These are excerpts from the Big Honey Dog blog – by Honey the Great Dane, who recounts what her humans did when they went on a Big Flying Machine and flew to visit the faraway place called France. These are their adventures in the French capital… . . . ****** . After a ‘wild night’ at the Moulin Rouge 😉 , my humans and their mummies got up early the […]
On this day in 1859, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) gets his license as a pilot of Missippi steamboats in the District of St. Louis after completing a two-year apprenticeship. He would later write about his experiences in the book Life on the Mississippi.
Atlanta — Scarlett O’Hara’s Atlanta is a very distant memory in Tom Wolfe’s look at this southern capital city in his book A Man in Full. The modern version of Atlanta doesn’t have a Civil War in the backdrop but the issue of race is at the forefront of this multi-layered novel. Race. Class distinctions. Real estate and political machinations. Young wives. First wives. The whole gamut is here in […]
SALINAS, CA.—The first sign this region is still all about agriculture is the life-size mural of Marilyn Monroe just a few steps into the National Steinbeck Centre — she holds up artichokes as provocatively as if she were offering up herself. Marilyn Monroe was crowned Miss California Artichoke Queen in 1947. But despite her outsized personality, this region has never been known as Marilyn Monroe land. This is Steinbeck Country. […]
ASHEVILLE, N.C.—Out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America is a fictional world that fans of The Hunger Games know as Panem and that residents of North Carolina know as their home state. The southern Appalachian mountain range, the thick forests and the modern architecture of North Carolina’s provide all the location needed for the futuristic world that is the setting for The Hunger Games […]
When Leonard and Virginia Woolf got married, they were determined to get a dog name John and start their own press called Hogarth. Don’t know if they ever got their dog John but on this day in 1917, the Woolfs started Hogarth Press from the dining room of their home in Richmond. The picture in this Literary History post was just taken in Brighton where I was a few days […]
In a New Yorker review of Oscar Wilde’s letters published on this day in 1963, W.E. Auden wrote “From the beginning Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands.”
On this day in 1928, Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez is born in Arataca, Colombia. His grandmother was the first to tell him stories when he was a child about magical events and later in his writings, Marquez would be a founder of the school known as “magical realism.” Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize in 1982 and his most famous work Love in the Time of Cholera […]
Frank Norris, who was born on this day in 1870 in Chicago made his way westward and became the quintessential California author. His major work McTeague is still taught in university classes there as a example of early 20th century literature. Who told me that? The bartender at McTeague’s Saloon in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. “If you study any kind of California literature, you run across Frank Norris,” […]
These are excerpts from my friend writer Hsin-Yi Cohen who lives in Australia. She is the creator and writer of the popular Big Honey Dog blog . This is the first of three parts. Please check out Hsin-Yi’s blog to read more adventures. The second and third parts will run over the next two weeks which will include her long-awaited literary visit to the Notre Dame Cathedral for one of […]
