A Good Writer Is Hard To Find: The Search For Flannery O’Connor
by Linda McGovern To try and get more from a writer than what you see on the page, depends on the writer and their ability to make you see, and…
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American Authors
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The Strange Case Of The Jack Kerouac Estate
Jack Kerouac is known in the popular imagination as the harbinger of the Beat movement – a free-wheeling spirit who “hit the road” in search of a good time and…
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The Longfellow House
By Natalie Rothstein He was a young 30-year-old professor about to start his teaching career at Harvard. So it was that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow knocked at the door of 105…
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Poe on Sullivan’s Island
On a chilly autumn day in the year of the new millennium, I head my car out of Charleston, South Carolina up the coast, across the river and marshes to Sullivan’s Island, now a settled community of mostly year round residents. Meandering, I could turn left onto Gold Bug Avenue, or Raven Drive, or turn right onto Poe Avenue, names commemorating a writer’s stay on this little sea island.
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Scholar, Athlete, and Artist: Edgar Allan Poe At University of Virginia
In 1826, Edgar Allan Poe attended the University of Virginia to receive the liberal education promised to him by his foster father, John Allan. Almost 200 years later, I visited Charlottesville in search of background ambiance for a novel I was writing about Poe’s stint as a college student. Although Poe had only turned 17 just three weeks before his arrival, John Allan’s influence with the school’s administrators cleared the way for his charge’s early admission.
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Edgar Allan Poe’s Richmond
The Poe Shrine is an open brick shelter, constructed of materials salvaged from the Southern Literary Messenger building where Poe worked as an editor. A bust of the poet looks out on an island of green grass, a two-tiered fountain, and a stone planter overflowing with begonias.
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Poe’s Philadelphia Experience
By the scene is a vacant old house in the center of a bustling city. A cold chill follows you in before you can even shut the heavy door. There are no furnishings, only a barren fireplace of cold brick. The ambiance gives off the feeling of ice. The paint is desperately trying to peel completely away from the wall, and the bare wooden floors creek beneath your feet.
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Ernest Hemingway and Piggott, Arkansas
Piggott, Arkansas, is a town of just under 4000 residents. Piggott is an attractive town, with lovely homes, and beautiful scenery, but it is an out-of-the-way town, and one doesn’t just stop at Piggott while on the way someplace else. It’s not off any major interstate, and Piggott doesn’t even have a Wal-Mart store.
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Jack London: The American Karl Marx
Called the “Boy Socialist: and the “American Karl Marx,” Jack London succeeded so well as a writer under the capitalistic system that he could afford to build a “palace for his pigs,” to popularize the sport of surfing, and to show off his bridge of artificial teeth to huge crowds. In addition to being one of the highest paid writers of his time, Jack London also ran for Mayor of Oakland twice and was pushed to run for the presidency — all on the Socialist ticket.
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Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
By Christina Lewis Margaret Mitchell admired people who had gumption, people who fought their way through hard times triumphantly and came out survivors. She said that if her novel, Gone…
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