Henrik Ibsen

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen born March 20, 1828 is often referred to the father of modern drama and one of the founders of modernism in playwright(ing). He turned away from the Romantic style and brought the problems of his day on stage. Born in Skien in southern Norway his father was a successful merchant until he was in his teens were the family was faced with poverty. He had to stop his education and become an apprentice to a pharmacist.

In 1850 he moved to Olso where he attended Heltberg and earned some money from writing for newspapers. He wanted to become a physician but failed the university entrance examinations. During this year he also wrote two plays; Catiline which is a tragedy and Burial Mound. Burial Mound performed three times in 1850 were Cataline was not preformed until 1881.

In 1851 he was appointed as a stage poet for a small theater in Bergen which he staged over 150 plays. During this time he also wrote four plays which were based on Norwegian folklore and history. From 1852 to 1857  his theater sent him to study in Denmark and Germany. Upon his return he became an artistic director for Norwegian Theatre which became bankrupt so he was appointed to Christiania Theatre. With setbacks in his plays he decided to move abroad. For the next twenty-seven years he began his foreign travel in Italy. He wrote most of his best work during this time. One of these was Brand (1866) using the idea of subjectivity as truth.

Ibsen thought his most important play was The Emperor and the Galilean (1873). However Pillars of Society (1877) and A Doll’s House (1879) were most popular. A Doll’s House was a sensation in Europe and America. I have read this play. There a couple of parts that stood out to me the most. One part is a man who is seen as immoral to society will ruin his house. “Just think how a guilty man like that has to lie and play the hypocrite with everyone… and how about the children… Because such an atmosphere of lies infects and poisons the whole life of a home. Each breath the children take in such a house is full of the germs of evil.” (A Doll’s House, 27.) However the most rememberable part for me is when the husband Torvald says to his wife “I would gladly work night and day for you, Nora- bear sorrow and want for your sake. But no man would sacrifice his honor for the one he loves.” and she responds “It is a thing hundreds of thousands of women have done.” (A Doll’s House,  70).

Ibsen introduced a new order of moral analysis. Ibsen wrote about ordinary and everyday people who were forced to remove their disguises and show their true self which made his audiences reexamine themselves and their moral values. Other things he explores in his plays were the individual feelings of alienation and societal pressure to conform. In the play A Doll’s House is an example of what appears and what it.

Feinberg has several of Ibsen’s works. If you browse roughly between PT8852. E5 M2 to PT8877.A42 you can found them.

Philip Roth

Philip Roth once said “My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve go to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets. No, they’re little gifts, containing meaning!” This is a great quotation and I agree that words even when arguingagainst something or taking a stand can still be a little gift with great meaning. I think of this quotation when I read poetry. For example in ancient Japan lovers used special paper, ribbonsand poems to convey specific meanings such as love and sex. Virginia Woolf once said “Language is wine upon the lips.” Our library has thousands of books with little gifts full of meaning. From history and science to art and fiction. Books and authors I have shared in this blog that our library has. Like autobiographies of men who endure racism and made history to fictional writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on March 19th, 1933. His grandparents were European Jews who immigrated to the United States in the eighteen hundreds. His first book was Goodbye, Columbus (1959). This book contains a novel and five short stories that depict Jewish American life in post-war America with irony and humor. This book gave him national recognition which included an award the National Book Award for fiction. However he also received reticule from some people in the Jewish communitysaying that what he said showed only the bad side. In 1962 he published Letting Gothat looked at society and ethical problems that occurred during the 1950s.

Roth is most known for Portnoy’s Complaint published in 1969. Using comedy he looks at his middle-class New York Jewish community and the decay of American youth. It was the best seller during this year and made him famous.  In 1974 he writes a book My Life As a Man which for the first time his fiction is postmodern. After this he writes the Zuckerman trilogy which is about the development of his alter ego.

One book our library has called The Plot Against America (2004) is an alternative history which looks at another outcome of the 1940 election. Roth asks what America would have been like with Charles A. Lindbergh as president, who was an isolationist and anti-Semite. Who he have kept the United States out of World War II? The book explores American identities and how history is constructed. He argues that history in many ways fiction.

Roth’s most recent book is Exit Ghost(2007) which is suppose to be the last book were the character Nathan Zuckerman will appear. Nathan Zuckerman is a fictional character who appears in several of Roth’s books as a narrator or protagonist and often as an alter ego. He first appears in the novel My Life As a Man. He also appears in The Ghost Writer (1979) , Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Prague Orgy (1985), The Counterlife, American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). Nathan Zuckerman has also appeared on film including the 2003 film The Human Stain. Roth’s book American Pastoral won a Pulitzer Prize.

There are several things Philip Roth has explored in his writing. One thing he looks at is Jewishness in American culture. Much of his early work looked at American idealism and society. He sometimes see his own life as part of his fiction, his work often being semi-autobiographical.  (The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature)

Irving Wallace

“I’ll sacrifice a good sentence for a good paragraph” said Irving Wallace an American historical fiction writer of the twentieth century. Irving Wallace was born in Chicago March 19, 1916 and grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He attended Williams Institute, Berkeley were he studies creative writing and Los Angeles City College. At the age of fifteen he began his writing career as a journalist for newspapers and magazines.

During WWII he served in the U.S. Army Air Force. He was a writer in the First Motion Picture Unit and Signal Corps Photographic Center. He also wrote for magazines during this time such as The American Legion Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. From 1948 to 1958 he produced screenplays for Hollywood.

In 1959 Wallace wrote his first novel called The Sins of Philip Fleming. However his breakthrough novel was The Chapman Report which was published in 1961. He novel was influenced by the Kinsey report. In 1963 a film was made based on his novel directed by George Cukor. Several of his novels have been made into films such as The Seven Minutes (1969) and The Prize (1963). After this book Wallace published mainly popular novels. The novel he wrote called The Man(1964) won the Supreme Award of Merit and honorary fellowship from George Washington Carver Memorial Institute. He also won various other awards. In 1972 he was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and the Sun Times Wire Service at the Democratic and Republican national convections. In 1977 he co-authored a nonfiction book with his son David called The Book of Lists.

On June 29, 1990 Wallace died of pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles. A  interesting fact, which also gives a insight to American history, is his son David when doing genealogical research on the family found out that the family’s original last name was “Wallechinsky”. It was anglified to Wallace by a US Immigration clerk.

Feinberg Library has four of his books; The Plot, The Man, The Fabulous Originals: Lives of Extraordinary People who Inspired Memorable Characters in Fiction and The Square Pegs: Some Americans who Dared to Be Different. The Man written in 1964 imagines America led by an African American president.

I should also mention that whatever we do not have in our library you can most likely get through ILL. You can search World Cat for these items much like you search Feinberg’s catalog. When you are on Feinberg Library’s homepage instead of clicking Search Feinberg click Search Worldwide. You can also click on Search SUNY which will search the library’s of the SUNY network and you will probably get the item you need faster. So if any of these author’s interest you but we do not have that book you do have options!

John Updike

Today in 1932 the acclaimed American writer John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. His childhood was plagued with sickness so he turned to art and writing as an escape. In high school he excelled in academics and graduated from Harvard with honors. He is most known for his Rabbit series; Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and Rabbit Remembered. Both Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest received the Pulitzer Prize. John Updike is viewed as one of the best American writers during the twentieth century. Recently, January 27, 2009 Updike died of lung cancer at 76.

Beginning in 1954 Updike had hundreds of short stories, reviews, and poems published in The New Yorker and he also wrote for The New York Review of Books. His first published story was “Friends from Philadelphia”. After he graduated from Harvard he went to Oxford. In 1955 he returned to the United States and took a job as a staff writer at the New Yorker. This was his life time goal, however after two years he left New York City for Ipswich, Massachusetts so that he could devote himself full time to his own writing. (Ipswich is where I live!)

His third novel The Centaurwritten in 1963 won the National Book Award.  He drew on his Pennsylvanian upbringing and used the myth of Chiron the centaur fusing it with the story of an adolescent boy and his father taking place in the winter of 1947. Critics are divided on whether he successfully integrated the myth with contemporary reality but the novel has a powerful meaning.

In 1958 he published his first volume of poems called The Carpentered Hen. His poetry has been collected in many volumes, such as Telephone Poles and Other Poems (1963); Midpoint (1969) and Tossing and Turning (1977). Tossing and Turning has had high reviews. Updike also wrote many major novels, aside from the Rabbit series like Couples (1965); A Month of Sundays (1975); The Witches of Eastwick (1984); Brazil (1993); and Bech at Bay (1998).  He also publish short stores like Pigeon Feathers (1962) and Museums and Women (1972).

In 1999 he published More Matter: Essays and Criticism which is a collection of pieces, reviews, speeches and some personal reflection. He has received many awards and honors throughout his career like National Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize, American Book Award and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Our library has several of his works, including all that are pictured in this blog. Some titles Feinberg have include; The Widows of Eastwich, Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, Terrorist, Villages, Seek My Face, Americana and other Stories, The Early Stories: 1953-1975, Toward the End of Time, Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel, Of the Farm, Couples and all the books of the Rabbit series. We also have The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

The Scarlet Letter

Today in 1850 The Scarlet Letter was published for the first time.  The author, Nathaniel Hawthorne began writing this novel during a time of desperation. He worked as a surveyor because he did not make enough money with writing. After the death of his mother in 1849 he had to rely on his friends for charity.

The Scarlet Letter was originally going to include other writing to make it longer for profits and wanted to balance the sadness of this one with lighter stories. In the end it was decided that he would publish just this story.

Adultery, though the word was never used in the book, gave Hawthorne the availability to explore many issues, it being the only sin that requires two people. Thus Hawthorne could explore human experience from many perspectives. He looked at the community and the individual, freedom, responsibility, passion, sin, repentance, crime and punishment. The Scarlet Letter  rejected seventeenth century Puritan Massachusetts idea of the Bible only having one meaning, societies costum to label people, and the oversimplification of good and evil.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of America’s greatest writers. Much of his writing centers on New England and explores moral allegories. Hawthorne name was orginally spelled Hathorne but he added the “w” to dissociate himself from his relatives which included John Hathorne who was a judge during the Salem Witch Trials. If you would like to read this book the call number is PS1850.F63 vol.1 c.3