Richard Wright (1908-1960)

Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His grandparents had been slaves and his father, Nathaniel, who was an illiterate sharecropper and mill worker, left home when Richard was six. Wright grew up in poverty, staying often at homes of relatives. His mother, Ella Wilson, was a schoolteacher; she moved with her family to Memphis, where she found employment as a cook. In 1915-16 Wright attended school for a few months, but his mother's illness forced him to leave. He attended school sporadically, lived in Arkansas with his aunt Maggie and uncle Silas, who was murdered, and in Mississippi. In his childhood Wright was often beaten. However, he continued to teach himself, secretly borrowing books from the whites-only library in Memphis. "My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety," he later wrote in his autobiography BLACK BOY (1945).

Wright worked at various jobs, among others as a newspaper delivery boy and as an assistant to an insurance agent. His spare-time jobs enabled Wright to buy schoolbooks, pulp magazines, and dime novels, all of which he read avidly. At the age of fifteen, he wrote his first story, 'The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre'. It was published in Southern Register, a local black newspaper. Wright attended junior high school in Jackson, Mississippi, and graduated in 1925. From 1925 to 1927 Wright lived in Memphis, where he worked for an optical company.

During these years he read widely and decided to become a writer. Tired of segregation law, he moved to Chicago, hoping that life would be better there. He worked as a post office clerk, at that time the only place educated blacks could find work. During the Great Depression he hold several other jobs. Wright was also given the opportunity to write through the Federal Writers' Project. By the time he moved to New York City, he had written most of the novel LAWD TODAY, which was published posthumously in 1963. It centered around the life of Jake Jackson, a violent man from Chicago, who has not much hope in his mean environment. Social environment also played central role in Native Son, a view that was advocated especially leftist writers.

In 1932 Wright joined the Communist Party and was an executive secretary of the local John Reed Club of leftist writers and authors of Chicago. He wrote poetry for such journals as Left Front, Midland Left, Anvil, International Literature, Partisan Review, and New Masses. 'Big Boy Leaves Home', telling about the shocking end of the childhood of a young black boy, was first published in The New Caravan and greeted as the best piece in the anthology. In 1937 Wright moved to New York City, becoming editor of Daily Worke , and a later vice president of the League for American Writers. In 1938 Wright published UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN, a collection of stories of Southern racism, which was reissued in expanded form two years later. The story 'Fire and Cloud' was given the O. Henry Memorial award in 1938. Uncle Tom's Children helped After his breakthrough as a writer, Wright collaborated with Paul Green on a stage adaptation of the book, which was directed by Orson Welles and run successfully on Broadway in 1941-43. After his marriage with Rose Dhima Meadman ended, a white dancer, Wright married in 1941 Ellen Poplar, a daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants and a fellow leftist. They had two daughters. The autobiographical Black Boy received good reviews. The book was set in the 1920s. It begins as the narrator accidentally burns his house down. Readers learn how he became a drunkard in his sixth year, and how begging drinks became his obsession. His mother and grandmother beat him, so hard sometimes that he lost consciousness. He was also beaten by his aunt in a Seventh-day Adventist school, where she was a teacher.

In 1944 Wright left Communist Party. He spent the summer of 1945 as an artist-in-residence at the Bread Loaf School for writers in Middlebury, Vermont, and then went to France with his wife and 4-year-old daughter. Wright met among others Gertrude Stein, André Gide, and Léopold Senghor. He returned to the United States only briefly and settled in Paris, where he associated with existentialists and such American writers as James Baldwin. Wright helped Baldwin to win a prestigious literary fellowship, and Baldwin repaid him four years later by criticizing the tactics of Native Son in his career-launching essay 'Everybody's Protest Novel'.

In 1949 Wright joined George Plimpton and others in founding the Paris Review. He acted in the film based on the novel Native Son - the American release was not successful and the film was banned in several cities. Wright's existentialist novel THE OUTSIDER (1952), depicting a black intellectual's search for identity, received mixed reviews. It was praised mostly in Europe. In Paris Wright was not treated like in the American South, but he gradually lost touch with his inspiration, or "the rhythms of his life".

During his years in France, Wright spent much of his time supporting nationalist movements in Africa. In 1953 he travelled in Africa, gathering material for BLACK POWER (1954), and witnessing the rise of the Pan-African movement. Among his other works in the 1950s were SAVAGE HOLIDAY (1954), about a white man caught in a web of violence, THE COLOR CURTAIN (1956), about Asia, PAGAN SPAIN (1957), a travel book of a Catholic country full of contradictions, and WHITE MAN, LISTEN! (1958), a collection of lectures on racial injustice. Wright's last short story, 'Big Black Good Man', which originally was published in Esquire and was collected in EIGHT MEN (1961), was set in Copenhangen and dealt with prejudices. THE LONG DREAM (1958), a novel set in Mississippi, had a poor reception. Its sequel, Island of Hallucination, set in Paris, was not published. "Everything in the book happened, but I've twisted characters so that people won't recognise them," said Wright to his agent. AMERICAN HUNGER, a sequel to Black Boy, appeared in 1977.

Wright distanced in the last years of his life from his associates. He suffered from poor health and financial difficulties and grew suspicious about the activities of CIA in Paris - in which he was right. Wright's plans to move to London were rejected by the British officials. In 1959 he began composing haiku, producing almost four thousand of them. Wright died nearly penniless at the age of fifty-two in Paris, on November 28, 1960. At his request, his body was cremated and his ashes mixed with the ashes of a copy of Black Boy. Wright's daughter Julia has claimed that his father was murdered. Upon his death, Wright left behind an unfinished book on French West Africa. His travel writings, edited by Virginia Whatley Smith, appeared in 2001. Wright to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to devote his full time to writing.

Everything That Rises Must Converge

Just one year before her death in 1963, Flannery O’Connor won her second O. Henry Award for ‘‘Everything That Rises Must Converge,’’ a powerful depiction of a troubled mother-son relationship. In 1965 the story was published in her well-regarded short fiction collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge.

Most critics view ‘‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’’ as a prime example of O’Connor’s literary and moral genius. The story exemplifies her ability to expose human weakness and explore important moral questions through everyday situations. Considered a classic of the short story form, ‘‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’’ has been anthologized frequently.

The story describes the events surrounding a fateful bus trip that an arrogant young man takes with his bigoted mother. The mother insists on her son’s company because she doesn’t like to ride the bus alone, especially since the bus system was recently integrated. The tensions in their relationship come to a head when a black mother and son board the same bus.

O’Connor utilizes biting irony to expose the blindness and ignorance of her characters. The story’s title refers to an underlying religious message that is central to her work: she aims to expose the sinful nature of humanity that often goes unrecognized in the modern, secular world.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

American writer, particularly acclaimed for her stories which combined comic with tragic and brutal. Along with authors like Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition that focused on the decaying South and its damned people. O'Connor's body of work was small, consisting of only thirty-one stories, two novels, and some speeches and letters.

"Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man, Freedom cannot be conceived simply." (from Wise Blood, 1952)

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic family. The region was part of the 'Christ-haunted' Bible belt of the Southern States. The spiritual heritage of the region shaped profoundly O'Connor's writing as described in her essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" (1969). O'Connor's father, Edward F. O'Connor, was a realtor owner. He worked later for a construction company and died in 1941. Her mother, Regina L. (Cline) O'Connor, came from a prominent family in the state - her father had been a mayor of Milledgeville for many years.

When O'Connor was 12, her family moved to Milledgeville, her mother's birthplace. She attended the Peabody High School and enrolled in the Georgia State College for Women. At school she edited the college magazine and graduated in 1945 with an A.B. O'Connor then continued her studies at the University of Iowa, where she attended writer's workshops conducted by Paul Engle. At the age of 21 she published her first short story, 'The Geranium', in Accent. In the following year she received the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Literature. In 1947 she lived for seven months at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., an estate left by the Trask family for writers, painters and musicians.

O'Connor published four chapters of Wise Blood in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review, and Partisan Review in 1948 and 1949. The complete novel appeared 1952. It dealt with a young religious enthusiast, who attempts to establish a church without Christ. The Signet paperback version of the book advertised it as "A Searching Novel of Sin and Redemption". O'Connor's second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), had a related subject matter. The protagonist is Francis Marion Tarwater who begins his ministry in his youth. He baptizes and drowns Bishop, his uncle's idiot son. Old Tarwater warns his grand-nephew: "'You are the kind of boy,' the old man said, 'that the devil is always going to be offering to assists, to give you a smoke or a drink or a ride, and to ask you your bidnis. You had better mind how you take up with strangers.'" Young Tarwater sets fire to his own woods to clean himself, and like his great-uncle, a mad prophet, he finally becomes a prophet and a madman. O'Connor once explained that "I can write about Protestant believers better than Catholic believers - because they express their belief in diverse kinds of dramatic action which is obvious enough for me to catch. I can't write about anything subtle."

The young protagonist of Wise Blood, Hazel Mote, returns from the army with his faith gone awry. He founds the Church Without Christ, wears a preacher's bright blue suit and a preacher's black hat. He is accompanied by bizarre villains. Asa Hawks pretends to have blinded himself. Sabbath Lily, his daughter, turns into a monster of sexual voracity. The fox-faced young Enoch Emery steals from a museum a mummy, which he thinks of as "the new jesus." Enoch knows things because "he had wise blood like his daddy." Eventually Enoch finds his religious fulfillment dressed in a stolen gorilla costume. Hazel buys an old Essex automobile, his own religious mystery: "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified." Haze murders the False Prophet, his rival, by running over him with his second-hand Essex, and faces his cul-de-sac.

John Huston read the novel in 1978 - he received a copy of it from Michael Fitzgerald, whose father was O'Connor's literary executor. Against all odds, Michael Fitzgerald got the money for the production, some $2,000,000; the screenplay was written by Michael and his brother, Benedict, and everyone worked for a minimum wage. Most of the film was shot in Macon, Georgia. "There were seven outstanding performances in Wise Blood. Only three of those seven actors have any reputation to speak of: Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty and Harry Dean Stanton. The other four are unknowns. They are all great stars, as far as I'm concerned. Nothing would make me happier than to see this picture gain popular acceptance and turn a profit. It would prove something. I'm not sure what... but something." ( John Huston in An Open Book, 1988) In 1950 O'Connor suffered her first attack from disseminated lupus, a debilitating blood disease that had killed her father. She returned to Milledgeville where she lived with her mother on her dairy farm. In spite of the illness, O'Connor continued to write and occasionally she lectured about creative writing in colleges. "I write every day for at least two hours," she said in an interview in 1952, "and I spend the rest of my time largely in the society of ducks."

"I am making out fine in spite of any conflicting stories," she wrote to Robert Lowell. "I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe more closely, or so I tell myself." O'Connor read such thinkers as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ( 1881-195 1881-195 ), George Santayana (1863-1952), and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). In New York she had befriended with Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, two other literary Roman Catholics. She lived and wrote in their house in Ridgefield, Connecticut until illness redirected her life in 1951. O'Connor named Robert Fitzgerald as her literary executor. He selected and edited with his wife a volume of O'Connor's occasional prose, which was published in 1969 under the title Mystery and Manners.

From around 1955 O'Connor was forced to use crutches. An abdominal operation reactivated the lupus and O'Connor died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39. Her second collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published posthumously in 1965. The Complete Short Stories (1971) contained several stories that had not previously appeared in book form. O'Connor's letters, published as The Habit of Being (1979), reveal her conscious craftsmanship in writing and the role of Roman Catholicism in her life.

David Michael Kaplan

Personal Information: Family: Born April 4, 1946, in New York, NY; son of Sidney and Minnie Marie (Henson) Kaplan; married Elizabeth Hope Crighton, August 16, 1976 (divorced); married Joyce Winer, July, 1988. Education: Yale University, B.A., 1967; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1987. Addresses: Office: Department of English, Crown Center for the Humanities, Loyola University of Chicago, 6525 North Sheridan Rd., Chicago, IL 60626.

Career: North Carolina Advancement School, Winston-Salem, English instructor, 1965-66; Learning Institute, Durham, NC, curriculum construction, 1968-71; Shadowstone Films, Durham, NC, creative director, 1971-76; National TV News, Los Angeles, CA, production director, 1976-84; Loyola University of Chicago, IL, assistant professor, then associate professor of English, 1987--.

Awards: "Doe Season" was selected as one of the Best American Short Stories of 1985; Nelson Algren Award for short fiction, 1999, for "Bamboo."

David Michael Kaplan is an associate professor of English at Loyola University of Chicago. He has written award-winning short stories, as well as a novel and a nonfiction work on how to improve your writing. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and began his writing career part time while working in Los Angeles.

his collection of short stories entitled Comfort, Kaplan focuses on the central theme of parent-child relationships. Most of the pieces describe children who have become emotionally or physically estranged from a parent and their search for reconciliation. Many of the stories involve surreal or supernatural content, suggesting an influence by magic realists. "In addition to the human relationships and the unbridgeable distances they seem to encompass," wrote Sarah Gold in Village Voice, "Kaplan infuses his stories with another reality; apparitions and magic, a demon and a witch, mystical events that seem like dreams but may not be."

The book begins with the showpiece entitled "Doe Season," which was selected as one of the Best American Short Stories of 1985. A pre-teen tomboy named Andy accepts an invitation to accompany her father on a hunting trip. She wants desperately to prove she is a worthy companion even though she is a girl. However, after reluctantly killing a doe, she runs from the horrible display of the gutted deer butchered by her father and his friends. Later that night, the doe revisits Andy in her dreams displaying the wound that the girl had inflicted upon her. These experiences cause Andy to reexamine her feelings about being a girl.

"In the Realm of the Herons" is another story of a father and his daughter. After the unexpected death of the mother, the grieving father and daughter take a vacation to the lake. Instead of a restorative stay at a summer cabin, the father is tormented by his daughter's refusal to accept her mother's death. While out rowing alone, the father happens upon an old house and begins to fantasize about living there with his daughter. When he insists upon her seeing the house, the daughter finds a dead heron nailed to the wall, causing the pain and suffering of death to rise to the forefront of the daughter's mind.

Many of Kaplan's stories concern children dealing with the loss of their mothers. In "Love, Your Only Mother," a daughter occasionally receives a postcard in the mail from her mother, who left years ago. The messages are bizarre, containing words that taunt and tease her daughter. Each card is from a different place, never revealing where her mother is, but only where she had been. New York Times Book Review contributor Susan Wood wrote that Kaplan "is at his best suggesting how such moments may alter, for better or worse, our relationships with those to whom we are most deeply bound--children, parents, lovers--in love and guilt."

Kaplan looks at a father's relationship with his son in "Summer People." Frank is an estranged son trying to escape his father's expectations. Father and son are forced to reunite to close up an old summer home for the last time. Once together, long-standing conflicts and resentments surface. However, even with a near drowning, resolutions are not offered. Mary Soete for Library Journal summed up Comfort: "This is writing of powerful insight and beauty, a talented first collection."

Skating in the Dark (1991) is a series of linked short stories about a man named Frank. The stories relate various stages in his life, from the age of seven to his forties. Diane Goheen of School Library Journal found the stories' various themes "bittersweet," but the collection "thoroughly entertaining." A critic for Publishers Weekly wrote that the "elegant novel . . . yields a particular richness of themes and variations." Kaplan "evokes the sadness and longing of growing up and thinking back."

Dinner For One

The Mystery of Dinner for One

How an obscure British skit has become Germany's most popular New Year's tradition.

By Jude StewartPosted Friday, Dec. 30, 2005, at 12:13 PM ET

Listen to this story on NPR's Day to Day.

"The same procedure as every year, James."Every New Year's Eve, half of all Germans plunk down in front of their televisions to watch a 1963 English comedy sketch called Dinner for One. Walk into any bar in Bavaria and shout the film's refrain: "The same procedure as last year, madam?" The whole crowd will shout back in automatic, if stilted, English: "The same procedure as every year, James." Even though Dinner for One is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most frequently repeated TV program ever, it has never been aired in the United Kingdom or the United States, and most of the English-speaking world is ignorant of its existence. When Der Spiegel probed the mystery last New Year's, it found that the BBC had not only never contemplated broadcasting this veddy British nugget in the United Kingdom, the BBC's spokesperson had never even heard of it.

Dinner for One, also known as Der 90 Geburtstag (The 90th Birthday), has rattled around the cabaret circuit for decades. Written by British author Lauri Wylie in the 1920s, it presents a morbidly funny story in miniature—(just 11 minutes on TV): Elderly Miss Sophie throws her birthday party every year, setting the table for her friends Sir Toby, Mr. Pommeroy, Mr. Winterbottom, and Adm. von Schneider, while conveniently ignoring the fact that they've all been dead for a quarter-century. (You can watch all of Dinner for One here or read the English script here.) Her butler James manfully takes up the slack by playacting all of them. He serves both drinks and food while quaffing toasts on behalf of each "guest," a bevy of soused British noblemen and von Schneider, who toasts Miss Sophie with a heel-click and a throaty "Skål!" (Watch a sample of Mr. Winterbottom's patois here.) James waddles to and fro, trips repeatedly over the head of a tiger-pelt rug, declaims each guest's pleasantries boozily, spray-fires the table with mispoured drinks, and downs a little water from a flower vase. Each course begins with the signature refrain: "The same procedure as last year, madam?" "The same procedure as every year, James." The sketch ends with James' final "procedure": bedding the old lady himself.

The Problem With Human Compassion

Human Compassion Surprisingly Limited, Study Finds
By Sara Goudarzi, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 16 February 2007 08:23 am ET

SAN FRANCISCO—While a person's accidental death reported on the evening news can bring viewers to tears, mass killings reported as statistics fail to tickle human emotions, a new study finds.

The Internet and other modern communications bring atrocities such as killings in Darfur, Sudan into homes and office cubicles. But knowledge of these events fails to motivate most to take action, said Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon researcher.

People typically react very strongly to one death but their emotions fade as the number of victims increase, Slovic reported here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"We go all out to save a single identified victim, be it a person or an animal, but as the numbers increase, we level off," Slovic said. "We don't feel any different to say 88 people dying than we do to 87. This is a disturbing model, because it means that lives are not equal, and that as problems become bigger we become insensitive to the prospect of additional deaths."
Human insensitivity to large-scale human suffering has been observed in the past century with genocides in Armenia, the Ukraine, Nazi Germany and Rwanda, among others.

"We have to understand what it is in our makeup—psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally—that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century," Slovic said. "If we don't answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world."

Slovic previously studied this phenomenon by presenting photographs to a group of subjects. In the first photograph eight children needed $300,000 to receive medical attention in order to save their lives. In the next photograph, one child needed $300,000 for medical bills.
Most subjects were willing to donate to the one and not the group of children.

In his latest research, Slovic and colleagues showed three photos to participants: a starving African girl, a starving African boy and a photo of both of them together.
Participants felt equivalent amounts of sympathy for each child when viewed separately, but compassion levels declined when the children were viewed together.

"The studies ... suggest a disturbing psychological tendency," Slovic said. "Our capacity to feel is limited. Even at two, people start to lose it.”

The Story of An Hour

Irony in "The Story of the Hour"

Summary: Dark irony plays a major role in "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin. A long-suffering wife who celebrates her husbands' death dies from the shock of discovering he is still alive.

In "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin, there are many moments when Chopin's craft of writing feeds the irony of the story. One perfect example, "assure himself of its truth by a second telegram" (772). This sentence subdued me into believing that Mrs. Mallard's husband was dead, when in fact, we learn that he never died. In addition, Mrs. Mallard is a woman with a strong sense of passion and detest. In the end, she dies by the nature of story.

Chopin brings a style of writing that has irony. In the beginning of the story, Chopin's introduces you to the heart trouble that afflicts Mrs. Mallard. Her condition is significant later because this ailment drives the story. However, the notion of this heart condition can be overlooked as being meaningless. Many readers could argue that this heart condition foreshadowed the climax of the story instantaneously but it does not. In the end of the story, we realize the significance of her sickness. It was a clever way to secretly introduce the weakness that ends Mrs. Mallard's life. Another, well deceptive measure used by Chopin's was to suggest that Mr. Mallard had died. In paragraph 2, Mr. Mallard's friend, Richards, confirmed twice that such allegations were in fact true (772). At that moment, I conceived that Mr. Mallard was dead. There was no other clue to believe otherwise and it was one of the strongest signs delivered in the story, because it left you unprepared for what was to come in the end.


When Chopin wrote, "She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms", I felt her sense of passion and emotional attachment to her husband (772).
Mrs. Mallard also opposed her husband as much as she cared for him. For a women being ill, and just being notified of her husbands death, it's awkward to read how she describes the surroundings while in her room. She describes the tops of trees being, "all aquiver with the new spring life", and the air being filled with, "delicious breath of rain" (772). What all this symbolizes is a new beginning for Mrs. Mallard. At this particular moment in the story, it is a little elusive to make that judgment, however, in paragraph 11 it is very easy to ascertain. When Mrs. Mallard says, "Free, free, free!", it is very clear that Mrs. Mallard has come to an understanding that she's free from her unhappy marriage (772); "But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome." (772-773).

There is also evidence provided in the text that tells us Mrs. Mallard was living a Victorian life giving me a reason to understand why she did not remorse like I would expect. "There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence." (773). In the Victorian era, women were seen as weak, helpless and incapable of making decision. Their focus was to tend to the house and care for the children. Mrs. Mallard was living that lifestyle which was the cause of her negative outlook on life and her joy for her husband's death.

Sadly, Mrs. Mallard was destined to die. Throughout the story, Mrs. Mallard resentment for life is made clear. "It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long" and "And yet she had loved him-sometimes. Often she had not." (773). All of this attest to the conclusion that Mrs. Mallard dreaded her life. She did not love her husband and she look down on the possibility of a long life. It all movies the bad guy never comes out victorious and Chopin's was not going to let that happen in this story. Mrs. Mallard's death only made sense.
What is amusing about this story is what is stated in the last line of the story, "When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease-of joy that kills" (773). Mrs. Mallard, who was joyful of being liberated, has a heart attack after the shocking realization that her husband was alive. Mrs. Mallard's death was inevitable by the course of the story but its ironic knowing that her enjoyment of her husband's death lead to the fatal reaction to him being alive.

Works Cited
Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." Arguing Through Literature: A Thematic Anthology and Guide to Academic Writing. Comp. and ed. Judith Ferster. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2005. 772-773