Even before James Joyce’s Ulysses was published it was causing trouble. Short excerpts appeared in a review magazine, and the US postal service claiming it was pornography refused to deliver the magazines and then burnt all the copies. Any publisher that thought about publishing Ulysses had to weigh up the possibility of being prosecuted for obscenity against the potential of bringing a masterpiece into the world. Most publishers wouldn’t touch it, but Sylvia Beach, owner of the Shakespeare and Co. bookshop in Paris, decided the risk was worth taking, and in 1922 Ulysses was published in Paris. It is famously hard to read, and many never finish it, but the novel would go on to triumph over the criticism and censorship, to become one of the most highly regarded works of art in the 20th century. Nothing much happens in Ulysses, two men wander around Dublin, and a woman lies in bed thinking. But it is the story telling, the language and the humour that makes it a work of genius.
As internet users, we all understand the expression “Going Down a Rabbit Hole”, which comes from the much-loved book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The book famously begins when the main character, Alice, follows a white rabbit underground, and finds herself going deeper and deeper into a strange world - somewhere in which normal social rules, and even laws of physics, are suspended.
This is a story about the American Dream. No other decade defined America like the 1920s. The country was coming into its own and fulfilling its promise of freedom and prosperity, but already the dream was showing its cracks, and the decade that followed would test America to its very core. One book would serve as a prophetic warning to its audience and still offer a glimmer of hope about the American ideal.
The popularity of Emily Dickinson's poetry has always been bound up with interest in her unconventional life. In her lifetime she was the focus of town gossip and this speculation continues today: about her mental health, her beliefs and her sexuality. It was only when Emily Dickinson died aged 55, and the nearly two-thousand poems she wrote mostly on scraps of paper, began to be discovered, did it become clear that beneath the plain nondescript white dress, was a truly revolutionary artist, and a woman who refused to live by society’s rules.
Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick, worked on a whaling ship as a harpoonist, literally at the sharp end of that gruesome business. And he took those experiences of life at sea and combined them with a love of William Shakespeare and the King James bible, to create a great American novel about obsession and compulsion. Moby-Dick pre-empts the work of Freud and Jung and the very modern quest to understand the psychology of the human mind, and it is just as much a story of the inner journey to the recesses of the human psyche as it is a journey across the vast blue oceans.
The Little Prince begins with an account of how the pilot drew a picture when he was a child. His picture — he called it Drawing N°1 — shows an elephant swallowed by a boa constrictor — perfectly logical to him- but to adults it was just a drawing of a hat and they roundly mocked him. When his plane crash-lands in the desert and the little prince appears at his side, asking him to draw a sheep and then declaring himself unsatisfied with the results, the pilot brings out his Drawing N°1. “No, no, no!” says the little prince, “ And this, the pilot tells us, is how he finally found someone who understood his drawing, and how he made the acquaintance of the little prince.
In 1954, J.R.R. Tolkien was 62 years old and had just spent the last 16 years working industriously on a book. It was now time to release it into the world and he was very nervous. And he should have been - because no-one had seen anything quite like The Lord of the Rings before.
“Shall [we] call him Artist or Genius—or Mystic—or Madman? Probably he is all.” The English artist and poet William Blake was 32 years old when the citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille prison, signalling the start of the French Revolution. For Blake, the revolution was a powerful source of inspiration. Within a few years, energised by dreams of freedom and revolution, Blake had quickly produced several of his most significant works, including Songs of Innocence and of Experience. This deceptively simple collection appears at first glance as if it was written for children, and nothing more than a collection of nursery rhymes. But hidden within these unassuming poems are radical ideas. In them, Blake reveals his passionate hatred for authority, as well as his contempt for the church and the monarchy, and he expresses his deeply-held belief in one of the key values of the French revolution: liberty.
The American writer, James Baldwin was born one hundred years ago today. He was by any stretch of the imagination, one of the most radical and important voices of the 20th century. He was the outspoken grandson of a slave, who bore witness to the consequences of American racial strife. He was an opinionated, critical, blunt, and provocative man, at a time when that was considered dangerous. But it was as an author, that he took the greater risks, that no other commercial writer at the time was taking, that could so easily have destroyed his career. And Giovanni’s Room was his greatest risk.
The King James Bible is an intensely political work, and up until the 17th century, translating the Bible into English was a dangerous act, done in secret, and punishable by death. Then in 1604, King James I of England authorised a new translation of the Bible, with the intention to clarify religious differences, but also to solidify his power and supremacy. In so doing, he unintentionally democratized a book which for so long had been withheld from the masses. He ended up creating the “people’s Bible”.
In a post-truth society, is George Orwell’s 1984 even more important now than ever? It is a book that in politics has been co-opted by both the left and the right, with the term "Orwellian" being used and misused in the clamour for power. In some way the novel is about the future, but it is also about the present. Even Orwell who wrote the book in 1948 said it should be seen not as a prediction... but as a warning.
Despite being arguably, the most famous writer of all time, William Shakespeare is still a widely misunderstood figure. Today, he is often viewed as the property of the cultural elite, and his work is often approached out of obligation rather than desire. But Shakespeare was a populist, and his plays were written first and foremost to entertain audiences – of all kinds. They are full of humour, slapstick and clever wordplay, and have a deep sympathy for ordinary people and the heartache, beauty, joy and pain we all experience. They are in fact, pure entertain.
When Mary Shelley initially conceived the plot of Frankenstein, she was still only 18-years old. But she had already lost a child, a daughter who died just two weeks after she was born. The loss of her child induced acute depression in Shelley, and evidence suggests that the grief over the loss, as well as the death of her own mother when she was only 10 days old, may have been, not only part of the inspiration for the novel, but also responsible for the novel’s themes and preoccupation with ideas about abandonment, death … and reanimation. The desire perhaps to revive her deceased daughter.
The Tempest opens with a raging storm conjured up by the exiled Duke of Milan, Prospero, who has lived on a remote island with his daughter Miranda for twelve years. A shipwreck scatters his enemies across the island: among them, his treacherous brother Antonio, who stole his dukedom, and King Alonso of Naples, co-conspirator in Prospero’s fall, along with his son, Ferdinand – all pawns in a carefully orchestrated plan.