Today is Thomas Mann’s birthday!
For those of you who did not know enough about this exceptional German author, why don’t you take a few minutes and read our quick facts below? We had more than an interesting time of it researching this man – we are sure you will find the facts as intriguing as we did!
1. Thomas Mann was the younger of two sons born to a bourgeois German family in 1875.
2. Thomas Mann and his mother and elder brother moved to Munich following the death of his father in 1891.
3. Thomas Mann began his studies (like so many talented writers we seem to know of) in training for a career in journalism.
4. Thomas Mann married at the age of 30 and his wife bore him 6 children.
5. Having emigrated to the United States with some of his most popular works behind him, he began teaching at Princeton in 1939.
Sounds like a pretty average Joe, right?
WRONG.
Now get ready for the real facts. The facts that make this author someone to admire…
1. Thomas Mann’s elder brother was author Heinrich Mann, another notable German author known for his criticisms of fascist regimes. Three of Mann’s 6 children also grew up to be widely known and read writers.
2. Thomas Mann wrote his first novel in 1901 when he was only 26. His novel Buddenbrooks, based on his life growing up, would win him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.
3. In 1912 Mann and his wife Katia moved to Switzerland and lived in a sanatorium (which was apparently a very inspiring place, as it helped fuel his work on Joseph and His Brothers.
4. In 1933 Mann’s eldest two children wrote to their parents from Munich, advising them that because of their beliefs and outspoken distaste for fascism and the like it would be a dangerous place for them to return to. Hence their emigration to the United States in 1939.
5. Due to his openly anti-Nazi beliefs, Mann was approached in 1939 to record anti-Hitler broadcasts, in the German tongue, to be broadcast furtively to the German people over the radio. His 8-minute recordings were widely received and well-known. In one of his most noted speeches giving hope to those living under the Nazi-regime, he made the famous claim, “The war is horrible, but it has the advantage of keeping Hitler from making speeches about culture.” Burn!
Now, this blog isn’t to say that Mann was a perfect specimen. People criticized his speeches for certain reasons, and in the McCarthy era he was condemned for being associated with peace organizations that were being criticized for being “Communist fronts.” (Cause we all know the Red Scare was legit.) However, despite the problems people might find with him… we all must agree – pretty radical guy, no???
Happy Birthday, Thomas Mann!
Now, Voltaire’s early life does not necessarily reflect my friends insistence that Voltaire “always got away with it.” As a matter of fact… he totally didn’t. Voltaire spent almost a year imprisoned in the Bastille for accusing a member of the royal family of incest with his daughter in a satirical poem (I mean… what exactly did he expect?). Seven months after his release in 1718, however, his play Oedipus debuted at the Comédie-Française in Paris a spectacular success. Not only did it land Voltaire on the literary map (for something other than scandal), but it also marked the first time he used his pen name – Voltaire, an anagram of the Latin spelling of his surname, AROVET LI (though there are several schools of thought for how Voltaire settled on “Voltaire”). Despite the importance of this name today, what is not necessarily commonly known is that throughout his lifetime Voltaire wrote under 178 different pen names.
Barrie wrote several successful plays (and a couple flukes), but his third script brought him into contact with a young actress of the day – Mary Ansell – who would later, in 1894, become Barrie’s wife. For their union Barrie gifted Mary a St. Bernard puppy – who would become the inspiration for “Nana” in later years. They settled in London but kept a country home in Farnham, Surrey. In 1897 Barrie became acquainted with a nearby family – the Llewelyn Davies family.
Inspired largely by the stories he told to the Llewelyn Davies family, Barrie began to formulate a story of a boy who wouldn’t grow up, who flew around and had adventures. Not unlike Charles Dodgson’s Alice a century before, Barrie began to write his story into a play and once debuted in 1904, the play Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up was an immediate success. George Bernard Shaw said of the performance, “ostensibly a holiday entertainment for children, but really a play for grown-up people” – a wonderful description of the meanings and metaphors found in Peter Pan. Though children may see the adventure story on the outside, the adults in the audience could see what was really at play (pun intended) – Barrie’s social commentary on the adult’s fear of time and growing old and losing their childish innocence and fun, to name just a few.
* watch for our New Acquisitions list… lots of interesting material will be coming your way!
The vernal equinox has been celebrated for centuries – Ancient Egyptians built the Great Sphinx so that it faces exactly the rising sun on the vernal equinox, and pagans (or ancient Anglo-Saxons, if we’re being politically correct) celebrated the Germanic Goddess Eostre (or Ostara) – the Teutonic goddess of spring and dawn, a symbol of fertility whose sacred spirit animal was – you may have guessed it – a fertile bunny rabbit! The symbol of an egg wasn’t far away – eggs are a (pretty obvious) ancient symbol of rebirth. Christianity adopted the holiday for their own celebration of Easter, the rebirth of Jesus Christ. As is obvious from all of these examples, it is a day that celebrates the coming of spring – of greenery, harvest, enjoyment and abundance!
However, Márquez’s passion lay in writing, despite continuing his law studies in order to please his father. That did not stop him from publishing his work, however. Having published poems throughout high school in his school journals and papers, La tercera resignación was his first published work as an adult, which appeared in the 13th of September, 1947 edition of the newspaper El Espectador. Coincidentally and luckily for Márquez,the assassination of Gaitán, in 1948 led his school to be closed indefinitely. Márquez began working as a reporter at El Universal and eventually moved on to write for El Heraldo.
