Skip to main content

September 18, 1893

William March (September 18, 1893 to May 15, 1954), was an American writer. He is obscure today, and he was in the 1930s, when he started writing. Some of his novels are, The Tallons, (1936) and October Island (1952). His prose was excellent, as we can observe in this excerpt from The Tallons:

She lifted the overfed kitchen cat, curled him into her lap, and thought of her uncles and the complexity of their relationship. She had not known what the quarrel was about, but she had speculated over it a good deal. 

According to the Encyclopedia of Alabama:

The Looking-Glass is generally considered to be March's best Alabama-based work and, indeed, his best novel. His biographer, Roy S. Simmonds, called the novel March's "most accomplished full-length work."

His life is interesting and I suggest reading the article at the link already cited. There I learned that, after he  had a novel published in April, March was found dead of a heart attack in his bed. In his typewriter there was the first page of another novel, titled: "Poor Pilgrim, Poor Stranger." 

The Bad Seed was published in April of 1954. March did not live to see his book made into a successful Broadway play, and a famous movie. If you just saw the movie, you missed the complete grimness of that work. The Bad Seed is an attempt by the 20th century to come to grips with the implications of major scientific advances of the modern era. The movie was sanitized. 
at  No comments:   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

May 27, 1564

  May 27, 1564 John Calvin, a Protestant theologian who argued for predestination, was fond of his wife's cat,"Henriette." His wife and his wife's cat died in the same month, and according to J. Stephen Lang, author of 1,001 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Cats, Calvin did not get another wife or another cat. John Calvin died on May 27, 1564.
Post a Comment
Read more

August 23, 1941

Onora Sylvia O'Neill (August 23, 1941) is a British thinker. She studied at Oxford and received a doctorate from Harvard. After a noted career, in 1992, she  accepted the post of  Principal of  N ewnham College, Cambridge, and since 2006 she has been Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Her 1997 paper, "Environmental Values, Anthroporphism, and Speciesism" contains a timely  argument  in which Dr. O'Neill, (she prefers that title to the "Baroness" to which her elevation to the peerage allows) points out inadequacies in the use of the term speciesism to argue against according humans more ethical rights than aspects of the non human world.  A viewpoint that puts " a person torturing a cat is on a par with a cat torturing a bird," is not one she finds supportable. The link is to a downloadable version of this paper.  We have  this picture  of Onora O'Neill, in 2002, at Newnham College: We meet in the Principal's lodge at Ne...
Post a Comment
Read more

July 8, 2006

 Raja Rao, the Indian writer credited for his authentic portrayal of Indian values in English publications died on July 8, 2006. From his obituary in The Guardian this description of two books Rao wrote. "Aiming at an ultimately positive encounter between east and west, Rao's metaphysical novel,  The Serpent and the Rope  (1960), displays an intellectuality that goes beyond the textual, through its metaphysical associations and a spiritual dimension that tells us much about the Indian and European worlds. His protagonist, Ramaswamy, entertains his friends with philosophical discussions ranging over an impressive set of themes - including Buddhism, theology, monasticism and world politics - while at the same time he charmingly invites the reader to envisage reality from his Hindu viewpoint, offering the key of distinguishing the projected reality of the serpent from the existing reality of the rope, an image derived from Shankara. ...[In a subsequent book,] Rao manages to ...
Post a Comment
Read more