyosha, compulsive gambler Dmitri, rebellious intellectual Ivan, and their cynical father Fyodor Karamazov.
Dostoevsky died on February 9, 1881, of a lung hemorrhage caused by emphysema and epileptic seizures. He lived his entire life under the pall of epilepsy, much like the mythical "Sword of Damocles", and was fearless in telling the truth. His writings are an uncanny reflection on his own life - the fate of a genius in Russia.- Franz Kafka was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Austrian Empire, in 1883. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a business owner and a domestic tyrant, frequently abusing his son. Kafka later admitted to his father, "My writing was all about you...". He believed that his father broke his will and caused insecurity and guilt, that affected his whole life. Their tensions come out in "The Trial" and in "The Castle" in form of a hopeless conflict with an overwhelming force. His mother, Julie Lowy, came from an intellectual, spiritual family of the Jewish merchant and brewer Jakob Lowy. Although her influence was diminished by his dominating father, she shared her son's delicate nature. Kafka had a few relationships with women and was engaged, but never made a family.
He finished the German National Gymnasium in 1901, and graduated from the German University in Prague as Doctor of Law in 1906. He worked for insurance companies for the rest of his life. His profession shaped the formal, cold language of his writings which avoided any sentimental interpretations, leaving it to the reader. In 1908 Kafka published eight short stories compiled under the title "Meditation". In 1911 he became interested in Yiddish theater, that absorbed him more than abstract Judaism. In 1912 he began writing "The Judgment", which was more than an autobiography, providing a therapeutical outlet for his wrecked soul. The same year he started "Metamorphosis" about a traveling salesman, who transformed into a giant bug. In 1914 he wrote "In the Penal Colony" and "The Trial", which is regarded to be his best work. His style remains unique, though literary connections may be traced to Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Nikolay Gogol, as well as to Chinese parables, to the Bible and Talmud.
As a Jew Kafka experienced social tensions and isolation from the German community, so very few of his writings could find readers during his life. His three sisters later died in the Nazi concentration camps. He suffered from clinical depression, social anxiety, insomnia, and tuberculosis, complicated by laryngitis, that caused him the loss of his voice before his death in 1924. He was comforted by his girlfriend Dora Diamant, who had broken away from her Hasidic shtetl in Poland. She was 19 when they met in 1923 and Kafka wrote to her parents, asking for their permission to marry her. Their answer was negative, because Kafka presented himself as a non-religious Jew. He asked Dora to destroy his manuscripts after his death, but she kept about 20 notebooks of his writings and 35 private letters, that were reportedly confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933 and are not yet recovered. His university friend Max Brod became his editor, biographer and literary agent, who preserved and published most of Kafka's works posthumously, including the unfinished novels "The Trial", "The Castle", and "America". - Born in Providence, Lovecraft was a sickly child whose parents died insane. When he was 16, he wrote the astronomy column in the Providence Tribune. Between 1908 and 1923, he wrote short stories for Weird Tales magazine and others. He died in Providence, in poverty, on March 15, 1937. His most famous novel is considered to be "At the Mountains of Madness", about an expedition to the South Pole, which discovers strange creatures beneath a mountain.
- Guy de Maupassant was born on 5 August 1850 in Château de Miromesnil, France. He was a writer, known for La criada de la granja (1953), Pierre & Jeanne and Black Sabbath (1963). He died on 6 July 1893 in Paris, France.
- Writer
- Actor
- Script and Continuity Department
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov was a part-time assistant in his father's business and also a singer in a church choir. At age 15, he was abandoned by his bankrupt father and lived alone for 3 years while finishing the Classical Gymnazium in Taganrog. Chekhov obtained a scholarship at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879, from which he graduated in 1884 as a Medical Doctor. He practiced general medicine for about ten years.
While a student, Chekhov published numerous short stories and humorous sketches under a pseudonym. He reserved his real name for serious medical publications, saying "medicine is my wife; literature - a mistress." While a doctor, he kept writing and had success with his first books, and his first play "Ivanov." He gradually decreased his medical practice in favor of writing. Chekhov created his own style based on objectivity, brevity, originality, and compassion. It was different from the mainstream Russian literature's scrupulous analytical depiction of "heroes." Chekhov used a delicate fabric of hints, subtle nuances in dialogs, and precise details. He described his original style as an "objective manner of writing." He avoided stereotyping and instructive political messages in favor of cool comic irony. Praised by writers Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, he was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1888.
In 1890, Chekhov made a lengthy journey to Siberia and to the remote prison-island of Sakhalin. There, he surveyed thousands of convicts and conducted research for a dissertation about the life of prisoners. His research grew bigger than a dissertation, and in 1894, he published a detailed social-analytical essay on the Russian penitentiary system in Siberia and the Far East, titled "Island of Sakhalin." Chekhov's valuable research was later used and quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago." In 1897-1899, Chekhov returned to his medical practice in order to stop the epidemic of cholera.
Chekhov developed special relationship with Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theater. He emerged as a mature playwright who influenced the modern theater. In the plays "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "Seagull," and "Cherry Orchard," he mastered the use of understatement, anticlimax, and implied emotion. The leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, became his wife. In 1898, Chekhov moved to his Mediterranean-style home at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea. There he was visited by writers Lev Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, and artists Konstantin Korovin and Isaac Levitan.- Writer
- Music Department
- Actor
Author, playwright and composer Ira Levin decided on a career of a writer at the age of 15. Educated at the elite Horace Mann school, he went on to two years at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, before transferring to New York University, where he majored in philosophy and English. He earned his degree in 1950. In 1953 he was drafted into the army. Based in Queens, New York, he wrote and produced training films for Uncle Sam before moving into television, penning scripts for such anthology series as Lights Out (1946) and The United States Steel Hour (1953). He made a bright theatre debut at the age of 25 with an adaptation of Mac Hyman's "No Time for Sergeants" (1955). He went on to write several plays, including the longest-running Broadway mystery to date, "Deathtrap" (1978), and several popular novels, including "A Kiss Before Dying", and other plays including "Critics Choice" and "Interlock" and the Broadway stage score and libretto for "Drat the Cat!". Joining ASCAP in 1965, he wrote the popular gospel song "He Touched Me" with his chief musical collaborator Milton Schafer.- Writer
- Soundtrack
Here he grew up in the educated Jewish middle class, together with his brother Alfred. The Zweig family was not religious. He passed his high school diploma at the Wasagymnasium in Vienna. Zweig wrote his first poems here. At that time he was influenced by writers such as Hugo von Hofmannstahl and Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1901, Stefan Zweig's first volume of poetry entitled "Silberne Saiten" was published. He also began translating works by French writers at this time. In 1904 he completed his doctorate in German and Romance studies. Until 1910 he traveled extensively through Europe. The focus here was on exchanges with other writers and artists, with whom he mostly maintained friendship through intensive correspondence. By 1911, works such as "Tersites", "The House by the Sea" and "Burning Secret" as well as his first biography "Émile Verhaeren" had been created.
With his work "First Experience. Four Stories from Kinderland," Zweig approached an intuitive psychological style. At the beginning of the First World War, Stefan Zweig signed up as a volunteer. Here he was employed in the war press quarters until 1917. To demonstrate against war in any form, he wrote the drama "Jeremiah", which premiered in Zurich in 1918. From 1918 onwards, Zweig also worked as a journalist and correspondent for the Swiss newspaper "Neue Freie Presse". He also uses this medium to publish his non-partisan views. After the end of the war he settled in Salzburg. His idea was to found a spiritually, holistically and humanistically motivated alliance in Europe. So he began, initially in numerous lectures and essays, to warn against radicalization through nationalism and to call for calm, diplomacy and patience.
In 1920, Zweig published the writings "Fear", "The Compulsion" and, from 1920, three essays about master builders of the world: "Three Masters", in 1925 "The Fight with the Demon" and in 1928 "Three Poets of Their Life". Zweig enjoyed great stage success in 1926 with his adaptation of Ben Jonson's "Volpone". The publication of the book "Star Hours of Humanity" in 1927 was equally successful. In 1928 he traveled to the Soviet Union, where his books were also published in Russian at the instigation of Maxim Gorki, with whom he corresponded. After the NSDAP came to power in Germany, Stefan Zweig fled to London for fear of persecution. The book "Impatience of the Heart" was written here. From 1934 onwards, his works were no longer published in Germany and with the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich in 1938, production in his homeland also stopped. In 1935, Zweig wrote the libretto for the opera "Die schweigsame Frau" for Richard Strauss.
In 1936 the NSDAP immediately banned the sale of all of his works. His first marriage ended in divorce in 1938, and his second marriage was to Charlotte Altmann in 1939. In 1940 he received English citizenship from Great Britain. Nevertheless, he left Europe and traveled on to New York. In 1942 his chess novella and the monograph Brazil were published. After a short stay he visited Argentina and Paraguay. He then settled in Brazil. Here Stefan Zweig fell into deep sadness and depression.
Stefan Zweig committed suicide on February 22, 1942 in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro. In 1944 his autobiography was published posthumously under the title "The World of Yesterday".- Writer
- Actor
Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago in December 1928, along with a twin sister, Jane. Jane died less than eight weeks later, allegedly from an allergy to mother's milk. Dick's parents split up during his childhood, and he moved with his mother to Berkeley, California, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. Dick became a published author in 1952. His first sale was the short story "Roog." His first novel, "Solar Lottery," appeared in 1955. Dick produced an astonishing amount of material during the 1950s and 1960s, writing and selling nearly a hundred short stories and some two dozen or so novels during this period, including "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," "Time Out Of Joint," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," and the Hugo-award winning "The Man In The High Castle." A supremely chaotic personal life (Dick was married five times) along with drug experimentation, sidetracked Dick's career in the early 1970s. Dick would later maintain that reports of his drug use had been greatly exaggerated by sensationalistic colleagues. In any event, after a layoff of several years, Dick returned to action in 1974 with the Campbell award-winning novel "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said." Perhaps more importantly, though, this same year Dick would have a profound religious experience that would forever alter his life. Dick's final years were haunted by what he alleged to be a 1974 visitation from God, or at least a God-like being. Dick spent the rest of his life writing copious journals regarding the visitation and his interpretations of the event. At times, Dick seemed to regard it as a divine revelation and, at other times, he believed it to be a sign of extreme schizophrenic behaviour. His final novels all deal in some way with the entity he saw in 1974, especially "Valis," in which the title-character is an extraterrestrial God-like machine that chooses to make contact with a hopelessly schizophrenic, possibly drug-addled and decidedly mixed-up science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick. Despite his award-winning novels and almost universal acclaim from within the science-fiction community, Dick was never especially financially successful as a writer. He worked mainly for low-paying science-fiction publishers and never seemed to see any royalties from his novels after the advance had been paid, no matter how many copies they sold. In fact, one of the reasons for his extreme productivity was that he always seemed to need the advance money from his next story or novel in order to make ends meet. But towards the very end of his life, he achieved a measure of financial stability, partly due to the money he received from the producers of Blade Runner (1982) for the rights to his novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" upon which the film was based. Shortly before the film premiered, however, he died of a heart attack at the age of 53. Since his death, several other films have been adapted from his works (incuding Total Recall (1990)) and several unpublished novels have been published posthumously.- Writer
- Additional Crew
Isaac Asimov was born Isaak Judah Ozimov, on January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi shtetl, near Smolensk, Russia. He was the oldest of three children. His father, named Judah Ozimov, and his mother, named Anna Rachel Ozimov (nee Berman), were Orthodox Jews. Ozimov family were millers (the name Ozimov comes from the eponymous sort of wheat in Russian). In 1923 Isaac with his parents immigrated to the USA and settled in Brooklyn, New York. There his parents temporarily changed his birthday to September 7, 1919, in order to send him to school a year earlier. Their family name was changed from Ozimov to Asimov.
Asimov was an avid reader before the age of 5. He spoke Yiddish and English at home with his parents and spoke only a few word in Russian. He began his formal education in 1925 in the New York Public School system. From 1930-1932 he was placed in the rapid advance course. In 1935 he graduated from high school, in 1939 received a B.S. and in 1941 he earned his M. Sc. in Chemistry from Columbia University. From 1942-1945 Asimov was a chemist at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard's Naval Air experimental station. After the war ended, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and was transfered to the island of Oahu and was destined to participate in the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in July 1946. He narrowly avoided that by receiving an honorable discharge in May 1946. In 1948 he completed his post-graduate studies and earned his Ph. D. in Chemistry. In 1949 he began his teaching career at the Medical School of Boston University, becoming assistant professor in 1951, and associate professor in 1955. In 1958 Asimov became a full-time writer and gave up his teaching duties because his income from his literary works was much greater than his professor's salary. He was fired, but he retained his title and later returned as a lecturer and was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1979. Asimov was considered one of the best lecturers at Boston University.
Young Isaac Asimov was raised as a non-religious person. His parents observed the Orthodox Judaism, but did not force their belief upon young Asimov. He did not have affiliation with a temple, did not have a bar mizvah and called himself an atheist, then used the term "humanist" in his later life. He did not oppose genuine religious convictions in others but opposed superstitious or unfounded beliefs. Asimov defined his intellectual position as a Humanist and rationalist. He opposed the Vietnam war in the 1960s and was a supporter of the Democratic party. He embraced environmental issues, and supported feminism, joking that he wished women to be free "because I hate it when they charge". He was also humorous about many of his memberships in various clubs and foundations. Asimov did not approve exclusionary societies, he left Mensa after he found that many of the members were arrogant. He liked individuality and stayed in groups where he enjoyed giving speeches. As a free thinker, Asimov saw sci-fi literature serving as a pool where ideas and hypotheses are expressed with unrestricted intellectual freedom.
Young Asimov was fascinated with science fiction magazines which were sold at his parent's general store. Around the age of 11 he wrote eight chapters of a fiction about adventures of young boys in a small town. His first publication was "Marooned Off Vesta" in the Amazing Stories magazine in 1939. Asimov shot to fame in 1941 with 'Nightfall', a story of a planet where night comes once every 2049 years. 'Nightfall' has been described as one of the best science fiction stories ever written. Asimov wrote over five hundred literary works. He is credited for introducing the words "positronic", "psychohistory", and "robotics" into the English language. He penned such classics as "I, Robot" and the "Foundation" series, which are considered to be the most impressive of his writings. He also founded "Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine", which became a best-selling publication.
Asimov was afraid of needles and the sight of blood. Although he had the highest score on the intelligence test he had the lowest score on the physical-conditioning test. He never learned how to swim or ride a bicycle. The author who described spaceflights suffered from fear of flying. In his entire life he had to fly only twice during his military service. Acrophobia was revealed when he took his date and first love on a roller coaster in 1940, and was terrified. This phobia complicated the logistics and limited the range over which he traveled; it also found reflection in some of his literary works. He avoided traveling long distances. Instead he enjoyed cruise ships like the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2, where he occasionally entertained passengers with his science-themed talks. He impressed public with his highly entertaining speeches as well as with his sharp sense of timing; he never looked at the clock, but he spoke for precisely the time allocated. Asimov's sense of time prevented him from ever being late to a meeting. Once he discovered that his parents changed his date of birth, he insisted that the official records of his birthday be corrected to January 2, 1920, the date he personally celebrated throughout his life.
Asimov met Gertrude Blugherman on a blind date on Valentine's Day in February of 1942, they got married in July of the same year. The Asimovs had two children, son David (born in 1951), and daughter Robyn Joan (born in 1955). Asimov had known Janet Opal Jeppson since 1959. She was a psychoanalyst and also a writer of science fiction for children. Correspondence with her convinced Asimov that she was the right kind of person for him. He and Gertrude were separated in 1970, and he moved in with Janet Jappeson almost at once. His first marriage ended in divorce in 1973. That same year he and Janet Jeppson were married at Janet's home by an official of Ethical Culture Society. Asimov had no children by his second marriage.
In 1983 Asimov contracted HIV infection from a tainted blood transfusion received during a triple bypass surgery. He eventually developed AIDS and wanted to go public about his AIDS but his doctors convinced Asimov to remain silent. The specific cause of death was heart and renal failure as complications of AIDS. He died on April 6, 1992, in Boston, Massachussets, and was cremated. His ashes were scattered.
Ten years after Asimov's death, his widow, Janet Jeppson Asimov, revealed that his death was a consequence of an unfortunately contracted AIDS.- Writer
- Producer
- Actor
Ray Bradbury was an American science fiction writer whose works were translated in more than 40 languages and sold millions of copies around the world. Although he created a world of new technical and intellectual ideas, he never obtained a driver's license and had never driven an automobile.
He was born Ray Douglas Bradbury on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. He was the third son in the family. His father, Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, was a telephone lineman and technician. His mother, Esther Marie Bradbury (nee Moberg), was a Swedish immigrant. His grandfather and great-grandfather were newspaper publishers. In 1934, his family settled in Los Angeles, California. There, young Bradbury often roller-skated through Hollywood, trying to spot celebrities. He attended Los Angeles High School, where he was involved in the drama club and planned to become an actor. He graduated from high school in 1938 and had no more formal education. Instead, he learned from reading works of such writers as Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others.
From 1938-1942, he was selling newspapers on the streets of Los Angeles, spending days in the local library and nights at the typewriter. At that time, he published his stories in fanzines. In 1941, he became a paid writer when the pulp magazine Science Stories published his short story, titled "Pendulum", and he was a full-time writer by the end of 1942. His first book - "Dark Carnival" - was a collection of stories published in 1947. That same year, he married Marguerite McClure (1922-2003), whom he met at a bookstore a year earlier. Maggie, as she was affectionately called, was the only woman Bradbury ever dated. They had four daughters and, eventually, eight grandchildren.
Ray Bradbury shot to international fame after publication of "The Martian Chronicles" (1950), a collection of short stories partially based on ideas from ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Then he followed the anti-Utopian writers Yevgeni Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley in his best-known work, "Fahrenheit 451" (1953). The film adaptation (Fahrenheit 451 (1966)) by director François Truffaut, starring Julie Christie, received several nominations. However, Bradbury was not happy with the television adaptation (The Martian Chronicles (1980), starring Rock Hudson) of his story "The Martian Chronicles". His other novels and stories also have been adapted to films and television, as well as for radio, theatre and comic books. Bradbury had written episodes for Alfred Hitchcock's television series, as well as for many other television productions. His total literary output is close to 600 short stories, more than 30 books and numerous poems and plays. He was writing daily.
In 2004, Bradbury received a National Medal of Arts. He was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6644 Hollywood Boulevard. An asteroid was named in his honor, "9766 Bradbury", and the Apollo 15 astronauts named an impact crater on the moon "Dandelion Crater", after his novel, "Dandelion Wine". He also received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Grand Master Award from Science Fiction Writers of America, an Emmy Award for his work as a writer on "The Halloween Tree", and many other awards and honors. Ray Bradbury died on June 6, 2012, at the age of 91, in Los Angeles, California.- Writer
- Soundtrack
Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 into the lower nobility of Florence, to Alighiero di Bellincione d'Alighiero, a moneylender. A precocious student, Dante's education focused on rhetoric and grammar. He also became enamored with a young girl, Beatrice Portinari, whose death in 1290 threw a grieving Dante into intense religious studies. Though the Alighieri family had managed to avoid entanglement in the power struggles between the Ghibelline and Guelf families for control of Florence, Dante allied himself with the democratic Guelfs and married a member of that clan, Gemma di Manetto Donati, in 1285.
After serving in the Guelf forces as a cavalryman in the Battle of Campaldino, Dante enrolled in the Guild of Doctors and Pharmacists and became politically active. He became an ambassador and a prior, but after finding himself on the opposite side of the political party in power he was forced to flee Florence in 1301, never able to return to the city of his birth. He narrowly escaped being executed for treason.
Dante left for Verona and Ravenna, where he was joined by his children. He then wrote his most famous work, "Commedia", not in scholarly Latin but in the vernacular Italian of the time, giving his countrymen a literature of their own. In it he would resurrect the love of his youth, Beatrice, giving her a place among the angels. This work would also take the author, escorted by the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, on a grand tour to Hell and Purgatory, and later by his beloved Beatrice to Paradise. History would later judge Dante's creation to be divine. Dante Alighieri died in 1321 and was buried in Ravenna. Three sons--Pietro, Jacopo and Giovanni--and a daughter, Antonia, survived him.- Nikolai (Mykola) Gogol was a Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist of Ukrainian origin. His ancestors were bearing the name of Gogol-Janovsky and claimed belonging to the upper class Polish Szlachta. Gogol's father, a Ukrainian writer living on his old family estate, had five other children. He died when the Gogol was 15. Young Gogol was fond of the drama class at his high school in Nezhin, Ukraine. He was strongly influenced by his religious mother, as well as by the enchanting beauty of the Ukrainian folklore. He also called himself a "free Cossac".
At age 18 Gogol moved to St. Petersburg, became a student, and later a professor of history at the St. Petersburg University. His short stories, set in St. Petersburg, became a success. His play "Revizor" (1836, The Inspector General) had its premiere in St. Petersburg attended by the Tzar Nickolai I. But it also made him many powerful enemies who hated his satire on the corrupt Russian society. It was his friend Alexander Pushkin who suggested to him the subject for "Revizor". Pushkin also suggested the main idea of "The Dead Souls" (1842), a bitter satirical story of a crook, who was buying the names of dead surfs from various greedy landlords, for a tax-evasion scheme. In his other famous story "Shinel" (1842, The Overcoat) a poor clerk is intimidated both by thieves and by the government. Gogol's discontent against the slavery and social injustices in Russia caused him trouble. He escaped to Europe for 12 years, returning to Russia briefly to publish the 1st part of "The Dead Souls".
His religious beliefs were used by the State-controlled Orthodox Church to place guilt on him and to cause interruption of his literary work. In 1848 he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After his return to Russia, he settled in Moscow, where he fell under the control of the fanatical Orthodox priest, Konstantinovskii, who demanded that Gogol quit writing and destroy the manuscript of the 2nd part of "The Dead Souls". Torn by his inner conflict with guilt and being under the pressure from the fanatical priest, Gogol burned his manuscript. He died nine days later in pain without having any food during his last days. In the 1931 excavation of his tomb, his body was found lying face down, which caused suspicion that Gogol was buried alive.
His style involves the elements of the fantastic and grotesque, with the taste for the macabre and absurd, following the tradition of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaimed, "We all came out from under his Overcoat", referring to Gogol's influence on Russian writers. Sometimes compared with Franz Kafka, Gogol had such followers, as Yevgeni Zamyatin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Mikhail A. Bulgakov. - Writer
- Soundtrack
John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father was County Treasurer and his mother, a former schoolteacher. John graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 without a degree. He was variously employed as a sales clerk, farm laborer, ranch hand and factory worker. In 1925, he traveled by freight from Los Angeles to New York, where he was a construction worker. From 1926-1928, he was a caretaker in Lake Tahoe, CA. His first novel, "Cup of Gold," was published in 1929. During the 1930s, he produced most of his famous novels ("To a God Unknown," "Tortilla Flat," "In Dubious Battle," "Of Mice and Men," and his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Grapes of Wrath"). In 1941, he moved with the singer who would become his second wife to New York City. They had two sons, Thom (b. 1944) and John IV (b. 1946). In 1948, his close friend Ed Ricketts died, he went through a divorce, he took a a tour of Russia, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His wrote the screenplay for Viva Zapata! (1952), and 17 of his works have been made into movies. He received three Academy Award nominations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. US President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964, and he was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on what would have been his 75th birthday. His ashes lie in Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.- Writer
- Actor
Jim Thompson was born on 27 September 1906 in Anadarko, Oklahoma, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Paths of Glory (1957), The Killing (1956) and The Getaway (1972). He died on 7 April 1977 in Hollywood, California, USA.- Writer
- Producer
- Actor
James Ellroy was born on 4 March 1948 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for L.A. Confidential (1997), Street Kings (2008) and The Black Dahlia (2006).- Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
William S. Burroughs, one of the three seminal writers of the Beat Generation (the other two being his friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg), was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 5, 1914, to the son of the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. He grew up in patrician surroundings and attended private school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, chosen due to the climate as he suffered from sinus trouble (the school was later used to house the Manhattan Project during World War II)). Burroughs took his undergraduate degree at Harvard College (Class of 1936) but rebelled inwardly against the life that the upper-class Harvard man was supposed to lead during the pre-war period (outwardly he dressed the part of a patrician, with three-piece suit, necktie, black homburg and chesterfield overcoat being his standard wardrobe. His political options generally were also of his class, i.e., right-wing).
Planning to become a physician, Burroughs moved to Germany to study medicine. The plight of the Jews under the Nazis was desperate, and in 1937 Burroughs agreed to marry Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, a German Jewish woman, so she could leave Germany and eventually become a U.S. citizen. The two remained friends for many years after they moved back to the U.S., meeting often for lunch when Burroughs eventually settled in New York City in the early 1940s. They never lived together, and Burroughs formally divorced her in 1946 so he could marry his second wife, Joan.
Perhaps it was his exposure to National Socialism in Adolf Hitler's Germany that raised Burroughs' interest in his lifelong fascination: control mechanisms used by the state against its citizens. Burroughs left Germany for the United States without completing his studies, bringing along Ilse.
A homosexual in an extremely homophobic age, back in the U.S. he drifted from job to job while continuing his education as an autodidact. He lived in Chicago, where he was an exterminator, which he claimed was the best job he ever had. While in Chicago he met the young Lucien Carr (later to be the father of best-selling novelist Caleb Carr, author of "The Alienist") and David Kammerer. Kammerer was a homosexual 14 years Carr's senior who had been his private school tutor and had stalked Carr obsessively afterward, following him from city to city. While Carr was disturbed by Kammerer's behavior, he was also immature and flattered by the attention, a moth attracted to the flame. When the moth got singed, he would fly away. Carr dropped out of the University of Chicago to attend Columbia in New York in order to escape Kammerer, and when Kammerer inevitably followed, Burroughs tagged along.
Through Carr, Burroughs made the connections that would change his life: Columbia drop-out Kerouac, then in the Merchant Marine, and Columbia undergrad Ginsberg, then studying pre-law with the idea of becoming a labor lawyer. Intrigued by what he heard from Carr and Kammerer of Kerouac, he dropped in to see him at the apartment of Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Kerouac Parker, who shared the flat with Burroughs' future wife Joan.
Before the momentous meet-up, Burroughs had begun experimenting with morphine when he acquired a stash of the drug to sell, and he subsequently became hooked. Long fascinated by "low lifes" and the vitality they retained while the rest of "normal" Americans seemed wan and dessicated (this was the Great Depression, after all), Burroughs began conducting field "research" into New York's demimonde, aided and abetted by Herbert Huncke, a junkie and thief whom Burroughs befriended and let share his apartment in lower Manhattan. With Huncke playing Virgil to his Dante, Burroughs met the "low-lifes" who would become part of his fiction as he journeyed through the rings of hell that was World War II New York. "Sailor", who showed up as a character in Naked Lunch (1991), was a thief and drug dealer who once borrowed Burroughs' pistol and went out and shot a storekeeper to death (Sailor later hanged himself in jail after being arrested for an unrelated crime. He was known as an informer and had turned in a rival narcotics dealer--he was facing beatings, torture and possibly murder when he decided to take his own life). Soon Burroughs began to deal drugs in earnest in order to keep up with his own habit and fence merchandise himself, becoming part of a den of thieves that spilled over into Edie and Joan's apartment. The patrician Burroughs, with his high standards, prided himself on giving the best "cut" of heroin available, with personal home delivery to boot.
Jack Kerouac first urged Burroughs to write. Burroughs spent a lot of time at the apartment Kerouac shared with Edie and Joan. He particularly liked to psychoanalyze Kerouac and Ginsburg, and enjoyed having them act out scenarios, little dramas in which they would play roles: Burroughs an old queen/con artist, Ginsburg her pimp, and Kerouac as the gullible young American, mouth agape in a foreign land, ripe for the plucking. Their imaginations were quite fertile, and it fed Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing. Burroughs had never really had any inclination to write until he met Kerouac, but he and Jack collaborated on a mystery novel they eventually entitled "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," after the last sentence of a BBC-Radio report on a fire at the London Zoo. Each wrote alternating chapters, and after the book was complete, the manuscript was passed around among New York publishers. There were no takers, and for the time, Burroughs lost interest in writing.
In 1945 Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death during a stroll along the bank of the Hudson River below Morningside Heights that was a notorious gay cruising area. After holding the dying man in his arms, Carr weighted down the body of his former tutor with rocks and disposed of it in the Hudson. In bloodied clothes, Carr sought out Burroughs, soliciting advice. Ignoring the elder's wise counsel to get a good lawyer and turn himself in, Carr then went to see Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the murder weapon and Kammerer's glasses. Both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested (Burroughs as a material witness; Kerouac as an accessory after the fact), but eventually both were released without being prosecuted. Carr pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent off to the Elmira Reformatory, where he was incarcerated for two years.
New York City became increasingly untenable as Burroughs became known to the police, so -- after he and Joan married -- they moved to Louisiana to become farmers. Their crop was marijuana, and eventually they moved on to Mexico, where living was cheaper and drugs easier to come by (and there was less hassle from police). In 1951, at a party in which they both were drunk, an exhibitionistic Burroughs shot and killed Joan in an alleged accident where he reportedly attempted to mimic the "apple on the son's head" scene from "William Tell". As the story is told, Joan put a glass of liquor on top of her head after Burroughs beseeched her to perform their William Tell trick for the guests. There had never been a William Tell trick, Burroughs later ruefully admitted, and Joan wound up with a .32 ACP slug in her head. Accounts of the death, which the Mexican police ruled a misadventure caused by a mistake in judgment, have never been entirely satisfactory. Like Lucien Carr before him, Burroughs may have consciously or subconsciously rid himself of a lover whom he no longer had any use for, or was piqued at. Burroughs at the time of the shooting was in love, involved in a heavy gay affair.
After the death of Joan, Burroughs spent time journeying through Central and South America, looking for the drug called "Yage", which like peyote was rumored to offer a key to opening the doors of perception and heightening consciousness. He found it and distributed it among friends. In 1953 Allen Ginsburg managed to get Burroughs into print under the pen name "William Lee." His autobiographical novel, "Junkie", was published by Ace Books (the son of the owner, Carl Solomon, was one of Ginsburg's friends) as a 35-cent paperback original (its formal title was "Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Adict", and it was published as "Two Books in One" back-to-back with another paperback original in the same volume). Returning to Mexico City, in the mid-'50s he began writing in earnest while keeping up with his drug habit, living off the small trust fund he received as a scion of the Burroughs family. It was in Mexico City that he began writing the sketches that would turn into his major book, "Naked Lunch". In 1956 he left Mexico City for Tangiers, Morocco, as the living was even cheaper than it was in Mexico City (as were the drugs). He eventually returned to the US in the 1960s.
"Naked Lunch" has the distinction of being the last major book to be prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The novel was written in Mexico City and Tangiers, crafted from fragments he wrote while addicted to heroin. After it was published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1959, it quickly became notorious for its graphic descriptions of sexual encounters, sadism and murder, as well as its no-holds-barred use of language. Many stalwart defenders of the First Amendment drew the line at "Naked Lunch", stating that they did not fight the good fight to get James Joyce's "Ulysses" and the works of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller before the American public so that something like "Naked Lunch" could be published. Grove Press acquired the rights to the book, but it was not published until 1962, as the publishing house awaited the outcome of other obscenity trials, including one involving Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl", which featured Burroughs as one of its hipsters searching for "an angry fix". Guided by Justice William J. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court starting in the late 1950s had relaxed censorship standards to protect literature that had redeeming social value, no matter that passages in the works were accused of being obscene. To be banned, a work had to be utterly without redeeming social value. Undaunted, the Comonwealth of Massachusetts successfully prosecuted the book as obscene.
For the initial trial, Grove Press had gathered together an impressive list of "experts" such as Norman Mailer to defend the book, but Burroughs' modern classic initially lost, was declared obscene, and was banned in Massachusetts (a banned book would be destroyed, the copies already having been confiscated by the police). However, in 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court (in Memoirs v. Massachusetts) found that "Naked Lunch" was "not without social value, and therefore, not obscene." With this ruling an era that began in the 1870s when anti-smut crusader Anthony Comstock led the charge for stricter enforcement of obscenity laws by the federal and state governments came to an end.
By the late 1970s Burroughs had lived long enough to be hailed by critics and the public as a major American writer. He was embraced by punk rockers in New York and became an iconic figure by the 1980s. He died in 1997 at the age of 83.- Mikhail A. Bulgakov was a Russian writer and medical doctor known for big screen adaptations of his books, such as Beg (1971) and Master i Margarita (2006).
He was born Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov on May 15, 1891, in Kiev, Russia (now Kiev, Ukraine). He was the first of six children in the family of a theology professor. His family belonged to the intellectual elite of Kiev. Bulgakov with his brothers took part in the demonstration commemorating the death of Lev Tolstoy. Bulgakov graduated with honors from the Medical School of Kiev University in 1915. He married his classmate Tatiana Lippa, who became his assistant at surgeries and in his Doctor's office. He practiced medicine, specializing in venereal and other infectious diseases from 1915 to 1919.
Bulgakov wrote about his experiences as a doctor in his early works "Notes of a Young Doctor." In 1917-1919, he suffered from an infection that caused him an unbearable painful itch requiring him to take morphine; which he became addicted to, but he managed to overcome the dependency and quit. He joined the anti-communist White Army in the Russian Civil War. After the Civil War, he tried to emigrate from Russia, to reunite with his brother in Paris. But he became trapped in Soviet Russia. Several times he was almost killed by opposing forces on both sides of the Russian Civil War, but soldiers needed doctors, so Bulgakov was left alive. He provided medical help to the Chehchens, Caucasians, Cossacs, Russians, the Whites, the Reds... Bulgakov was the Doctor to all the sick people.
In 1921, Bulgakov moved to Moscow. There he became a writer and made friends with Valentin Kataev, Yuriy Olesha, Ilya Ilf, Yevgeni Petrov, and Konstantin Paustovsky. Later, he met Mikhail Zoschenko, Anna Akhmatova, Viktor Ardov, Sergey Mikhalkov, and Korney Ivanovich Chukovskiy. Bulgakov's plays at the Moscow Art Theatre were directed by Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. "Days of the Turbins," about the demise of the White Army, was performed more than 200 times at the Moscow Art Theatre, and also at other Soviet theatres until it was banned.
The play was later restored to the repertoire and at least fifteen performances of this play were attended by Joseph Stalin. Stalin liked the play and later, in his official speeches, he used some of the well-written lines that were spoken from the stage by the Bulgakov's characters. In 1941, after the Nazi invasion in Russia during the Second World War, Joseph Stalin started his first radio address to the people of the Soviet Union with Bulgakov's words from the play, "Brothers and Sisters..."
Bulgakov's political independence was expressed in his article on the death of the first Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin, "He killed a river of people..." wrote Bulgakov in 1924.
Bugakov's own way of life and his witty criticism of the ugly realities of life in the Soviet Union caused him much trouble. In 1925 he released 'Heart of a Dog', a bitter satire about the loss of civilized values in Russia under the Soviet system. Soon after, Bulgakov was interrogated by the Soviet secret service, OGPU. After interrogations, his personal diary and several unfinished works were confiscated by the secret service.
His plays were banned in all theaters, which terminated his income. Being financially broke, he wrote to his brother in Paris about his terrible life and poverty in Moscow. Bulgakov distanced himself from the Proletariat Writer's Union because he refused to write about the peasants and proletariat. He made adaptation of the "Dead Souls" by Nikolay Gogol for the stage; it became a success but was abruptly banned.
He took a risk and wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin with an ultimatum: "Let me out of the Soviet Union, or restore my work at the theaters." On the 18th of April of 1930, Bulgakov received a telephone call from Joseph Stalin. The dictator told the writer to fill an employment application at the Moscow Art Theater. Gradually, Bulgakov's plays were back in the repertoire of the Moscow Art Theatre. But most other theatres were in fear and did not stage any of the Bulgakov's plays for many years.
Joseph Stalin, who was increasingly paranoid, ordered massive extermination of intellectuals during the repressions known as the "Great Terror" (aka.. Great Purge). Many of Bulgakov's friends and colleagues, like Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoschenko and many others were censored, banned, prosecuted, exiled, imprisoned, executed, found dead, or just disappeared without a trace.
At that time Bulgakov started his masterpiece - "Master and Margarita." It was slowly evolving from the series of chapters, initially titled "The Black Magician" in 1929. That was changed to "The Prince of Darkness" in 1930. Then it was changed again to "The Great Chancellor" in 1934. Finally, the novel was titled as "Master and Margarita" in 1934 and was rewritten and updated constantly until the writer's death in 1940.
While writing the novel, Bulgakov met Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya, who became his wife. She was, in part, the model for Margarita in the novel. Secret service agents were spying on Bulgakov and learned about his new novel. Bulgakov was interrogated again and was ordered to destroy the manuscript under the threat from the government agents. He had to be very cautious. Bulgakov split the manuscript in two parts and destroyed one half in a fire.
Soon, he restored the missing part from memory and continued writing the novel. He was writing the novel in secrecy, hiding its manuscript for many years until his death in 1940. The main character in the novel, Voland, alludes to Stalin, or Beria, or any dictator who plays a semi-god. Voland was modeled after Satan in "Faust" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The novel has many parallels with the Bible and the "Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri. The characters and events in "Master and Margarita" are alluding to Bulgakov's experiences in Moscow under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin.
Five days before his death, Bulgakov accepted an unusual promise from his loving wife. She swore to live a humble life and wait as long as it would take for Bulgakov's masterpiece to be published. The original manuscript of "The Master and Margarita" was preserved by Bulgakov's wife, Elena Sergeevna, until its first publication in 1966. It is a Menippean satire, a cross-genre comedy, drama, and fantasy, regarded by many as the best of the 20th century Russian novels.
Mikhail Bulgakov died of a kidney failure, on March 10, 1940, in Moscow. He was laid to rest in the Novodevichy Monastery Cemetery, next to other Russian cultural luminaries. - Writer
- Art Department
- Music Department
Although Hugo was fascinated by poems from childhood on, he spent some time at the polytechnic university of Paris until he dedicated all his work to literature. He was one of the few authors who were allowed to reach popularity during his own lifetime and one of the leaders of French romance.
After the death of his daughter Leopoldine in 1843, he started a career in politics and became member of the Paris chamber where he fought for leftist ideas. After the re-establishing of monarchy, he had to go into exile to Guernesey (1851-1870) where his literary work became more important, e.g. "Les Miserables" was written during that period. After his return to Paris he did not join politics anymore.- Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on 11 November 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Back to School (1986), Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) and General Electric Theater (1953). He was married to Jill Krementz and Jane Marie Cox. He died on 11 April 2007 in New York City, New York, USA.- Born 1933 in Leningrad, RSFSR, USSR (now Saint Petersburg in Russia), Boris Natanovich Strugatskiy was a Soviet/Russian sci-fi writer, often writing in collaboration with his older brother Arkadiy Strugatskiy. Strugatskiys' father Natan Strugatskiy was a Jewish art critic and their mother was a Russian Orthodox teacher. Living in Leningrad with his mother, Boris survived the 1941-1944 siege of the city by the Nazi Germany army. In 1955 he graduated astronomy and went on to word as an astronomer and computer engineer. In 1958 the Strugatskiy brothers begun their artistic collaboration, which lasted until Arkadiy's death in 1991. In 1966 Boris quit his job to become a full-time writer and starting form 1972, he taught a speculative fiction writing seminar. In 1979, the brothers' best-known novel, "Piknik na obochine" ("Roadside Picnic") was loosely adapted for the screen by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker (1979). After his brother's death, Boris published two more books, which he wrote under a pseudonym. He died on November 19, 2012 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Writings of the Strugatskiys continue to inspire creators of movies (such as Dark Planet (2008)) and video games (such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007) and its sequels).
- Born on August 28, 1925 in Batumi, Georgian SSR, Transcaucasian SFSR, USSR (now in Georgia), Arkadiy Natanovich Strugatskiy was a Soviet/Russian sci-fi writer, often writing in collaboration with his younger brother Boris Strugatskiy. Strugatskiys' father Natan Strugatskiy was a Jewish art critic and their mother was a Russian Orthodox teacher. When Arkadiy was a child, the family moved to Leningrad. He was evacuated from the city during the siege of Leningrad in 1942 along with his father, who didn't survive the journey. The following year he was drafted into the Soviet army and went to study at the artillery school in Aktyubinsk. In 1949 he graduated the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow as Japanese and English interpreter. He worked for the military until 1955, when he became a writer instead. In 1958 the Strugatskiy brothers begun their artistic collaboration, which lasted until Arkadiy's death. In 1979, the brothers' best-known novel, "Piknik na obochine" ("Roadside Picnic") was loosely adapted for the screen by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker (1979). Arkadiy died on October 12, 1991 in Moscow, USSR (now in Russia). Writings of the Strugatskiys continue to inspire creators of movies (such as Dark Planet (2008)) and video games (such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007) and its sequels).