To lay the keel

Tuesday 3 March 2025

Eskişehir, Türkiye

“Nikos Kazantzakis asked his God for ten additional years.

Ten additional years in which to complete his work – to say what he had to say and “empty himself“.

He wanted Death to come and take only a sackful of bones.

Ten years were enough.

Or so he thought.

“The house might catch on fire.

I would rather leave the manuscript with you.

If it is burned at this point I will never be able to rewrite it.

The great shame is only that I never finished it.“

“We have got to manage to finish in time so I won’t go down to Hades with a lame leg.“, he used to say half ironically, half with fear.

Alone, now, I experience the autumn twilight which descended ever so gently, like a small child, with the first chapter.

I collect my tools:

Sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, intellect.

Night has fallen.

The day’s work is done.

I return like a mole to my home, the ground.

Not because I am tired and cannot work.

I am not tired, but the sun has set.

Above: Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis

It seems his inner daemon had prodded him to abandon the project which he so desired to write and to lay the keel of his autobiography instead.

The Report to Greco is a mixture of fact and fiction – a great deal of truth, a minimum of fancy.

When he speaks, it is always the truth, unaltered, exactly what he saw and heard.

He would have enriched it, for each day he recalled new incidents which he had forgotten.

He would have poured it into the mold of reality.

His actual life was full of substance, of human anguish, joy and pain – dignity, to put it in a single word.

Why should he have changed this life?

Not for lack of difficult moments of weakness, flight and pain.

On the contrary, it was precisely these difficult moments which always served as new steps enabling him to ascend higher – to ascend and reach the summit he promised himself he would climb before abandoning the tools of labor because night had begun to fall.

“Do not judge me by my actions.

Do not judge me from Man’s point of view.“, another struggler once entreated me.

“Judge me from God’s – by the hidden purpose behind my actions.“

Above: Nikos Kazantzakis

This is how we should judge.

Not by what he did and whether what he did was or was not of supreme value, but rather by what he wanted to do and whether what he wanted to do had supreme value for him and for us as well.

His round eyes pitch black in the semidarkness and filling with tears, he used to say to me:

“I feel like doing what Bergson says – going to the street corner and holding out my hand to start begging from the passers-by:

“Alms, brothers! A quarter of an hour from each of you.“

Oh, for a little time, just enough to let me finish my work.

Afterwards, let Charon come.“

Helen N. Kazantakis, Genève, Suisse, 15 June 1961

Introduction to Nikos Kazantzakis’ Report to Greco

Monday 3 March 2025

Landschlacht, Schweiz

Above: Landschlacht, Canton Thurgau, Schweiz

If anything Life has shown me is that there are few certainties.

I left an employer last September.

He informed the authorities that my employment contract ended on 1 October.

I worked at another school from October to January.

Half-hearted gestures were made to renew my work status.

I found a new employer and worked there in January and February, but no application to the authorities had been made.

Yesterday I came to the Istanbul International Airport with clothes and books sufficient for a week in Switzerland.

Above: Istanbul International Airport

I am informed by Customs that I am to be exiled from Türkiye until June.

Above: Flag of Türkiye

Most of what I call mine remains behind in my apartment in Eskişehir.

To maintain it, I will need to pay rent for a place I cannot enter for a quarter-year.

Above: Sazova Park, Eskişehir, Türkiye

I now need to take stock of my life and plan for my future.

Above: The Thinker, Auguste Rodin (1904)

I am informed that there will be a pension when I retire, but it will be meagre:

Insufficient for Switzerland, barely sufficient for Türkiye or another country whose economy is less prosperous.

Above: Flag of Switzerland

As I read Kazantzakis – I brought him with me as he features for the calendar date of 18 February. (He was born on this day in 1833.) – I am reminded of those who thought they had more time, but died with regrets for having failed to realize their goals.

I think of my cousin, the athlete – a man who literally wrote the book on perseverance.

He does so much – there is no idleness in his character – because he has also known that there are no guarantees.

Especially as we get older.

He is laying the keel of his autobiography and has asked for my words to capture the essence of who he is and have the world judge him by his intentions.

Above: Canadian athlete/trainer/motivational speaker Steve O’Brien

It has been too easy to procrastinate, for what has already been written has been scanty at best, but that does not diminish the urgency of saying all that needs be said.

Here in Switzerland, as a guest of my wife, I have shelter and she has offered to assist me with other material needs that I may have, but my visit she had envisioned as a few days may now be a few months.

Above: “Be Our Guest“, Beauty and the Beast (1991)

We have grown accustomed to living separate lives and now circumstances have thrust us together again.

So, now at 0500 hours (0700 in Türkiye), I take stock of my life.

I had often thought of what it might be like to be a digital nomad and now it seems this is what I must become.

I will teach online as much as I can until June.

Perhaps seek out some work in Switzerland.

Perhaps seek out work in a country other than Switzerland or Türkiye.

In June, I will return to Eskişehir and either try and find work there or vacate my apartment there, send what I can back to Switzerland and seek out new solutions elsewhere.

Meanwhile, I lay the keel of my autobiography and act as mortar to the building bricks of Steve’s story.

I will spend as much time as I can writing:

This blog, along with my writing projects, and Steve’s autobiography.

I look at the calendar date of 18 February.

At first glance I am spoiled by the choices of themes:

• The executions of English Prince George Plantagenet (1478), Bulgarian revolutionary leader Vasil Lavski (1873) and Kenyan rebel leader Dedan Kemathi (1957), and the birth of Belorussian writer Maksim Haretski (1893) who would later be executed

Above: George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence (1449 – 18 February 1478)

Above: Vasil Levski (1837 – 18 February 1873)

Above: Statue of Dedan Kimathi Waciuri (1920 – 18 February 1957)

Above: Maksim Harecki (18 February 1893 – 1938)

• The battles of Montereau (1814) and Paardeberg (1900)

Above: Battle of Montereau, France – 18 February 1814

Above: Battle of Paardeberg, South Africa – 18 February 1900

• The Lincoln County War begins (1878), the Imperial Japanese Army begins the systematic extermination of perceived hostile elements among the Chinese in Singapore (1942), 13 people die in the Wah Mee massacre in Seattle – the largest robbery-motivated mass-murder in US history (1983), Hamas accuses Israel of carrying out at least 266 attacks in the Gaza Strip since the agreed ceasefire on 19 January, killing at least 132 Palestinians and wounding 900 others (2025) and Rapid Support Forces militants kill at least 433 people in the villages of Al-Kadaris and Al-Khelwat, Sudan (2025).

Above: Billy the Kid (1859 – 1881), the most remembered gunfighter of the Lincoln County War – February 18 – July 20, 1878

Above: Civilian War Memorial, dedicated to the victims of Sook Ching and the wider occupation of Singapore – 18 February 1942 – 4 March 1942

Above: The entrance to the former Wah Mee Club, where the Wah Mee massacre occurred on the night of February 18 – 19, 1983 Maynard Alley, International District, Seattle, Washington, USA

Above: Israeli troops work on their tanks in southern Israel before a view of buildings destroyed in northern Gaza as a result of Israeli strikes

Above: Internally displaced people from Khartoum gather at their shelter in an IDP camp in Um Durain county, Nuba Mountains, South Kordofan, Sudan

• The Nazis arrest the members of the White Rose movement (1943), the Chicago Seven are found not guilty of conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention (1970), FBI agent Robert Hanssen is arrested for spying for the Soviet Union (2001) and WikiLeaks publishes the first of hundreds of thousands of classified documents disclosed by the soldier now known as Chelsea Manning.

Above: Monument to Hans (1918 – 1943) and Sophie Scholl (1921 – 1943) and the “White Rose” (German: Die Weiße Rose) resistance movement – Willi Graf (1918 – 1943), Kurt Huber (1893 – 1943), Christoph Probst (1919 – 1943), Alexander Schmorell (1917 – 1943) – against the Nazi regime, in front of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Bavaria, Germany

The group conducted an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign that called for active opposition to the Nazi regime.

Their activities started in Munich on 27 June 1942 and ended with the arrest of the core group by the Gestapo on 18 February 1943.

Above: The Chicago Seven – Rennie Davis (1940 – 2021), David Dellinger (1915 – 2004), John Froines (1939 – 2022), Tom Hayden (1939 – 2016), Abbie Hoffman (1936 – 1989), Jerry Rubin (1938 – 1994) and Lee Weiner (b. 1939) – charged by the US Department of Justice with conspiracy, crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot, and other charges related to anti-Vietnam War (1955 – 1975) and 1960s counterculture protests in Chicago, Illinois during the 1968 Democratic National Convention (26 – 29 August 1968). The Chicago Seven are found not guilty on 18 February 1970. 

Above: KGB agent Robert Hanssen (1944 – 2023) who started working for the FBI and then defected to the KGB while pretending to work for the FBI

• While studying photographs taken in January, Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto (1930), Elm Farm Ollie becomes the first cow to fly in a fixed-wing aircraft and also the first cow to be milked in an aircraft (1930), and Perseverance, a Mars rover designed to explore Jezero Crater on Mars, as part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, lands successfully (2021).

Above: Pluto

Above: Elm Farm Ollie

Above: Perseverance (18 February 2021 – 18 January 2024)

• Birthdays of people whose names became commonplace:
  • Mary I of England (1516 – 1558) became the “Bloody Mary” cocktail

Above: English Queen Mary I (18 February 1516 – 1558)

• Alessandro Volta (1745 – 1827) – the SI unit of electric potential is named the volt in his honor

Above: Italian scientist Alessandro Volta (18 February 1745 – 1827)

• Ernst Mach (1838 – 1916) – the ratio of the speed of a flow or object to that of sound is named the Mach number in his honor

Above: Austrian physicist Ernst Mach (18 February 1838 – 1916)

• Hans Asperger (1906 – 1980) – the namesake of the former autism spectrum disorder Asperger syndrome

Above: Austrian physician Hans Asperger (18 February 1906 – 1980)

• The shared birthday of US filmmaker John Hughes (1950) and of the actress Molly Ringwald (1968) for whom many of his most enduring characters from these years were written

Above: John Hughes (February 18, 1950 – 2009)

Above: Poster for Sixteen Candles (1984)

Above: Poster for The Breakfast Club (1985)

Above: Poster for Pretty in Pink (1986)

Above: Molly Ringwald (born: 18 February 1968)

Instead, what generally attracts me are the lives of writers and the works those lives have produced.

On the calendar date of 18 February, I have chosen the birthdays of:

• Alexander Kielland

Above: Norwegian writer Alexander Kielland (1849 – 1906)

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

• Nikos Kazantzakis

Above: Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis (1883 – 1957)

• Wallace Stegner

Above: American writer Wallace Stegner (1909 – 1993)

• Toni Morrison

Above: American writer Toni Morrison (1931 – 2019)

A writer’s work is more than just ink on paper, more than mere stories crafted for the entertainment of others.

It is, in many ways, the keel of their autobiographical framework —the foundation upon which the ship of their inner world is built.

Just as a keel gives a vessel stability and direction, a writer’s words reveal the course of their experiences, beliefs, and deepest reflections.

This is particularly evident in the works of five writers who, despite differences in style and subject matter, shared a relentless pursuit of understanding: Alexander Kielland, Nikos Kazantzakis, Wallace Stegner, Toni Morrison, and Mark Twain, whose The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains an enduring testament to this quest.

Alexander Lange Kielland (18 February 1849 – 6 April 1906) was a Norwegian realistic writer of the 19th century.

Above: Statue of Alexander Kielland in Stavanger, Norway

He wrote newspaper articles, short stories and novels, some plays, and was a brilliant letter writer.

The bulk of his fiction was in the 1880s and belongs to realism, with a sense of wit, irony and satire.

As the most stylistically confident writer of his time, Kielland was an elegant and witty writer with a strong social conscience, modeled after John Stuart Mill.

Above: English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873)

The action in the novels is mostly set in Stavanger and the surrounding area with recognizable nature and environmental depictions.

Above: Images of Stavenger, Norway

Kielland used his literary works to criticize the church and school, and the bourgeoisie’s exploitation of workers.

As a Liberal, he was strongly provoked by class divisions, social distress and the oppression of women.

Kielland had great faith in women’s abilities and strength.

He is one of “The Four Greats” of Norwegian literature, along with Henrik Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Jonas Lie.

Above: Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906)

Above: Norwegian writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832 – 1910)

Above: Norwegian writer Jonas Lie (1833 – 1908)

Born in Stavanger, Norway, Kielland grew up in a rich merchant family.

The childhood home was Stavanger’s former municipal hospital and was located by Breiavatnet.

Above: Breiavatnet Lake, Stavenger, Norway

(This is where Kiellandshagen Park is located today.)

Above: The home of author Alexander Kielland in Stavanger, Norway. Demolished in 1907.

Kielland later claimed to have counted backwards from his birth on 18 February 1849 and concluded that he was conceived the night after 17 May in the year of the Revolution of 1848:

“Hence in my family unheard of rebel blood“.

Above: The barricades of Paris (1848)

The childhood home remained the center of his life until he married in 1872.

In 1888 he moved back and lived there until 1902.

He described his mother as “a wise, fine lady – cheerful and bold“.

Unfortunately, she had a weak heart and died giving birth to their 7th child. 

His father had religious and artistic interests, a strict and serious man, the director of the Stavanger Savings Bank.

Kielland was closest to his two older siblings Jacob (1841–1915) and Kitty Kielland, who became known as a painter, but also had a good relationship with Jane (b. 1852 and married to Dr. Danckert Holm in Bergen), his brother Tycho, and Dagmar, who married the literary historian Olaf Skavlan.

Above: Norwegian painter Kitty Kielland (1843 – 1914)

Above: Norwegian journalist Tycho Kielland (1854 – 1904)

Above: Norwegian historian Olaf Skavlan (1838 – 1891)

The youngest child was a boy who died a few days after his mother died in childbirth on 12 February 1862 of heart failure. 

As a boy, Kielland attended Kongsgaard School in Stavanger, but was unhappy.

Above: Stavanger Cathedral School

He took the artium exam in 1867, where he achieved average grades, including “good” in Udarbeidelse i Modersmaalet (Preparation for Mother’s Day).  

He would later, in the book Gift, take issue with the school system and the teaching methods of the time.

Growing up, he spent his free time drawing and playing the flute.

He was also an avid fly fisherman.

Just before he turned 13, his mother died.

In 1863 his father remarried, to Inger Mæle (1815 – 1887).

She had a Haugian background and was at least as religious as her husband.

Haugianism (or Hauge’s Friends) is a Norwegian Christian lay movement that was strongest in the early 19th century, and was originally preached by the layman Hans Nielsen Hauge.

Followers were called Haugians and consisted mostly of farmers.

The movement significantly influenced Norwegian social life.

Above: Adolph Tidemand’s famous painting “The Haugians” (1848), shows a lay preacher preaching from the Bible to Norwegian farmers and small-scale farmers in a summerhouse in the early 19th century.

It was considered a threat by the authorities.

Hauge was arrested a number of times.

In the 20th century, the movement mainly entered the Norwegian Lutheran Internal Mission Society.

Hans Nielsen Hauge, a farmer’s son from Tune in Østfold, received a revelation on 5 April 1796 in which he was called to “confess the name of the Lord to the people and exhort them to repent“. 

This was the beginning of Haugianism.

Hauge wrote several writings and traveled around Norway as a lay preacher.

He gradually gained more and more followers, who were called Haugians after the preacher’s surname.

Above: Norwegian preacher/industrialist Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771 – 1824)

During Hauge’s time, the Conventicle Placard was in force, a law from 1741 that prohibited laypeople from preaching and holding religious assemblies (“conventicles“).

Hauge, on the other hand, believed that the Norwegian Church was not preaching Christian doctrine correctly.

Above: Coat of arms of the Church of Norway

Based on Luther’s ideas about the universal priesthood, he believed that anyone had the right to preach the Word of God.

Above: German reformer/theologian Martin Luther (1483 – 1546)

This led to Hauge being arrested several times, and spending several years in a penal colony. 

Haugianism aimed at conversion and sanctification.

In matters of Christian doctrine, Hauge was an orthodox (originally) Lutheran, and interpreted Lutheran doctrine very strictly.

Hauge preached that doing good deeds was the most important thing about faith.  

Thus, great emphasis was placed on practical work.

Haugianism was based on a pietistic (personal piety and conduct) understanding of Christianity.

This was a serious and heartfelt form of religious practice.

Only if one felt a deep and genuine remorse for one’s sins could one have hope of salvation.

Once one was converted to “true Christianity“, one had to stay on the narrow path.

Sensual pleasure and worldly joys could give one impure thoughts and lead one away from God.

One had to consider the consequences for life in the Hereafter in everything one did in Earthly life. 

In the eyes of the Haugians, God’s grace depended on a personal relationship with God, where one detached oneself from this world and focused on God.

They distanced themselves from others by breaking with inherited social customs and common expressions of joy in life.

The Haugians did not dance. 

They considered the fiddle “the Devil’s instrument“.

From 1850 they refused to take a dram, even though this was traditionally considered a gift from God.

The Haugians formed a united front against and rejection of the pleasures of this world.  

Before his death, Hauge nevertheless advised his “friends” to receive from the priest what his office entailed.

The Haugians took this advice and received the Sacrament from the priest, even when they believed that he was personally unworthy of his office.

The Haugians also limited their preaching to “admonition“, rather than “teaching“.

They left Bible interpretation to the priest, who at their meetings had the floor when he read aloud from sermon collections. 

Hauge was the most widely distributed Norwegian author of his time, with 33 published books, as well as writings in 200,000 copies, at a time when the Norwegian population was 850,000.

Hans Nielsen Hauge created more than 7,000 jobs.

His followers formed one of the 19th century’s largest and most effective business networks for small and medium-sized businesses.

Hauge financed his projects through hard work and loans, especially from merchants on Bryggen in Bergen.

This involved great risk:

At that time it was common to provide at least half of the business capital as equity – while Hauge operated with less than 4%.

The number may have been between 30,000 and 50,000 during the 1830s.

With the intellectual and material resources of the Haugians, they knew how to make themselves felt even in areas where they were few.  

Bishop Nordahl Brun in Bergen did not suspect Hauge of being a danger to the state, but described him as “nothing less than a 
bookkeeper for a so-called public treasury.

In a period of less than six months they bought Svanøy for 12,000 riksdaler, Strusshamn with a church for 11,000 riksdaler, a ship for 3,000 riksdaler, without several jetties.

Where all this money comes from, no one understands.” 

Above: Bishop Johan Nordahl Brun (1745 – 1816)

The peasant politicians were either Haugians or influenced by them.

Above: Hauge Obelisk, Bredtvet Church, Oslo, Norway

By 1815, the authorities had ceased to think of the Haugians as a threat.

When the Norwegian Bible Society was founded in 1816 by priests and laypeople, both Hauge and other leaders of the movement joined. 

Above: Norwegian Bible Society, Oslo, Norway

Bishop Pavels referred to a priest who had said about the Haugians that:

“Their religious fervor has ceased and gone over to beneficial activities, but fears that they would henceforth constitute a political sect, which will make it their principle to oppress the official class.” 

Above: Norwegian Bishop Claus Pavels (1769 – 1822)

At that time, the Haugians faced strong opposition from other lay movements. 

The mystic Hans Feigum, who was originally a Haugian himself, also criticized them for their preoccupation with trade and profit. 

One example of the progress of the Haugians is Ole Andreas Devold in Sunnmøre who received training in knitting and textile dyeing from Hauge himself.

Thus, the Devold family was equipped to start one of Norway’s most prominent textile factories in 1853.

The family took social responsibility and built good quality workers’ housing, a hospital, a church and a house of prayer.

They introduced unemployment insurance and old-age insurance many decades before the labor movement got this through on a national basis.  

Above: Ole Andreas Devold (1827 – 1892)

Just a few years after Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, 125 light bulbs were installed in Devold’s weaving mill.

Above: US inventor/businessman Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931)

In 1868, Devold moved production from Ålesund to Langevåg, where he not only built a factory, but also one of Norway’s first power stations in 1883.

Here the turbine had 70 horsepower and a direct current generator that provided lighting in the weaving mill, the first electric light in Sunnmøre. 

From the 1840s, the modern inner mission and missionary movement was founded.

The Haugians gradually became absorbed into this.)

Above: The Hans Nielsen Hauge Memorial Museum at Hauge, Rolvsøy in Fredrikstad, Norway

In 1881 Kielland wrote to his brother Jacob about his stepmother’s “cruel and infamous nature” which his wife Beate in particular suffered from:

“There is a certain evil expression in her face that I am afraid of, as one is afraid of disgusting animals.”

Inger Mæle felt the hatred of her stepchildren, her family had to take legal action so that she would receive her share of the inheritance from her husband.

When Kielland moved back to his childhood home in 1888, he erased all traces of his stepmother in the house. 

In 1866, Kielland secretly became engaged to Beate Ramsland, who was one year younger than him and was also of the Haugian family.

Her mother died of tuberculosis when Beate was three years old.

When she was 11, her father married Sara Svendsen, who was a widow and had nine children.

Beate herself had had five siblings, but they died one after the other of tuberculosis.

Kielland himself considered 13 January 1867 to be the day of his engagement, but as early as September 1866 the class report states: “A. Kielland absent first class; engaged after ball!” – with a strong exclamation mark.

In his writings, Kielland is extremely critical of engagements.

After completing his schooling, he studied law in Oslo – not because the study particularly interested him, but because it was the shortest.

Above: Images of Oslo, Norway

He was very interested in the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

Above: Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855)

The church criticism in Øieblikket may have engaged him with its focus on the coercion and the empty nature of the norms of the time.

He wanted a popular edition of Øieblikket.

He wrote to Georg Brandes on 2 January 1880 about Kierkegaard as “the author I have loved most“.

He also claimed that he wrote “always, so to speak, under Søren Kierkegaard’s eyes“.

Kielland rarely mentioned God, but his writing revolves around people’s relationship to God or lack thereof.  

Although he later asked his son not to confirm himself, it is nevertheless believed that Kielland, as a “Christian ethicist“, did not distance himself from the faith itself. 

In September 1872, he married Beate Ramsland and bought the Malde brickworks at Madla, which he ran until 1881. 

Within three years he and his wife had their first three children.  

While running the brickworks, he read a lot, including philosophy , where he felt particularly inspired by John Stuart Mill and Georg Brandes.

He later said that what he had lacked in his youth was “the courage to despise the time, on whose shaky remains our fathers lived in an incomprehensible drowsiness“. 

Above: Danish philosopher Georg Brandes (1842 – 1927)

At the age of 30, Brandes formulated the principles of a new 
realism and naturalism, in which he condemned the hyper-aesthetic writing and imagination in literature.

According to Brandes, literature should convey “the great thoughts of freedom and the progress of humanity“.

His literary goals were shared by many writers.

Kielland invited Sigbjørn Obstfelder to his house from time to time.

Above: Norwegian poet Sigbjørn Obstfelder (1866 – 1900)

He also helped Gabriel Finne, so he received a scholarship.

Above: Norwegian writer Gabriel Finne (1866 – 1899)

From his father, Kielland had learned to appreciate Lars Hertervig’s art.

They had Hertervig’s paintings hanging on the wall.

In the inheritance settlement after his stepmother, Kielland wanted the painting Ved smie (“by forging“) and got it.

In June 1893, he wrote six articles about Hertervig in Dagbladet (“daily news“) under the title En efterglemt (“a forgotten one“).

Kielland was the only one of Hertervig’s contemporaries who publicly spoke out for his paintings.

He bought painting materials for Hertervig, but the painter was too proud to accept.

When Hertervig died in January 1902, Kielland wrote a call in the newspaper for the city’s artists to attend the funeral, as the city’s Mayor.

Above: Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig (1830 – 1902)

In 1878 Kielland went to France, where he met Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

Kielland showed his writings to his new friend, who encouraged him and found him a publisher.

Kielland made his debut with the play Paa Hjemvejen (1878).

It depicts a woman who rebuilds her husband’s bankrupt estate and on her own manages to create a good life for herself and her family.

Noveletter (“short stories“) is Kielland’s debut work from 1879.

For Kielland, a novelette can mean a short, pointed prose text with the same characteristics as a short story , or a longer story in several episodes.

The collection opens with the humorous Hope is Bright Green, which is about the young party animal Hans and his more modest cousin Ole, who both have their eyes on the district doctor’s daughter.

Both are equally sure that Hans will emerge victorious, but when it comes down to it, it is Ole who is chosen to walk her home.

Withered Leaves is an ekphrasis (description) of a painting in a Parisian art salon.

Here Kielland portrays with great empathy a relationship that has broken down.

In Erotik og Idyl (“eroticism and idyll“) the social critic Kielland is noticed for the first time.

It is a longer story about two young people who get married with the highest expectations of marriage, which they have been trained to have.

However, lack of education in what leads to pregnancy and childbirth leads them in a few years into hardship and poverty.

The same women who at the beginning spoke about the high ideals of love, then draw the conclusion that the two have themselves to thank for their misery, because they lacked the spiritual prerequisites to realize true love.

Ball Mood takes its plot from Paris and contains a Cinderella motif.

But Cinderella’s happiness is problematic.

In a flash, the past returns.

She sees how the sea of ​​poor masses may one day rise and swallow the unsuspecting upper class.

The short story A Dinner thematizes generational rebellion.

The grocer gives a speech to his returning son, in which he acknowledges the right of youth to think new thoughts and bring social development forward.

But when it comes down to it, it turns out to be just phrases, and he takes it badly when his son tries to correct him in a political discussion.

The old assistant professor is given the task of calming his son down.

The assistant professor has seen one generation of rebellious youth after another adapt and join the ranks, and the conclusion is pessimistic:

“Yes, yes!

That’s all well and good.

But just watch, I’ll be right:

He’ll be just like the rest of us.”

And the assistant professor was right.

Two Friends is a longer story about the relationship between two inseparable childhood friends who also follow each other through their professional lives:

One introverted and little-regarded, but skilled in business – the other cheerful and outgoing and everyone’s favorite.

Without either of them really realizing it, a hidden grudge builds up in one of them.

They are driven apart, and it all has a fatal outcome.

The Novelettes ends with the long story The Battle of Waterloo, which on the surface may seem like a joke.

But the social critic Kielland comes to the fore through a female supporting character, who makes the hero reveal his attitudes towards women.

The revelation is made with well-known Kielland irony:  

“And in that, everyone must give his cousin his due, that in order for a woman to fulfill her task in life (to be a wife for a man), she should, of course, not have any other knowledge than those that her husband wants her to have, or will himself impart to her.“

Above: The Battle of Waterloo, Belgium – 18 June 1815

When he published his first collection of Novelettes in 1879, Georg Brandes suggested that he should write a novel.

Apart from Camilla Collet’s Amtmandens Døtre (“the sheriff’s daughters“) and Kristian Elster’s Tora Trondal, there was no modern Norwegian social novel of artistic value.

Above: Norwegian writer Camilla Collett (1813 – 1895)

Above: Norwegian writer Kristian Elster (1841 – 1881)

A few weeks later Kielland embarked on Garman & Worse.

Nye Novellette (“new short stories“)(1880) is Kielland’s second collection of short stories.

The collection opens with the short story Torvmyr (“peat bog“) in which Kielland surprisingly takes the perspective of an animal – an old raven.

It is a device he uses with great mastery in other stories in the collection, and occasionally in the novels.

The raven provides a reflection on enterprising people, who cannot leave any untouched nature alone, but cultivate and domesticate everything in nature for their own purposes.

The novella is based on a drawing by the author’s sister, the painter Kitty Kielland.

She later followed up the theme with the painting Peat Marsh (1880), which was presented at the Paris Salon, and several later paintings of the Jær landscape.

Above: Kitty Kielland’s painting Peat bog

In Siesta, Kielland’s empathy with music is expressed.

Here, a depiction of the power of music is combined with an attack on the indifference and ignorance of the upper class.

The action takes place in Paris, in a loosely composed company of rich and spoiled people from many countries.

An unknown Irishman provides the music, which increasingly gives voice to the world’s poor and oppressed.

The good mood is spoiled, but it turns out that the audience has still not understood anything.

A Skipper’s Story is a subtle allegory on the theme of conservatism and radicalism.

The skipper and the mate refuse to let the ship sail, but briefly give in to pressure and allow it to be cast off.

The crew rejoices over the brisk sailing, but the skipper suddenly lets go of the anchor, and ends by lecturing the crew about the danger they have exposed themselves to: 

“Yes – fortunately!

This time it went well!

But now I also hope that each of you will have learned how dangerous it is to lend an ear to these immature agitators, who could never be calm and let development – ​​as the mate says – take its natural course.“

Above: The Skipper (Alan J. Hale: 1921 – 1990), Gilligan’s Island (1964 – 1967)

Folkefest (“folk festival“) is about two newlyweds who spend their honeymoon in a suburb of Paris.

Here they have a great time at a fun fair that offers all kinds of folk amusements.

The good mood changes to its opposite when they take a shortcut and come to the back of the stalls and circus tents and see the shabbiness and poverty smiling at them.

En Abekat is a humorous story about a law candidate who is about to take his exams and who manages to get through them by a twist of fate.

Kielland displays a wealth of wit here, while also giving some well-directed jabs at academia and the law in particular.

Above: Poster from The Paper Chase (1973)

It tells the story of James Hart, a first-year law student at Harvard Law School, his experiences with Professor Charles Kingsfield, a brilliant and demanding contract law instructor, and Hart’s relationship with Kingsfield’s daughter.

In A Good Conscience, Kielland reaches a pinnacle of biting irony over the ladies of the bourgeoisie and their need for charity towards the poor.

Mrs. Warden has set out to seek out poverty to see with her own eyes and help where it is needed.

She recoils in horror when she realizes that there is no such thing as noble poverty, and can safely conclude that such people neither can nor should be helped.

Above: Unemployed people lined up outside a soup kitchen opened in Chicago during the Great Depression (1929 – 1939)

The Parsonage is a long story about a country priest’s daughter who has grown up motherless under her father’s protective care.

He has done his best to spare her the realities of life, and when one summer day she is exposed to the attention of a young townsman, she is completely unprepared.

The story is a statement against a bourgeois-Christian upbringing that fails to prepare children and young people for life.

The story opens and ends with a depiction of the arrival of spring and autumn, respectively, in which Kielland proves himself to be a masterful portrayer of nature.

Again, he uses the technique of letting animals, plants and natural forces think, feel and act.

“People who know something and love something are never boring.“

Garman & Worse is Kielland’s first novel, published in 1880, and is considered by many to be his best.

The book is set in Kielland’s hometown of Stavanger in the 1870s (although the name of the city is never mentioned, but in a letter to Strindberg to whom he sent a copy of the book, he refers to Stavanger as “a hypocritical , reactionary Smaaby“) and depicts some of the city’s many characteristics.

The centerpiece of the novel is the trading house “Garman & Worse” at Sandgaard, which is based on the Kielland family’s own trading house, “Jacob Kielland & Søn“.

The characters are largely based on people in his own family and circle of friends.

Both his mother and father, as well as several of his ancestors, can be recognized in several of the characters in the book.

In 1882, Kielland published the sequel novel Skipper Worse, which takes place in the same trading house and environment one generation earlier, in the 1840s.

Kielland was not really completely satisfied with the book.

The characters created their own lives and the story took its own direction.

The title was originally supposed to be The Discontented, but as Kielland himself wrote in a letter to Bjørnson:

“Satan’s people are so complacent that it’s worth crying over.”

He justified the book not being “what it was supposed to be and should have been” to his uncle Jacob Lange by saying that:

“I am – between us – a bit of a coward. Next time I’ll hit harder.”

He did that with the book Arbeidsfolk (“working people“). 

The main themes in the novel are the conflict between old and new science, the school system, the church, social problems and women’s issues.

The book is also interwoven with relationships between both, across social classes, and much of this comes into direct focus.

Garman & Worse was published in 1880.

In the same year, Kielland wrote his first letter to Strindberg.

Above: Swedish writer/painter August Strindberg (1849 – 1912)

Georg and Edvard Brandes had recommended that he read Röda rummet (“the red room“), which also made a deep impression on Kielland.

Above: The Red Room – Strindberg reflects his own experiences of living in poverty. As a result of The Red Room, Strindberg became famous throughout Scandinavia. Edvard Brandes wrote that it “makes the reader want to join the fight against hypocrisy and reaction“.

A young idealistic civil servant, Arvid Falk, leaves the drudgery of bureaucracy to become a journalist and author.

As he explores various social activities — politics, publishing, theatre, philanthropy and business — he finds more hypocrisy and political corruption than he thought possible.

He takes refuge with a group of “bohemians“, who meet in a red dining room in Berns Salonger to discuss these matters.

Above: Berns Salonger, Stockholm, Sweden

The Red Room is a satire on life in Stockholm, on life everywhere.

The pathetic struggle of the artistic and literary career, its follies and pretenses, the fatuity of politics, the dishonesty of journalism, the disillusion that awaits the aspiring actor, all these things run riot through the lively pages.

Strindberg’s satire is severe.

It is sometimes hard, but it is not mean.

He has a large if rather distant sympathy for the poor fellows whose aspirations, failures, dissipations and friendships he portrays.

Of two young critics he says:

“And they wrote of human merit and human unworthiness and broke hearts as if they were breaking egg shells.”

He writes of their unconscious inhumanity and blindness in a way that reveals his own clearness of vision and fundamental humanity.

The laughter of a somber humorist has in it a tenderness unknown to merry natures.

Above: Interior of Berns Salonger

Initially, he disliked Sweden and the Swedes.

He declared himself willing to go to war to dissolve the Union.

Above: Flag of the Union of Sweden and Norway (1814 – 1905)

But with Strindberg he immediately felt a sense of community, and wrote that they were “the indignant, the silently furious, the discontented, who have no hope“.

There was nevertheless no doubt that Strindberg was far more blunt than Kielland when he dealt with a subject.

In 1881, Kielland’s social commitment became very clear.

In the spring he published the novel Arbeidsfolk with a focus on poverty and social degradation, in the autumn Else came with the same message.

After all the criticism he received for his harsh descriptions in Arbeidsfolk, Kielland wrote to his brother:

“Get me out of life with your eternal mediation, justice, impartiality, seeing from both sides – and all this snuff, which envelops and blunts the holy indignation.“

Two Novelette fra Danmark (“two short stories from Denmark“) is Kielland’s third collection of short stories, consisting of the short stories Trofast and Karen.

The short stories were written after Kielland had spent some time in Denmark :

Above: Flag of Denmark

The first short story takes place in Copenhagen, while the next is set in Krarup, without any significance being given to the location.

The short stories contain criticism of the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, and of the treatment that women receive when they “fall into misfortune“.

Kielland’s style here, as in most of his other works, is satirical, but also with a clear touch of understatement.

Above: Copenhagen, Denmark

Faithful is about the wealthy Hansen family and their dog, a Great Dane named Faithful.

In this family, Faithful is adored, and Faithful becomes the head of the family.

We see the plot from Faithful’s point of view and he has human traits.

He thinks and assesses situations and you quickly realize that he is taking advantage of the situation he is put in.

We also meet another family, it consists of only a mother and two children.

The family is very poor and it is also called Hansen.

In addition to these two families, we meet a policeman, Frode Hansen.

The fact that everyone is called Hansen is perhaps Kielland’s way of emphasizing that there is no difference between these people, except for their money and status.

None of the people are complex characters, they are all simple and they are all stereotypes.

This is typical of Kielland’s way of writing, but it is deliberate.

Because he is going to focus on the central theme.

So he uses the characters as a means to express himself.

That is also perhaps one of the reasons why everyone is called Hansen, they emphasize that it is not the people themselves in the plot that are important, but what they represent.

But back to Mam Hansen, the mother of the poor family.

She steals coal from the rich Hansen family.

She steals two baskets of coal every day and sells them to provide food for the children and herself.

The rich family has so much coal that it is equivalent to several hundred thousand barrels of coal.

Gradually, wholesaler Hansen (the father of the rich family) discovers that someone is stealing coal.

He does not understand it because he notices that some coal is being lost, because he had never noticed that himself.

But he sees tracks in the snow.

Therefore, he sets Faithful to be a watchdog to look after the coal.

Then a discussion arises about whether it is right to set “a wild animal that will tear a poor poor man to pieces“.

Here we hear a “Candidate Hansen” criticism of the family.

Candidate Hansen becomes Kielland’s spokesman throughout the story.

When Mam Hansen comes to steal some coal as she always does, Faithful is there.

The next day we find out that Faithful has bitten her so that she is dying, but when she is sent to the hospital the doctors find out that “she was not worth the repair“.

Thus, poor Mam Hansen dies.

Faithful was ashamed of what he had had to do and he was very upset by what his family had made him do.

Therefore, the whole family focused on apologizing for the terrible thing they had done to Faithful.

Here Kielland focuses heavily on the criticism of the upper class and its principles.

That what was horrible for them in that situation was what they had exposed their dog to.

No one mentioned that Trofast had killed a human being, on their command, to defend a completely insignificant amount of litter.

She was killed because of principles.

The name Faithful is also a bit ironic in relation to the story, because Faithful is not that faithful, he is smart and takes advantage of what he can to get his way.

But the family is stupid and does not understand this, nor do they notice who is the real head of the family, their “faithful” Faithful.

“Love is a lottery, if you want to win, you have to play.“

The novella Karen begins and ends with the words:

“Once upon a time in Krarup Kro there was a girl named Karen.”

The maid Karen is the main character in the novella, which proceeds without any real action taking place, and without the real theme being mentioned in plain words:

Karen is pregnant, without being in a permanent relationship.

Her despair is only depicted indirectly through natural metaphors.

The novella ends dramatically.

The writing style is passive and reserved.

In this short story, there is a parallel plot where the action takes place in three places, in Krarup kro, in the forest and in the wind’s journey.

Karen was a waitress in Krarup kro.

She was the only one serving, a job she did quite well.

Karen was small and beautiful, but at the same time a bit strange.

Her dress had become too tight for her, especially around her belly because she was pregnant.

At that moment the wind came from the West.

It blew in the gates of a stable and created complete chaos.

It also blew into the mail carriages where Anders the postman and the postman were sitting.

Behind the inn was a peat bog.

There a fox was lurking, hunting a hare.

It was waiting for the right moment, when the hare would lie down.

Inside the inn, many orders came in that needed to be kept in order.

The innkeeper’s wife was busy with a lawyer, because the innkeeper was busy at an auction in Thisted.

Karen served the wrong food to the guests.

There was complete confusion in the inn.

Karen disappeared.

When the commotion in the inn was settled, Anders’ postman and the postman moved on.

Karen reappeared.

Throughout the story, it is understood that Karen and the postman have a relationship, which is proven by Karen’s disappearance.

Afterwards, Karen was startled when she overheard a conversation between fish buyers.

They were talking about the relationship the postman had with his wife in Lemvig.

He was therefore unfaithful to Karen.

She was so shocked by this that she went out into the heath, which is a forestless area, and jumped into the bog.

The splash scared the hare, so that the fox could not catch it, but one young woman was gone forever.

The wind can be interpreted as a love affair.

It is Karen’s love affair with the postman that is represented by the wind.

Karen is taken by storm.

There are many similarities between Karen and the Hare.

It is no coincidence that Kielland has given her the name “Karen“, it is because, quite simply, she resembles the Hare very much.

Karen is described by Kielland with many features that are associated with a hare.

In the same way, we can say that the postman is compared to the fox.

Apart from the obvious bright red colors that both are recognizable by, Kielland’s portrayal of the postman is also reminiscent of the features that we recognize in the fox.

Therefore, the fox’s hunt for the hare becomes an image of the postman’s “hunt” for Karen.

But the Hare escapes.

We can also interpret it as Karen also escaping.

That is, by taking her own life, it is Karen who wins.

Skipper Worse is a novel by Kielland, published in 1882.

The novel takes place in Stavanger in and around the Sandgaard trading house, which Kielland created using the family’s own trading house, “Jacob Kielland & Søn“, as a model.

The novel is a sequel to Garman & Worse, which was published in 1880.

However, while the first novel’s action is set in the 1870s, the sequel takes place a generation earlier, in the 1840s.

In 1813, Lars Mele is said to have saved Jacob Kielland’s trading house from ruin when some of the firm’s competitors had bought up bills of exchange for a large sum, in order to present them to the firm for redemption at a time when the trading house had no liquid funds.

When Skipper Worse was published, with an almost identical account, Mele’s relative Håvar Larsen, brother of Kielland’s stepmother Inger Mæle, is said to have said:

“I am so angry at the young scoundrel who has written about our family.” 

The novel gives a broad picture of the city’s various environments and alternates between the old trading house that is faltering in its finances, the rising petty bourgeoisie dominated by the Haugians and the skipper’s club.

The book contains eroticism, generational differences, revelations of hypocrisy, romance, environmental depictions and a juicy lushness.

In addition to Skipper Jacob Worse and Consul Morten Garman, Madam Torvestad is one of the main characters.

She belongs to the town’s religious circles, and manipulates her marriageable daughter Sara into marrying the skipper.

A university professor who disliked modern literature stated that such books should be labeled as poison, like other dangerous substances.

Accordingly, Kielland called his next novel Gift (1883), a showdown with church, state, and the school system of the time, the Latin school, in which Marius Gottwald is given a free pass as the son of a single mother.  

Another main character is Marius’ good friend and supporter, the talented Abraham Løvdahl.

In Gift, Kielland debates the preference for Latin that Norwegian teachers had during his time.

The story features a young boy called Marius, lying on his deathbed while repeating Latin grammar.

Poison (original Norwegian title: Gift) is an 1883 novel by the Norwegian writer Alexander Kielland. 

An English language edition of Gift did not exist until November 2020, 137 years after its original publication, when it was finally translated as a labor of love by aspiring Norwegian writer M. A. Larsen, who self-published the classic novel as an e-book for Kindle under the title Poison.

This famous novel is an attack on the Norwegian education system, particularly on the obsession with Latin.

A schoolboy, Little Marius, is tormented throughout the first half of the novel by his scholastic inability.

He is the son of “Mrs. Gottwald“, who had him out of wedlock.

The fact that “Mrs. Gottwald” had her son “Little Marius” outside of marriage attaches an unspoken stigma to both her and her son —Little Marius is perceived as “illegitimate“.

However, out of sheer politeness and pity, the other townspeople still refer to his mother as “Mrs.“, a title typically reserved for married and “respectable” women.

Although Little Marius has a lower social status, he is allowed to attend school with the children from the town’s respectable upper class.

Little Marius, who is small in stature and not particularly intelligent, performs poorly in all subjects except one:

Rote-learning in Latin.

During his final illness he continues to murmur rote phrases, his last words being Mensa rotunda (“a round table“).

The main character of the book is Little Marius’s friend Abraham Løvdahl, the son of a respected professor.

His mother Wenche is an idealist who struggles in vain to keep her son honest and upright.

She takes her own life after falling pregnant to the businessman Michal Mordtmann.

It is a common misconception that the title is intended to carry a double meaning, as the Norwegian word for “poison” is the same as the word for “married“.

Alexander Kielland, in his novel Gift (Poison), attacks the rigid Norwegian education system of his time, critiquing its obsession with Latin at the expense of meaningful learning.

His work exposes his frustration with a system that values form over substance, where knowledge is memorized rather than internalized.

His further decline is described in Fortuna (1884) and Sankt Hans fest (1887), where Kielland vented his frustration over the attitudes he encountered when the Storting refused to give him a poet’s salary. 

Norway failed to join the Berne Convention.

Above: Bern, Switzerland

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 9 September 1886 , usually abbreviated as the Berne Convention, is an international copyright treaty, first drafted in 
Bern, Switzerland, in 1886. 

It was developed at the initiative of the author Victor Hugo, and was thus influenced by the French concept of “author’s right” (droit d’auteur), which stands in some contrast to the Anglo-Saxon concept of “copyright“, which was concerned only with economic protection.

Most countries in the world have since joined this Convention.

Because of this Norwegian authors missed out on royalties for foreign translations.

As compensation, Ibsen, Bjørnson and later also Lie received a poet’s salary from the state.

Eventually, Kielland also sold so well abroad that he filed a claim.

In November 1884 he sent his application to the government, but was rejected.

Both Ibsen and Bjørnsson advocated that Kielland should receive support on an equal footing with themselves, but this also did not gain traction.

Bjørnson gave up his own poet’s salary in protest, which contributed to a split in the Liberal Party.  

The case thus led to Sverdrup losing the unifying force that had been his strength.

Above: Logo of the Norwegian Venstre (Liberal) Party

One of the main speakers against Kielland was the leftist priest Lars Oftedal, who believed that his texts were impious.  

The result was a very public feud between Oftedal and Kielland.

Despite this, there were similarities between them.

Kielland may have recognized Oftedal’s unhappy marriage.

The two also used the same rowboat, Asbjørn, when they fished on Orrevannet.

And after Oftedal’s fall in 1891, Kielland never publicly opposed him again.

Above: Norwegian priest Lars Oftedal (1838 – 1900)

 

Fortuna is a novel by Alexander Kielland from 1884.

It is a continuation of Gift from 1883, with the same characters in the same environment.

The novel is named after a joint-stock company that is central to the novel.

Fortuna is first and foremost a novel about economic life.

Here Kielland gives a clear-sighted presentation of how economic irresponsibility and speculative ambition lead to an inevitable economic crisis, and how the subsequent depression always hits those who were least responsible for the crisis – the working class – hardest.

Abraham Løvdahl has become a student and is living the happy life of a student.

What remains of his rebellious spirit and urge to live by high ideals is soon channeled into an ironic and sarcastic attitude towards the existing.

Circumstances in his upbringing have deprived Abraham of the ability to pursue his own goals and ideals, and he is largely led by others.

The strong-willed Mrs. Meinich has decided that Abraham is a suitable marriage partner for her daughter Clara.

She also believes that Abraham should complete a shorter course of study than medicine, as he had intended.

Therefore, he will study law.

In his hometown, Michal Mordtmann decides to resign from his position as director of the Fortuna factory, which he himself has helped to get started.

Carsten Løvdahl harbors an old hatred for Mordtmann, and happily accepts the position of working chairman.

He also arranges for his son Abraham to step in as his assistant and general manager at Fortuna.

Thus, Abraham returns to his hometown as a newlywed and moves into the upstairs of his father’s house.

It gradually becomes clear that Clara is not the loving and self-sacrificing life partner that Abraham had dreamed of – she can be both capricious and moody.

On the other hand, a special degree of togetherness soon arises between Clara and his father-in-law, who share their views on life in every way.

Abraham sometimes feels alien in the house, where he walks with his vague thoughts about progress and liberation from old prejudices and social structures.

It is the spiritual legacy of his mother Wenche that moves him.

But at the same time, he looks up to his father infinitely and deflects any attempts at confrontation.

The love and understanding that he does not find at home, he finds in the blind young girl Grete, who is the daughter of the anarchist machinist Steffensen at the factory.

He can sit for hours with Grete’s hand in his and talk about his dreams and ideals.

It may be that in Grete he finds some of the longing for his mother covered – but without being exposed to her mother’s scrutiny.

When Carsten Løvdahl is given responsibility for the factory, he must first overcome his old academic contempt for shopkeepers, but he soon gains a sense of the irresistible power that radiates from someone who manages his own and other people’s wealth.

He throws himself into a round dance of speculative business.

The first to understand that things could go wrong is the cautious bank manager Christensen, who has a special nose for economic fluctuations.

Løvdahl is too proud to realize that the factory is not producing the results it should, and he supports his own unhealthy business by investing his own (and Wenche’s) funds in the operation.

Gradually, many other small and large fortunes are also invested in an increasingly confusing business.

Very few others than Christensen have any objections.

Carsten Løvdahl’s name on a piece of paper guarantees solidity and a secure dividend.

Even after he should have realized that it is only a matter of time before the ship can carry, he continues the round dance with bills of exchange and endorsements.

In the end he commits a number of actions that are both legally and morally far beyond the line.

Among other things, he persuades Abraham to hand over the workers’ savings and life insurance fund, which Abraham has been entrusted with.

After the bankruptcy – which takes away almost everyone in the town except bank manager Christensen – he makes the stroke of genius to act like a hard-pressed but deeply feeling Christian.

“He knew that nothing is as strong as this hypocrisy that never flashes:

No integrity, no virtue can disarm evil or protect against suspicion like the hypocrisy that never feels ashamed.

He knew that whoever could put on a full armor of this material, with which most people cover themselves piecemeal, he would be able to go through this Purgatory that was ahead of him, gain a new foothold – yes, perhaps turn his shame into a halo that no one would have the courage to tear from him.”

And he calculates correctly:

There will be neither a trial nor naked misery.

The bourgeoisie and the civil service protect their own.

In addition, he and Clara manage to hide silverware and other things from the probate court.

The one who is hit hardest by the people’s judgment is Abraham.

He is suspected of having embezzled the workers’ money.

When Steffensen and Grete disappear from town during the bankruptcy, it turns out that:

“Grete had to be sent away, – presumably with a good chunk of the stolen money.“

Sne (“snow“) is a novel by Kielland published in 1886. 

It deals with how young people should develop their own opinions and have the courage to stand by them.

The main character in Snow is the priest Jürges, a highly respected intellectual who sought work in the north of the country rather than the capital.

After many years in the North, he decides that he wants to work closer to the capital so that he can be heard more easily through “the capital’s newspaper“.

The major conflict in the novel arises when her son Johannes brings his fiancée, Gabriele Pram, home for Easter.

Gabriele is convinced that Johannes does not want to work as a priest, but Johannes is under pressure from his father to apply for a job as a priest.

The priest hatches a plan to “break” Gabriele so that she agrees to let Johannes take a job as a priest.

Like other novels by Kielland, Snow contains impressionistic elements.

The title is a symbol of how the church holds the country, society and culture in a grip like the snow that lies suffocating and isolating the farmers in the villages.

Early in the novel there is a small conflict that illustrates how there were often difficult relations between officials and the common people.

Sankt Hans Fest is a novel by Kielland from 1887. 

It is a standalone continuation of Gift and Fortuna, but Abraham Løvdahl is reduced to a supporting character in Sankt Hans Fest.

The novel was primarily an attack on the priest and left-wing politician Lars Oftedal, who was distant from Kielland’s radicalism, and whom Kielland also had personal reasons for attacking.

Oftedal played a major role when the Storting had refused to grant Kielland a poet’s post the previous year.

The plot is, as usual in Kielland’s novels, not the main thing, and in Sankt Hans Fest it is very thin.

Some people in a small, joyless town want to organize a town festival.

This does not suit the town’s spiritual leader, the powerful priest Morten Kruse, who instead wants to have a charity event under his auspices. 

Sankt Hans Fest is a collective novel with a large cast of characters.

The novel’s theme is the struggle for power and dominance in the town.

After the great economic crisis that hit the town, and which is depicted in Fortuna, there has been little to enjoy in the small coastal town.

People lock themselves in and go to bed early.

Some happy gentlemen in the club – bank teller Thomas Randulf, law graduate Holck and the young Christian Fredrik Garman – decide that the town needs a party, and form a party committee.

It is to be a party for all social classes with dancing and entertainment at the town’s open-air area Paradis outside the town.

Word of the party spreads quickly.

Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.

The town’s economic and political elite do not feel comfortable at the thought of someone arranging something in the town without their involvement, and soon bank manager Christensen and county magistrate Hiorth step up and demand to be part of the committee, and the party begins to take on an official character.

In a longer flashback, the story of Morten Kruse’s transformation from failed chaplain to powerful religious leader with influence far beyond the city’s borders is told.

In Gift he was the hunky Latin schoolboy Morten Bakstrever, son of grocer Jørgen Kruse, who was set on studying.

In Fortuna he returns to his hometown as a chaplain, and is characterized primarily by his stinginess in matters of money.

A terrible misfortune for Morten Kruse was the bankruptcy of Carsten Løvdahl, to whom he had entrusted both his wife’s and parents’ fortune, convinced that Løvdahl would give a better interest rate than the bank.

The economic misery makes Morten Kruse develop a bitter hatred for everyone who owns something.

His sermons develop into joyless performances in which fewer and fewer find any edification, and the collection yields less and less.

At the same time, he feels that he is not able to say what he would like to say in the rigid bookish language that he has had to acquire in his studies.

One day, he bursts from the pulpit, and he throws the manuscript and hurls out his contempt for the world in muddled language.

To his great surprise, he finds the room full the next time he is to preach, and he realizes that he must give people what they want:

Powerful reminders of their sinful lives and penchant for vanity and display – told in their own language.

From then on, they flock in ever greater numbers, and the offerings flow in on a previously unknown scale.

Soon he finds himself in the middle of a spiritual empire, surrounded by his henchmen, who know all the circumstances of everything and everyone in the city, and who lure and intimidate people to him with a combination of spiritual and economic threats.

“The rabbits” is what Kielland calls this circle of helpers.

He has the chief rabbit Peder Pedersen express himself thus to one of the most stubborn:

“No, it really seems that you absolutely and completely want to be among God’s enemies, but you will get no pleasure from it, I can tell you that.

For he who is not with us is against us.

And – as he said – the priest, it is best to know where one has friends and enemies.”

The only reason the plans for a secular Midsummer’s Eve get as far as they do is that Morten Kruse is out of town on a preaching tour.

When he is notified by telegram from Peder Pedersen that something is going on, he rushes back to town and sets about getting everything back to normal and preferably increasing his own power.

Under pressure from Morten Kruse and his rabbits, one after the other drops out, and instead joins his alternative – a charity event for the blind – at the prayer house.

It ends up that the town lies as if extinct on Midsummer’s Eve – no one dares to appear outside for fear of arousing the rabbits’ displeasure.

“But to the east, where the moon came from, it was clear and dark blue.

And far in there between the mountains there must still be some rabbit-free areas.

For here and there a column of smoke rose into the air, where there were still some daring boys and girls who dared to dance and party on Midsummer’s Eve.”

As for the real Lars Oftedal, the press is also a means for Morten Kruse to spread and increase his power.

Here Abraham Løvdahl comes in as an important supporting character.

After his father’s bankruptcy, he has been given a position as a newspaper editor in Morten Kruse’s newspaper Sannhetsvidnet (“the witness of truth“).

During Kruse’s absence, he dares to give the upcoming party a positive review, but when the boss comes home and Abraham realizes where the country is, he comes the next day with an equally condemnatory review.

Abraham Løvdahl is reduced to a pitiful person, despised by all.

The last book he published before returning from France was Sankt Hans Fest.

It was an attack on his opponent Lars Oftedal and his followers, referred to as “the rabbits“.

Many felt offended, and when Kielland announced on his return in the summer of 1888 that he would run for Parliament for the Liberal Party, he was told in clear terms by his local connections that a parliamentary seat for Stavanger was out of the question.

Above: Alexander Kielland

Journalism was not a natural career choice for Kielland.

In November 1888, he wrote to his brother Jacob, after returning to a ruined hometown:

“I see the abuses and am perhaps the only one who has the courage and authority to put my finger on the sore spot.

Now my head will no longer rewrite what I have observed into art.

I have come so close to life that my fine art is on the verge of what I have always despised so deeply:

Journalism.” 

Stavanger Avis was owned by the Haabeth brothers and, in Kielland’s words:

“A terrible sloppy piece of a newspaper that was to be transformed, cleaned up and become a city paper for Stavanger:

Funny, European and terrible for the little popes.”

He entered into an agreement with the Haabeth brothers and took over as editor on 1 January 1889.

Now he could begin what he had written to Strindberg about, his desire to be as bold as the Swede, for:

“When I sit fat and contented and polish my shiny steel pen, a guilty conscience runs through me :

Wouldn’t it be better to stand in the street with Strindberg and throw stones at the pretty windows?” 

Above: Alexander Kielland

Kielland was influenced by the Brandes brothers and their newspaper Politiken (Politics).

As a newspaper editor he never suffered from the writer’s block that had gripped him as a writer.

His editorial style was the well-written, commenting reportage. 

To Bjørnson he wrote:

“A magazine in my hand would be a scourge for the city and a pleasure for the country.”

But he gained few allies and even fewer friends, even though he tried to make the newspaper the mouthpiece of the Liberal Party.

He felt more and more “skinless” as expressed in a letter:

“You know one is watched by so many evil eyes, who wonder at the disappointed faces.” 

On his 40th birthday on 18 February 1889, Kielland did not receive a single telegram.

He also struggled with major health problems, including sleep apnea which gave him difficulty concentrating and poor memory.

He also developed diabetes. 

Above: Bust of Alexander Kielland, Molde, Norway

Kielland and his opponent Lars Oftedal shared a keen interest in the labor movement and the plight of the working class.

When it was claimed that workers were not mature enough to have the right to vote, Kielland wrote that mature workers could finally be seen in the great nations:

“They are oppressed and tormented by a capitalist tyranny that is unknown to us.

They stand foaming with hatred and await the day of reckoning.”

He no longer had time left for fiction.

He wrote about ten manuscripts a day and even filled the front page of the newspaper.

Here he advocated public care for the elderly, a pension scheme, a social security fund and accident insurance.

About Lars Oftedal, Kielland said that he had:

“God in one pocket and Stavanger in the other“.

Like Kielland, Oftedal wrote about the plight of workers, but unlike him, editor Oftedal also collected food and clothing for the needy.

While Kielland has been given a statue on a pedestal, Oftedal’s monument is his newspaper, Stavanger Aftenblad. 

Above: Aftenbladet Building, Stavanger, Norway

His articles about the Combined Institution, a combination of hospital, social welfare and punishment in one place, were of great importance.

Unrest, dissatisfaction and disrepair were increasingly associated with the institution.

In a series of newspaper articles, Kielland sharply criticized the place, and hastened its closure in 1897.

Above: Stavanger, Norway

In 1891, Kielland was appointed Mayor of Stavanger. 

At that time, the government appointed the country’s mayors, otherwise he would hardly have achieved such a position after all his criticism of the civil service.

Now he thought it would be better to enter the civil service himself and make himself useful as “a popular civil servant“. 

Above: Coat of arms of Stavanger, Norway

In 1902, he became county governor of Romsdal County, living in Molde.

Above: Molde, Norway

On the night of 23 January 1904, he had just set off on a five-week holiday on the Continent with his publisher Hegel, when he learned that a city fire had broken out in Ålesund.

Above: Overview of Ålesund in the 1890s. Aspøy in the background. 
The city fire of 23 January 1904 destroyed about 850 houses.

He turned around, and the next morning, 24 January, at seven o’clock, he stood in the streets of Ålesund in the southwest and on the oil rig.

He later received praise from the Storting for his precise reports from the disaster.

He was in his element even though his diet consisted of rye breadcrumbs and beer, and later wrote to friends:

“For me, the 14 days of the fire were straight forward – yes, I dare not say party time – but just something for me.”

Above: Ålesund, Norway

Thomas Mann said in 1926 that he planned the Buddenbrook House after the Kielland model.

Above: German writer Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955)

He later said that:

“Kielland’s works have contributed to my being able to write Buddenbrooks.

That is why I always call Norway the land of Kielland.“

Despite being born wealthy, Kielland had a sincere affection for the less fortunate, treating his workers well when he was a factory owner. 

He remained a spokesman for the weak and a critic of society throughout his time as a writer.

His best known plays were the satirical comedies Tre Par (1886) and Professoren (1888).

It has been debated why Kielland ended his career as a writer so early.

Some believe that he was so much of a realist that he could not deal with the neo-romantic tendencies of Norwegian literature at the end of the 19th century.

A more probable reason is that he chose to focus on his political career.

The biography of Alexander L. Kielland by Tor Obrestad includes thoughts about Kielland dying from obesity.

Already from the mid-1880s, Kielland had suffered from shortness of breath.

He had several heart attacks, constantly gained weight, and couldn’t control his great passion for food.

Kielland had been severely overweight since the age of 30, and when Amalie Skram first met him, she clapped her hands together and exclaimed:

“No, what a fat, happy lapdog!” 

His obesity – at the time of his death he weighed 136 kilograms  – and addiction to alcohol exacerbated the symptoms of sleep apnea that caused him breathing problems at night.

He was observed when, after having a huge dinner at the Grand, he snuck out into the backyard and threw up everything – and then went back in and ordered more of both food and wine. 

Since he felt better in Bergen than in Stavanger, he regularly asked Claus Hanssen, who was a friend of his, to be admitted to Bergen Hospital where Hanssen was the chief physician.

Kielland was closely associated with the young nurse Camilla Struwe, educated in Edinburgh:

He asked his publisher to send her the collected works of Kierkegaard.

He always asked that Miss Struwe be present when he was admitted to the hospital, as he needed her “horror regiment“.

He called her “the master of the dock” because in her custody he was like a ship in dry dock.

On the last evening of his life, it was Struwe who checked on him at 11 o’clock and noted:

“Shortly after he heard very loud snoring.”

Towards the end of the night she reported that everything was quiet, but in the morning it was all over.  

Alexander Kielland died in Bergen on 6 April 1906, only 57 years old.

Above: Bergen, Norway

After Kielland’s death, Gyldendal saved the family from bankruptcy by buying the author’s rights.

For the publisher, this turned out to be a bargain, for which they were left with a lot.  

The widow Beate had been as irresponsible as her husband, and received a sharp letter from her brother-in-law Jacob shortly after Kielland’s funeral.

She soon moved to Copenhagen, where she died in 1923.

When she was interviewed by Jonas Collin in Tidens Tegn (“sign of the times“) on the occasion of her 70th birthday in 1921, she said that she preferred Denmark to Norway.

From her marriage to Kielland, she claimed that she remembered nothing:

“No, a fan is all that remains from that time.”

She meant the mother-of-pearl fan exhibited at Ledaal, the one on which the most famous men of the time had written their names.

Above: Ledaal Manor, Stavanger, Norway

Edvard Beyer believed that:

“Kielland’s most important contribution to Norwegian literature is his novels.

It is a colorful series of individual works, but most of them are also parts of a larger whole, a large novel series – our first – about the poet’s own city in growth and change over half a century.” 

Above: Norwegian Professor Edvard Beyer (1920 – 2003)

“I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Toda Raba (1934)

Nikos Kazantzakis (18 February 1883 – 26 October 1957) was a Greek writer, journalist, politician, poet and philosopher. 

Widely considered a giant of modern Greek literature, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in nine different years. 

He remains the most translated Greek author worldwide.

Above: Nikos Kazantzakis

Nikos Kazantzakis was a prolific writer. 

He dealt with almost every genre of speech: 

• poetry (dramatic, epic, lyrical)
• essays 
• novels (in Greek and French) 
• travelogues
• correspondence
• children’s novels  
• translation (from Ancient Greek, French, Italian, English, 
  German and Spanish)
• film scripts  
• history
• school books
• children’s books (adaptation and translation) 
• dictionaries (linguistic and encyclopedic) 
• journalism 
• criticism
• article writing

Kazantzakis’s novels included: 

• Zorba the Greek 

• Christ Recrucified (1948)

• Captain Michalis (1950)

• The Last Temptation of Christ (1955)

He also wrote plays, travel books, memoirs and philosophical essays, such as The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises.

His fame spread in the English-speaking world due to cinematic adaptations of Zorba the Greek (1964) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

He also translated a number of notable works into Modern Greek, such as:

• The Divine Comedy 

• Thus Spoke Zarathustra 

• On the Origin of Species 

• Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey

“We are not simple people who believe in happiness nor weaklings who crumple to the ground in distress at the first reverse nor skeptics observing the bloody effort of marching humanity from the lofty heights of a mocking, sterile wit.

Believing in the fight, though we entertain no illusions about it, we are armed against every disappointment.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Toda Raba (1934)

Kazantzakis was born in the town of Heraklion in Crete, with origins from the village of Myrtia.

Above: Images of Heraklion, Crete, Greece

Crete had not yet joined the modern Greek state (which had been established in 1832) and was still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.

Above: (in red) Greek island of Crete

Above: Flag of the Ottoman Empire (1299 – 1922)

From 1902 to 1906 Kazantzakis studied law at the University of Athens.

Above: Logo of the University of Athens

His 1906 doctorial thesis was titled “Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Law and the State“.

Above: German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

“God, what is all this talk put out by the Popes? 

Paradise is here, my good man.

God, give me no other Paradise!“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Captain Michalis (1953)

Kazantzakis’s first published work was the 1906 narrative, Serpent and Lily, which he signed with the pen name Karma Nirvami.

The Snake and the Lily is one of the first literary works of the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis.

The book was written in 1905, probably in Heraklion.

The author himself would later have conflicting feelings about his work. 

The author was only 20 years old when he completed it and the book was published under the literary pseudonym “Karma Nirvami“.

The book has the form of a diary and describes in it, Kazantzakis’ youthful concerns about life and death, women and love.

“We, who are dying, are doing better, than they, who will live.

For Crete doesn’t need householders, she needs madmen like us.

These madmen make Crete immortal.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Captain Michalis (1953)

A young painter, a lover of Pleasure and Beauty, enjoys everything life offers him and, gradually, the idea of ​​death dominates him.

Deciding that death and life are connected to Beauty and Love, he invites his mistress to a room flooded with fresh flowers, to spend an amorous night together.

Finally, in the morning, from suffocation, they are found dead. 

“All my life I struggled to stretch my mind to the breaking point, until it began to creak, in order to create a great thought which might be able to give a new meaning to life, a new meaning to death, and to console mankind.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, “Odyssey of Faith” in TIME magazine (6 June 1960)

The book does not have the characteristics of a classic novel , it is more like a literary psychograph.

The heroes of the book have realistic characteristics, while the main characters of the work are the Painter and his Lover.

The protagonist of the play is the Painter, in whose role the author appears.

And the secondary protagonist is the Painter’s mistress, in whose role Kazantzakis’ Irish friend, Kathleen Forde, is depicted.

“I said to the almond tree:

“Speak to me of God.“

And the almond tree blossomed.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Fratricides (1964)

In 1907, Kazantzakis went to the Sorbonne in Paris for his graduate studies.

Above: Coat of arms of the University of Paris

He was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, primarily the idea that a true understanding of the world comes from the combination of intuition, personal experience, and rational thought.

The theme of rationalism mixed with irrationality later became central to many of Kazantzakis’s later stories, characters, and personal philosophies.

Above: French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941)

His 1909 doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne was a reworked version of his 1906 dissertation under the title Friedrich Nietzsche dans la philosophie du droit et de la cité (“Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State“). 

Above: Friedrich Nietzsche

Upon his return to Greece, Kazantzakis began translating works of philosophy.

Above: Greece

“Every perfect traveller always creates the country where he travels.“

Nikos Kazantzakis quoted in Reporter in Red China (1966), Charles Taylor

In 1914, he met the writer Angelos Sikelianos.

Together they travelled for two years through places where Greek Orthodox Christian culture flourished, largely due to the enthusiastic nationalism of Sikelianos.

Above: Greek writer Angelos Sikelianos (1884 – 1951)

“The major and almost only theme of all my work is the struggle of man with “God”:

The unyielding, inextinguishable struggle of the naked worm called “man” against the terrifying power and darkness of the forces within him and around him.“

Nikos Kazantzakis (1968) by Helen Kazantzakis

Kazantzakis married Galateia Alexiou in 1911.

Above: Galatia and Nikos Kazantzakis

Through the next several decades, from the 1910s through the 1930s, Kazantzakis traveled around Greece, much of Europe, northern Africa, and to several countries in Asia.

Countries he visited include:

• Germany

Above: Flag of Germany

• Italy

Above: Flag of Italy

• France

Above: Flag of France

• Netherlands

Above: Flag of the Netherlands

• Romania

Above: Flag of Romania

• Egypt

Above: Flag of Egypt

• Russia

Above: Flag of Russia

• Japan

Above: Flag of Japan

• China

Above: Flag of China

• among others.

These journeys put Kazantzakis in contact with different philosophies, ideologies, lifestyles, and people, all of which influenced him and his writings. 

Kazantzakis would often write about his influences in letters to friends, citing Sigmund Freud, the philosophy of Nietzsche, Buddhist theology, and Communist ideology as major influences.

Above: Austrian therapist Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)

Above: The Kamakura Daibutsu, a 13th-century bronze statue of the Buddha Amitābha in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan

Above: Hammer and sickle logo of Communism

While he continued to travel later in life, the bulk of his travel writing came from this time period.

Kazantzakis and Galateia divorced in 1926.

Kazantzakis met Eleni Samiou (Helen) in 1924. 

Above: Helen and Nikos Kazantzakis

“Having seen that I was not capable of using all my resources in political action, I returned to my literary activity.

There lay the the battlefield suited to my temperament.

I wanted to make my novels the extension of my own father’s struggle for liberty.

But gradually, as I kept deepening my responsibility as a writer, the human problem came to overshadow political and social questions. 

All the political, social, and economic improvements, all the technical progress cannot have any regenerating significance, so long as our inner life remains as it is at present.

The more the intelligence unveils and violates the secrets of Nature, the more the danger increases and the heart shrinks.“

Nikos Kazantzakis (1968) by Helen Kazantzakis

Kazantzakis began writing The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel in 1924, and completed it in 1938 after 14 years of writing and revision.

The poem follows the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus, as he undertakes a final journey after the end of the original poem.

Following the structure of Homer’s Odyssey, it is divided into 24 rhapsodies and consists of 33,333 lines. 

While Kazantzakis felt this poem held his cumulative wisdom and experience, and that it was his greatest literary experience, critics were split, “some praised it as an unprecedented epic, while many simply viewed it as a hybristic act“, with many scholars still being split to this day. 

A common criticism of The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel was aimed at Kazantzakis’s over-reliance on flowery and metaphorical verse, a criticism that is also aimed at his works of fiction.

“A person needs a little madness or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006), Larry Chang

The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel is an epic poem by Greek poet and philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis, based on Homer’s Odyssey. 

It is divided into 24 rhapsodies as is the original Odyssey and consists of 33,333 17-syllable verses.

Kazantzakis began working on it in 1924 after he returned to Crete from Germany.

Before finally publishing the poem in 1938 he had drafted seven different versions.

Kazantzakis considered this his most important work.

“You have your brush.

You have your colors.

You paint Paradise.

Then, in you go.“

Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 2, No. 2, Nikos Kazantzakis (1972)

Odysseus (Ulysses) returns to Ithaca and decides to undertake new adventures after he quickly becomes dissatisfied with his quiet family life and they too with his brutality.

Above: Vathy, Ithaca Island, Greece

First he travels to Sparta to save Helen, the wife of the king of Sparta Menelaus, whose abduction by Paris had led to the Trojan War.

Above: Bust of Helen of Troy

He goes to Crete where a conspiracy dethrones the King.

He is abandoned by Helen who runs off with a blonde barbarian and continues to Egypt, where again a workers’ uprising takes place.

He leaves again on a journey up the Nile eventually stopping at the lake-source.

Upon arrival his companions set up camp and he climbs the mountain in order to concentrate on his god.

Upon his return to the lake he sets up his city based on the commandments of his religion.

The city is soon destroyed by an earthquake.

Odysseus laments his failure to understand the true meaning of God with the sacrifice of his companions.

His life transforms into that of an ascetic.

Odysseus meets Motherth (an incarnation of the Buddha), Kapetán Énas (Captain Sole: “Captain One“: a Greek folk expression for people who are insubordinate and single-minded to a fault), alias Don Quixote, and an African village fisherman, alias Jesus.

Above: Buddha, Samath Museum, India

He travels further south in Africa while constantly spreading his religion and fighting the advances of death.

Above: (in green) Africa

Eventually he travels to Antarctica and lives with villagers for a year until an iceberg kills him.

Above: (in green) Antarctica

“We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. 

As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back.

We die in every moment.

Because of this many have cried out:

The goal of life is death!

But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life.

We are born in every moment.

Because of this many have cried out:

The goal of ephemeral life is immortality!

In the temporary living organism these two streams collide.

Both opposing forces are holy.

It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

His death is glorious as it marks his rebirth and unification with the world.

The Odyssey represents Kazantzakis’ ideology and metaphysical concerns.

A central theme is the importance of struggle for its own sake, as opposed to reaching a final goal.

“With clarity and quiet, I look upon the world and say:

All that I see, hear, taste, smell, and touch are the creations of my mind.

The sun comes up and the sun goes down in my skull.

Out of one of my temples the sun rises, and into the other the sun sets.

The stars shine in my brain.

Ideas, men, animals browse in my temporal head.

Songs and weeping fill the twisted shells of my ears and storm the air for a moment.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

Ascesis: The Saviors of God is a series of “spiritual exercises” written by Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis.

It was first written between 1922 and 1923, while staying in Vienna and Berlin, and subsequently published in 1927 in the Athenian magazine Anayennisi (Renaissance).

“I do not know whether behind appearances there lives and moves a secret essence superior to me.

Nor do I ask.

I do not care.

I create phenomena in swarms, and paint with a full palette a gigantic and gaudy curtain before the abyss. 

Do not say:

“Draw the curtain that I may see the painting.”

The curtain is the painting.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

The author first presents a prologue.

Given the sacred tone of the book, which strives to go beyond philosophy and metaphysics, this introduction is better understood as an admonition.

The first words summarize the undercurrent of The Saviors of God:

“We came from an abyss of darkness.

We end in an abyss of darkness:

The interval of light between one and another we name life.“

Kazantzakis thought that there are two streams in life:

The first one runs toward ascesis, synthesis, life and immortality, while the second one runs towards dissolution, matter, death.

However, both streams are part of the Universe, and being so, sacred.

“To SEE and accept the boundaries of the human mind without vain rebellion, and in these severe limitations to work ceaselessly without protest — this is where man’s first duty lies.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

One of Kazantzakis’ main concerns was what force drives the uncreated to the created.

As opposition seems to be intrinsic to life and infinite, human beings should strive to ascend to a harmonic view of these oppositions, to be a guide for thought and action.

“I subdue matter and force it to become my mind’s good medium.

I rejoice in plants, in animals, in man and in gods, as though they were my children.

I feel all the Universe nestling about me and following me as though it were my own body.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

According to Kimon Friar, the English translator of many of Kazantzakis’ writings, The Saviors of God occupies a central role in the work of the Greek author.

In the second part of his lengthy introduction to The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, Friar notes:

Just before Kazantzakis began to write the Odyssey, he completed a small book, perhaps best titled The Saviors of God and subtitled Spiritual Exercises, where in a passionate and poetic style, yet in systematic fashion, he set down the philosophy embedded not only in the Odyssey but in everything he has written, for he was a man of one overwhelming vision, striving to give it shape in all the forms he could master, in epic, drama, novel, travelogue, criticism, translation, and even political action.”

“I will not accept boundaries.

Appearances cannot contain me.

I choke!

To bleed in this agony, and to live it profoundly, is the second duty.

The mind is patient and adjusts itself.

It likes to play, but the heart grows savage and will not condescend to play.

It stifles and rushes to tear apart the nets of necessity.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

Kazantzakis and Eleni began a romantic relationship in 1928, though they were not married until 1945.

Samiou helped Kazantzakis with his work, typing drafts, accompanying him on his travels, and managing his business affairs. 

They were married until his death in 1957.

Samiou died in 2004.

Above: Helen and Nikos Kazantzakis

“Behind all appearances, I divine a struggling essence.

I want to merge with it.

I feel that behind appearances this struggling essence is also striving to merge with my heart.

But the body stands between us and separates us.

The mind stands between us and separates us.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

Many of Kazantzakis’s most famous novels were published between 1940 and 1961, including Zorba the Greek (1946), Christ Recrucified (1948), Captain Michalis (1953), The Last Temptation of Christ (1955), and Report to Greco (1961).

“Never acknowledge the limitations of man.

Smash all boundaries!

Deny whatever your eyes see.

Die every moment, but say:

“Death does not exist.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

Zorba the Greek is a novel written by Nikos Kazantzakis, first published in 1946.

It is the tale of a young Greek intellectual who ventures to escape his bookish life with the aid of the boisterous and mysterious Alexis Zorba.

“To cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into Paradise.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (1946)

The book opens in a café in Piraeus, just before dawn on a gusty autumn morning sometime after the end of World War I.

The narrator, a young Greek intellectual, resolves to set aside his books for a few months after being stung by the parting words of a friend, Stavridakis, who has left for the Russian Caucasus and Ukraine to help the Caucasus Greeks and Ukrainian Greeks who were facing persecution from the Bolsheviks.

He sets off for Crete to re-open a disused lignite mine, and immerse himself in the world of peasants and the proletariat.

“Two equally steep and bold paths may lead to the same peak. 

To act as if death did not exist, or to act thinking every minute of death, is perhaps the same thing.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (1946)

He is about to begin reading his copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy when he feels he is being watched.

He turns around and sees a man of around 60 peering at him through the glass door of the café.

The man enters and immediately approaches him to ask for work.

He claims expertise as a chef, a miner, and player of the santouri, and introduces himself as Alexis Zorba, a Greek born in Macedonia.

The narrator is fascinated by Zorba’s lascivious opinions and expressive manner and decides to employ him as a foreman.

“While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. 

Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it we do suddenly realize — sometimes with astonishment — how happy we had been.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (1946)

On their way to Crete, they talk on a great number of subjects, and Zorba’s soliloquies set the tone for a large part of the book.

On arrival, they reject the hospitality of Anagnostis and Kondomanolious the café-owner, and on Zorba’s suggestion make their way to Madame Hortense’s hotel, which is nothing more than a row of old bathing-huts.

They are forced by circumstances to share a bathing-hut.

The narrator spends Sunday roaming the island, the landscape of which reminds him of “good prose, carefully ordered, sober… powerful and restrained” and reads Dante.

On returning to the hotel for dinner, the pair invite Madame Hortense to their table and get her to talk about her past as a courtesan.

Zorba gives her the pet-name “Bouboulina” (likely inspired by the Greek heroine) while he takes the pet-name “Canavaro” (after real-life Admiral Canevaro, a past lover claimed by Hortense).

The next day, the mine opens and work begins.

“How simple and frugal a thing is happiness:

A glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea.

All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple frugal heart.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (1946)

The narrator, who has socialist ideals, attempts to get to know the workers, but Zorba warns him to keep his distance:

“Man is a brute.

If you’re cruel to him, he respects and fears you.

If you’re kind to him, he plucks your eyes out.”

Zorba himself plunges into the work, which is characteristic of his overall attitude, which is one of being absorbed in whatever he is doing or whomever he is with at any particular moment.

Quite frequently Zorba works long hours, and requests not to be interrupted while working.

“Every village has its simpleton, and if one does not exist they invent one to pass the time.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (1946)

The narrator and Zorba have a great many lengthy conversations, about a variety of things, from life to religion, each other’s past and how they came to be where they are now.

The narrator learns a great deal about the human condition from Zorba that he otherwise had not gleaned from his life of books and paper.

“As I watched the seagulls, I thought:

“That’s the road to take.

Find the absolute rhythm and follow it with absolute trust.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (1946)

The narrator absorbs a new zest for life from his experiences with Zorba and the other people around him, but reversal and tragedy mark his stay on Crete.

His one-night stand with a beautiful passionate widow is followed by her public decapitation.

Alienated by the villagers’ harshness and amorality, and having spent all of his remaining funds on a mining-related construction project that ends in a spectacular collapse, the narrator finds himself beset by doubts and uncertainty.

“In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (1946)

Having overcome one of his own demons (such as his internal “no“, which the narrator equates with the Buddha, whose teachings he has been studying and about whom he has been writing for much of the narrative, and who he also equates with “the void“).

“The highest point a man can obtain is not knowledge or virtue, or goodness or victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing:

Sacred awe!“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (1946)

Feeling he is needed elsewhere (near the end of the novel, the narrator has a premonition of the death of his old friend Stavridakis), the narrator takes his leave of Zorba for the mainland, which, despite the lack of any major outward burst of emotionality, is significantly wrenching for both Zorba and the narrator.

It almost goes without saying that the two friends will remember each other for the duration of their natural lives.

The narrator and Zorba never see each other again, although Zorba sends the narrator letters over the years, informing him of his travels and work, and his marriage to a 25-year-old woman.

Despite Zorba’s many invitations to visit, the narrator does not accept.

Eventually the narrator receives a letter from Zorba’s wife, informing him of Zorba’s death (which the narrator had a premonition of).

Zorba’s widow tells the narrator that Zorba’s last words were of him.

In accordance with her dead husband’s wishes, she wants the narrator to visit her home and take Zorba’s santouri.

Alexis Zorba is a fictionalized version of the mine worker George Zorbas (1867 – 1941).

Above: Grave of Georgios Zorbas (1865 – 1941)

“What a strange machine man is!

You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter and dreams.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (1946)

Christ Recrucified concerns the attempts of a fictional Greek village community deep in Anatolia in 1921 to stage a Passion Play – which, as the title suggests, ends up with their in effect re-enacting the events of Jesus Christ’s trial, suffering and death.

“This is the Supreme Duty of the man who struggles — to set out for the lofty peak which Christ, the first-born sone of salvation, attained. 

How can we begin?

If we are to follow him we must have a profound knowledge of his conflict, we must relive his anguish:

His victory over the blossoming snares of the Earth, his sacrifice of the great and small joys of men and his ascent from sacrifice to sacrifice, exploit to exploit, to martyrdom’s summit, the Cross.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955)

The name of the village is Lycovrisi (Wolf-spring), under Ottoman rule.

The village holds Passion Plays every seven years and the elders of the village choose the actors from among the villagers.

“I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles.

I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation or death — because all three can be conquered, all three have already been conquered.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955)

Manolios, who is chosen to play the role of Christ, is a humble shepherd boy who was once a novice in a monastery.

“A book is not a biography.

It is the confession of every man who struggles. 

In publishing it I have fulfilled my duty, the duty of a person who struggled much, was embittered in his life, and had many hopes.

I am certain that every free man who reads this book, so filled as it is with love, will more than ever before, love Christ.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955)

Yannakkos becomes Apostle Peter.

He is a merchant-peddler who travels with his donkey through the villages and sells his items.

He is warm-hearted, naïve and loves his donkey above all else.

“I possess no weapon but love.

With that I have come to do battle.

Help me!“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955)

Michelis, the son of the wealthy nobleman old Patriarcheas, becomes Apostle John.

“The doors of Heaven and Hell are adjacent and identical.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955)

Kostandis, the owner of the village café, is Apostle James the Great.

He is good-hearted, willing to share, but confused.

“If you love me, be patient.

Look at the trees.

Are they in a hurry to ripen their fruit?“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955)

Then comes Panayotaros, who is chosen to be Judas.

He is a wild, passionate man, waiting for revenge.

“There’s a devil inside me which cries:

“You are not the son of the Carpenter.

You’re the son of King David!

You are not a man.

You are the Son of man whom Daniel prophesied.”

And still more:

“The Son of God!”

And still more:

God!”

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955)

The widow Katerina is Mary Magdalene.

She is the village’s prostitute.

She is beautiful, but of course an outsider in the village, not caring about anybody’s opinion.

But she is the most generous one and in the end gives her life for what she believes in.

“I said only one word, brought only one message:

Love.

Love — nothing else.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955)

Then the Elders of Lycovrissi are introduced.

There is the Priest Grigoris — a domineering man who bends God’s will to his own. 

“Outside the wind of Jehovah still beat on the door, trying to enter.

There was no other sound.

Not a jackal on the Earth nor a crow in the air.

Every living thing cowered in fear, waiting for the Lord’s anger to pass.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955)

Archon Patriarcheas is the leader of the village.

He only lives for his own pleasure.

“I strive to discover how to signal my companions before I die, how to give them a hand, how to spell out for them in time one complete word at least, to tell them what I think this procession is, and toward what we go.

And how necessary it is for all of us together to put our steps and hearts in harmony.

To say in time a simple word to my companions, a password, like conspirators.

Yes, the purpose of Earth is not life.

It is not man.

Earth has existed without these and it will live on without them.

They are but the ephemeral sparks of its violent whirling.

Let us unite.

Let us hold each other tightly.

Let us merge our hearts.

Let us create.

So long as the warmth of this Earth endures, so long as no earthquakes, cataclysms, icebergs or comets come to destroy us, let us create for Earth a brain and a heart.

Let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

Old Ladas is a miser who is obsessed with his money, but lives in poverty so that he doesn’t have to spend any of it.

“The moment is ripe:

Leave the heart and the mind behind you.

Go forward.

Take the next step.

Free yourself from the simple complacency of the mind that thinks to put all things in order and hopes to subdue phenomena.

Free yourself from the terror of the heart that seeks and hopes to find the essence of things.

Conquer the last, the greatest temptation of all:

Hope.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

Hadji Nikolis is the schoolmaster, who means well but is ineffectual, haunted by fear of his brother the priest.

“Nothing exists!

Neither life nor death.

I watch mind and matter hunting each other like two nonexistent erotic phantasms — merging, begetting, disappearing — and I say:

“This is what I want!”

I know now: 

I do not hope for anything.

I do not fear anything,

I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart.

I have mounted much higher.

I am free. 

This is what I want.

I want nothing more.

I have been seeking freedom.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

The whole story is made colorful by the Turkish household consisting of the Agha, the Lord of Lycovrissi.

He lives surrounded by Oriental splendor, drinks himself crazy and enjoys rakı and pretty boys.

He is guarded by Hussein, a giant Oriental who does everything his master asks of him.

Above: Flag of Türkiye

“I hold the brimming wineglass and relive the toils of my grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

The sweat of my labor runs down like a fountain from my tall, intoxicated brow.

I am a sack filled with meat and bones, blood, sweat and tears, desires and visions.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

Another character is the Priest Fotis.

He comes to the village with a whole group of starved villagers from a devastated village which has been overrun by the Turks.

They are looking for shelter in Lycovrissi.

Denied this by the priest Grigoris, the refugees retire to the barren slopes of the nearby mountain Sarakina, where they continue to starve.

“Where are we going?

Do not ask!

Ascend, descend.

There is no beginning and no end. 

Only this present moment exists, full of bitterness, full of sweetness, and I rejoice in it all.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

The villagers, simple, earnest people who are fond of Manolios (who is to play Christ) Yannakos (Apostle Peter), Michelis (Apostle John) etc., are indoctrinated by the elders.

“Gather your strength and listen.

The whole heart of man is a single outcry. 

Lean against your breast to hear it.

Someone is struggling and shouting within you.

It is your duty every moment, day and night, in joy or in sorrow, amid all daily necessities, to discern this.

Cry with vehemence or restraint, according to your nature, with laughter or with weeping, in action or in thought, striving to find out who is imperiled and cries out.

And how we may all be mobilized together to free him.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

The main factor is a real saintly priest, Father Fotis who comes to the village to ask for help with hundreds of hungry and dying people and who is turned away from the village and finds a refuge on the barren mountain.

There he tries to survive with the help of Manolios, Yannakos, Michelis and Konstandis.

“I surrender myself to everything.

I love.

I feel pain.

I struggle.

The world seems to me wider than the mind, my heart a dark and almighty mystery.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

Father Grigoris is afraid to lose his power over the villagers and starts a hate campaign first against the priest and his people and then against the rest of the group.

“I am not alone in my fear, nor alone in my hope, nor alone in my shouting. 

A tremendous host, an onrush of the Universe fears, hopes and shouts with me.

I am an improvised bridge.

When Someone passes over me, I crumble away behind Him.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

At one point Manolios offers his life to save the village, but in the last minute he is saved.

“Love responsibility.

Say:

“It is my duty, and mine alone, to save the Earth.

If it is not saved, then I alone am to blame.”

Love each man according to his contribution in the struggle.

Do not seek friends.

Seek comrades-in-arms.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

The venom of the village elders appalls even the Agha, but he is too comfortable and too afraid to lose his power to do anything.

“Amidst our greatest happiness someone within us cries out:

“I am in pain!

I want to escape your happiness!

I am stifling!”

Amidst our deepest despair someone within us cries out:

“I do not despair!

I fight on!

I grasp at your head.

I unsheathe myself from your body,

I detach myself from the Earth. 

I cannot be contained in brains, in names, in deeds!“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

Manolios loses his shepherding job and lives up on the hill praying to God and following His voice.

Michelis gives up his riches and comes to live with Manolios.

“Which of the two eternal roads shall I choose?

Suddenly I know that my whole life hangs on this decision — the life of the entire Universe.

Of the two, I choose the ascending path. 

Why?

For no intelligible reason, without any certainty.

I know how ineffectual the mind and all the small certainties of man can be in this moment of crisis.

I choose the ascending path because my heart drives me toward it. 

“Upward! Upward! Upward!”, my heart shouts.

I follow it trustingly.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

One main character, Panayotaros (Apostle Judas), doesn’t really change in character, but he becomes very dangerous and a real Judas.

He doesn’t care for his life anymore after widow Katerina dies, for whom he has a crazy desire.

He is the one who spies on the people up on the mountain and on Michelis and Manolios and reports to Father Grigoris, one of the main villains.

“I am NOT nothing! 

A vaporous phosphorescence on a damp meadow, a miserable worm that crawls and loves, that shouts and talks about wings for an hour or two until his mouth is blocked with earth.

The dark powers give no other answer.

But within me a deathless cry, superior to me, continues to shout.

For whether I want to or not, I am also, without doubt, a part of the visible and the invisible Universe.

We are one.”

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

In the end, Father Grigoris assembles the villagers in the church, where he instructs Panayotaros to stab Manolios to death in front of the mob of baying villagers:

“For an instant Manolios’s heart failed him, he turned to the door.

It was closed.

He looked at the three lit lamps and, under them, the icons loaded with ex-votos:

• Christ, red-cheeked, with carefully combed hair, was smiling
• the Virgin Mary, bending over the child was taking no interest in what was happening under her eyes.
• Saint John the Baptist was preaching in the desert.

He raised his eyes toward the vault of the church and made out in the half-light the face of the Almighty, bending pitilessly over mankind.

He looked at the crowd about him.

It was as if in the darkness he saw the gleam of daggers.

The strident voice of old Ladas squeaked once more:

“Let’s kill him!”

At the same moment, violent blows were struck upon the door.

All fell silent and turned toward the entrance.

Furious voices could be heard distinctly:

“Open! Open!”

“That’s the voice of Father Fotis!”, someone cried.

“Yannakos’s voice,” said another.

“The Sarakini have come to take him from us!”

The door was shaken violently, its hinges creaked.

There could be heard a great tumult of men and women outside.

“Open, murderers! Have you no fear of God?” came the voice of Father Fotis, distinctly.

Priest Grigoris raised his hands.

“In the name of Christ,” he cried.

“ I take the sin upon me!

Do it, Panayotaros.”

Panayotaros drew the dagger and turned to Father Grigoris.

“With your blessing, Father!” he asked.

“With my blessing, strike!”

Nikos Kazantzakis, Christ Recrucified (1948)

Priest Fotis and his people bring the dead body of Manolios to the mountain.

He kneels next to him and holds his hands.

“Toward midnight the bell began ringing, calling the Christians to the church to see Christ born.

One by one the doors opened and the Christians hastened toward the church, shivering with cold.

The night was calm, icy, starless.

Priest Fotis listened to the bell pealing gaily, announcing that Christ was coming down on earth to save the world.

He shook his head and heaved a sigh:

“In vain, my Christ, in vain”, he muttered.

“Two thousand years have gone by and men crucify You still.

When will You be born, my Christ, and not be crucified any more, but live among us for eternity?”

Nikos Kazantzakis, Christ Recrucified (1948)

Captain Michalis is a 1953 novel, also known as Freedom or Death.

The writer was influenced by his early years on the island of Crete and uses explicit Cretan Greek words and the Cretan idiom in a way that preserves it untouched.

It is one of the most widely read books of modern Greek literature which has been translated and published in several languages.

“It is not you talking, but innumerable ancestors talking with your mouth.

It is not you who desire, but innumerable generations of descendants longing with your heart.

Your dead do not lie in the ground.

They have become birds, trees, air.

You sit under their shade.

You are nourished by their flesh.

You inhale their breathing.

They have become ideas and passions.

They determine your will and your actions.

Future generations do not move far from you in an uncertain time.

They live, desire and act in your loins and your heart.

In this lightning moment when you walk the Earth, your first duty, by enlarging your ego, is to live through the endless march, both visible and invisible, of your own being.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

The story is set during the Cretan Revolution of 1889.

The protagonist, Captain Michalis, a fierce and indomitable warrior, has sworn to be black-clad, unshaven and unsmiling until Crete is liberated.

But when he meets Emine, the wife of his blood brother, Nuri Bey, he is possessed by “a demon” that despite his efforts, he cannot get out of his mind.

Above: Cretan insurrectionaries

“You are not free.

Myriad invisible hands hold your hands and direct them. 

When you rise in anger, a great-grandfather froths at your mouth.

When you make love, an ancestral caveman growls with lust.

When you sleep, tombs open in your memory till your skull brims with ghosts.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

While Captain Michalis fights his demon, Nuri Bey duels Manousakas, a brother of Captain Michalis, to avenge the death of his father, who was killed by their brother Costaros years ago, and kills him.

Himself, however, is injured at his genitals.

His wound heals, but the damage is irreversible.

He kills himself, unable to bear the scorn and pity of Emine (who has meanwhile become Captain Polixigis’ lover) for his impotence.

“Do not die that we may not die,” the dead cry out within you. 

“We had no time to enjoy the women we desired.

Be in time.

Sleep with them!

We had no time to turn our thoughts into deeds.

Turn them into deeds!

We had no time to grasp and to crystallize the face of our hope.

Make it firm!”

But you must choose with care whom to hurl down again into the chasms of your blood, and whom you shall permit to mount once more into the light and the Earth.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

The news of his death adds to the already tense atmosphere in Megalo Kastro, where daily reports of skirmishes and riots between Greeks and Turks arrive throughout the island.

At the instigation of the aghas, Turkish soldiers pour into the streets of the city, slaughtering and burning.

A few days later, the Revolution breaks out.

“Enlighten the dark blood of your ancestors.

Shape their cries into speech.

Purify their will.

Widen their narrow, unmerciful brows. 

This is your duty.

For you are not only a slave.

As soon as you were born, a new possibility was born with you, a free heartbeat stormed through the great sunless heart of your race.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

War is raging.

The Turks are besieging the monastery of Afentis Christos.

At the same time, Emine is preparing to be baptized a Christian and marry Polixigis.

But Nuri Bey’s family kidnaps her.

Captain Michalis, on the most critical night of the siege, leaves the monastery to save her.

He succeeds and sends her to an aunt’s house.

“Everything you do reverberates throughout a thousand destinies. 

As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

In his absence, however, the Turks manage to set fire to the monastery.

Captain Michalis kills Emine to calm down and get rid of his regrets about the monastery.

“The centuries are thick, dark waves that rise and fall, steeped in blood.

Every moment is a gaping abyss.

Gaze on the dark sea without staggering.

Confront the abyss every moment without illusion or impudence or fear.

But this is not enough.

Take a further step:

Battle to give meaning to the confused struggles of man.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

A little later, Kosmas, son of Costaros and nephew of Captain Michalis, arrives in Crete, bringing the message of capitulation to the rebels.

One after another, the captains lay down their arms, but Captain Michalis refuses to submit.

Kosmas goes to his lair to convince him to hand over his weapons, but in the end he stays as well, as Crete and his father Costaros wake up inside him.

In the heat of the battle, he understands that Captain Michalis has now been freed from all fear and hope.

Soon, uncle and nephew fall dead in the last raid of the Turks.

“Amid all these things, beyond all these things every man and nation, every plant and animal, every god and demon, charges upward like an army inflamed by an incomprehensible, unconquerable Spirit.

We struggle to make this Spirit visible, to give it a face, to encase it in words, in allegories and thoughts and incantations, that it may not escape us.

But it cannot be contained in the twenty-six letters of an alphabet which we string out in rows.

We know that all these words, these allegories, these thoughts, and these incantations are, once more, but a new mask with which to conceal the Abyss.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923)

The Last Temptation of Christ is a historical novel which depicts the life of Jesus and his struggles with various forms of temptation, including fear, doubt, depression, reluctance, and lust.

Upon its publication, the book was condemned by the Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church.

It has since been challenged by numerous Christian groups and conservative organizations.

“My entire soul is a cry, and all my work the commentary on that cry.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (1961)

The novel opens with Jesus in the desert, wrestling with his divine calling and the knowledge of his imminent death.

Throughout the book, Jesus grapples with his human desires and the temptation to lead a normal life, away from the suffering and sacrifice that he knows awaits him.

Despite his reservations, Jesus decides to follow through with his mission, ultimately leading to his arrest, trial and crucifixion.

“Every man worthy of being called a son of man bears his cross and mounts his Golgotha. 

Many, indeed most, reach the first or second step, collapse pantingly in the middle of the journey, and do not attain the summit of Golgotha, in other words the summit of their duty:

To be crucified, resurrected, and to save theirs souls.

Afraid of crucifixion, they grow fainthearted.

They do not know that the cross is the only path to resurrection.

There is no other path.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (1961)

However, the climax of the novel takes a different turn as Jesus is shown dying on the cross, only to awaken in a vision of a world where he did not die and instead lived a long, normal life with Mary Magdalene as his wife after choosing to abandon his calling.

In this world, Jesus experiences love, pain, and suffering just as any other human being would.

As he lives out his life in this alternate world, Jesus begins to question whether or not his divine mission was worth all of the suffering that he went through.

Eventually, he realizes that though he would have been content with living as a normal man, his death is rendered meaningless, and his teachings forgotten.

Accepting that his destiny is to sacrifice himself for the sake of humanity, Jesus willingly returns to his fate as the son of God.

The novel concludes with Jesus ascending to Heaven, leaving behind a legacy of love, sacrifice, and redemption.

“Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality,” says one of my favorite Byzantine mystics.

I did this when a child.

I do it now as well in the most creative moments of my life.”

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (1961)

Kazantzakis argues in the novel’s preface that by facing and conquering all of man’s weaknesses, Jesus struggled to do God’s will without ever giving in to the temptations of the flesh.

The novel advances the argument that, had Jesus succumbed to any such temptation, especially the opportunity to save himself from the cross, his life would have held no more significance than that of any other philosopher.

“General, the battle draws to a close and I make my report.

This is where and how I fought.

I fell wounded, lost heart, but did not desert.

Though my teeth clattered from fear, I bound my forehead tightly with a red handkerchief to hide the blood, and ran to the assault.

Before you shall pluck out the precious feathers of my jackdaw soul, one by one, until it remains a tiny clod of earth kneaded with blood, sweat, and tears, I shall relate my struggle to you — in order to unburden myself.

I shall cast off virtue, shame and truth — in order to unburden myself.

My soul resembles your creation “Toledo in the Storm”, girded by yellow thunderbolts and oppressive black clouds, fighting a desperate, unbending battle against both light and darkness.

You will see my soul, will weigh it between your lanceolate eyebrows, and will judge.

Do you remember the grave Cretan saying, “Return where you have failed, leave where you have succeeded”?

If I failed, I shall return to the assault though but a single hour of life remains to me.

If I succeeded, I shall open the earth so that I may come and recline at your side.

Listen, therefore, to my report, General, and judge.

Listen to my life, Grandfather, and if I fought with you, if I fell wounded and allowed no one to learn of my suffering, if I never turned my back to the enemy:

Give me your blessing!”

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (1961)

The critic I. A. Richards has stated that Kazantzakis’ novel tries to reclaim the values of early Christianity, such as love, brotherhood, humility and self-renunciation. 

“I felt that human partitions — bodies, brains, and souls — were capable of being demolished, and that humanity might return again, after frightfully bloody wandering, to its primeval, divine oneness. 

In this condition, there is no such thing as “me”, “you”, and “he”. 

Everything is a unity and this unity is a profound mystic intoxication in which death loses its scythe and ceases to exist. 

Separately, we die one by one, but all together we are immortal.

Like prodigal sons, after so much hunger, thirst, and rebellion, we spread our arms and embrace our two parents:

Heaven and Earth.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (1961)

According to the book’s English translator, Peter A. Bien, the psychology in The Last Temptation is based on the idea that every person, Jesus included, is evil by nature as well as good, violent and hateful as well as loving.

A psychologically sound individual does not ignore or bury the evil within him.

Instead, he channels it into the service of good.

“How difficult, how extremely difficult for the soul to sever itself from its body the world:

From mountains, seas, cities, people.

The soul is an octopus and these are its tentacles.

No force anywhere on Earth is as imperialistic as the human soul.

It occupies and is occupied in turn, but it always considers its empire too narrow.

Suffocating, it desires to conquer the world in order to breathe freely.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (1961)

Martin Scorsese, director of the 1988 film adaptation, formulated that Kazantzakis didn’t doubt the divine nature of Jesus, noting:

“The beauty of Kazantzakis’ concept is that Jesus has to put up with everything we go through, all the doubts and fears and anger.

He made me feel like he’s sinning — but he’s not sinning, he’s just human.

As well as divine.

And he has to deal with all this double, triple guilt on the cross.“

In February 1955, the Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church in Athens attempted to have all of Kazantzakis’ books banned in Greece, arguing that: 

The Last Temptation of Christ “contains evil slanders against the Godlike person of Jesus Christ, derived from the inspiration of the theories of Freud and historical materialism, this book perverts and hurts the Gospel discernment and the God-man figure of our Lord Jesus Christ in a way coarse, vulgar, and blasphemous.” 

A campaign was also started in the Greek Orthodox Church to excommunicate Kazantzakis, which ultimately failed, but he was denied normal funeral rites upon his death.

“You gave me your curse, holy Fathers.

I give you a blessing:

May you be as moral and religious as I am.“

God’s Struggler: Religion in the Writings of Nikos Kazantzakis (1996) by Darren J. N. Middleton and Peter Bien

In 1963, a Roman Catholic priest in Ashland, Wisconsin, forbade one of his parishioners from returning a library copy of The Last Temptation of Christ, arguing:

“That it would be a mortal sin to make it available to others.” 

“As long as our souls remain strong, that is all that matters.

As long as they don’t decline.

Because with the fall of certain souls in this world, the world itself will collapse.

These are the pillars which support it.

They are few, but enough.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (1961)

In 1964, a conservative group called the Citizens Group for Clean Books demanded that the novel be removed from public libraries in Arcadia, California, on the basis that it was “blasphemous, obscene and defamatory“.

As a result, the book was made “available on a limited basis to persons over the age of 18“.

The book was banned in Singapore in 1988.

Above: Flag of Singapore

“I hope for nothing.

I fear nothing.

I am free.“

Nikos Kazantzakis, Epitaph

Above: Epitaph on the grave of Kazantzakis in Heraklion.

It reads: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.“

The director Sidney Lumet acquired the film rights to Kazantzakis’ novel, describing it as the story “of how a man pushes himself to extremes he never knew he was capable of“, with Judas emerging “as a strong man, a sort of hero“.

Above: US film director Sidney Lumet (1924 – 2011)

Lumet commissioned a screenplay written by Lazarre Seymour Simckes and announced his plans to shoot the film in the fall of 1971, though the project did not come to fruition. 

Above: US psychotherapist/writer Lazarre Seymour Simckes

After many delays, a film version directed by Martin Scorsese was released in 1988, starring Willem Dafoe as Jesus, Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene, and Harvey Keitel as Judas Iscariot.

Above: US film director Martin Scorese

“You think God belongs only to you?

He doesn’t.

God is an immortal spirit who belongs to everybody, to the whole world.

You think you’re special?

God is not an Israelite.“

Willem Dafoe, The Last Temptation of Christ

A drama based on The Last Temptation of Christ, named Christuvinte Aaram Thirumurivu (‘The Sixth Holy Wound of Christ‘), written by P. M. Antony and depicting Jesus as a mere good-hearted man instead of the Son of God, was staged in India’s state of Kerala.

On 10 August 1986, the play debuted in Alappuzha. 

It was performed about 42 times, but the Church had taken offence, and at every performance, demonstrations including premeditated violence against the play and the playwright were instigated. 

The police even confiscated the script.

The state went on to ban the play, and courts did not overturn the ban.

Antony went on to publish the play in print in the Malayalam language.

Eventually he was arrested and punished on unrelated charges.

“If I was a woodcutter, I’d cut.

If I was a fire, I’d burn.

But I’m a heart and I love.

That’s the only thing I can do.“

Willem Dafoe, The Last Temptation of Christ

Above: Willem Dafoe, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

The American singer-songwriter Judee Sill referred to Kazantzakis as her favorite writer.

Above: American musician Judee Sill (1944 – 1979)

Her 1971 song “Jesus Was a Cross Maker” was inspired by the depiction of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ.

Sweet silver angels over the sea
Please, come down flyin’ low for me

One time, I trusted a stranger
‘Cause I heard his sweet song
And it was gently enticin’ me
Tho’ there was somethingth’ wrong
But, when I turned, he was gone

Blindin’ me, his song remains remindin’ me
He’s a bandit and a heart breaker
Oh, but Jesus was a cross maker

Sweet silver angels over the sea
Please, come down flyin’ low for me

He wages war with the devil
A pistol by his side
And tho’ he chases him out windows
And won’t give him a place to hide
He keeps his door open wide

Fightin’ him, he lights a lamp inviting him
He’s a bandit and a heart breaker
Oh, but Jesus was a cross maker

Sweet silver angels over the sea
Please come down flyin’ low for me

I hear the thunder come rumblin’
The light never looked so dim
I see the junction git closer
And danger is in the wind
And either road’s lookin’ grim

Hidin’ me, I flee, desire dividin’ me
He’s a bandit and a heart breaker
Oh, but Jesus was a cross maker
Yes, Jesus was a cross maker

Sweet silver angels over the sea
Please, come down flyin’ low for me

One time I trusted a stranger
‘Cause I heard his sweet song
And it was gently enticin’ me
Tho’ there was somethingthin’ wrong
But, when I turned, he was gone

Blindin’ me, his song remains remindin’ me
He’s a bandit and a heart breaker
Oh, but Jesus was a cross maker
Yes, Jesus was a cross maker
Oh, but Jesus was a cross maker
Yes, Jesus was a cross maker
Oh, but Jesus was a cross maker
Yes, Jesus was a cross maker
Oh, but Jesus was a cross maker
Yes, Jesus was a cross maker
Oh, but Jesus was a cross maker
Yes, Jesus was a cross maker
Oh, but Jesus was a cross maker
Yes, Jesus was a cross maker

In a 1988 private concert filmed at a Holiday Inn in Houston, American country singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt cited The Last Temptation of Christ as the inspiration behind his 1970 song “Nothin“.

Van Zandt claimed to have written the lyrics the same night he finished reading the book, acknowledging “the big controversy goin’ on” surrounding Kazantzakis’ work at the time.

Above: American musician Townes Van Zandt (1944 – 1997)

Hey mama, when you leave
Don’t leave a thing behind
I don’t want nothin’
I can’t use nothin’

Take care into the hall
And if you see my friends
Tell them I’m fine
Not using nothin’

Almost burned out my eyes
Threw my ears down to the floor
I didn’t see nothin’
I didn’t hear nothin’

I stood there like a block of stone
Knowin’ all I had to know
And nothin’ more
Man, that’s nothin’

As brothers our troubles are
Locked in each others arms
And you better pray
They never find you

Your back ain’t strong enough
For burdens doublefold
They’d crush you down
Down into nothin’

Being born is going blind
And buying down a thousand times
To echoes strung
On pure temptation

Sorrow and solitude
These are the precious things
And the only words
That are worth rememberin’

The Simpsons titled a Season 9 episode “The Last Temptation of Krust” as a play on the book title.

The Flash Season 6 Episodes 7 and 8 find Barry Allen tempted to give in to the villain, Ramsey Rosso, with the promise that Barry won’t die from the coming “Crisis” that would destroy Earth.

Barry faces a series of temptations and scenarios similar to the book The Last Temptation of Christ.

Between 1922 and his death in 1957, Kazantzakis sojourned in:

• Paris and Berlin (1922 – 1924) 

Above: Paris, France

Above: Berlin, Germany

• Italy

Above: Emblem of Italy

• Russia (1925)

Above: Coat of arms of Russia

• Spain (1932) 

Above: Flag of Spain

• Cyprus

Above: Flag of Cyprus

• Aegina

Above: Aegina Island, Greece

• Egypt

Above: Coat of arms of Egypt

• Mount Sinai

Above: Mount Sinai, Egypt

• Czechoslovakia 

Above: Flag of the Czech Republic

• Nice 

Above: Nice, France

• He later bought a villa in nearby Antibes, in the Old Town section near the famed seawall

Above: Antibes, France

• China

Above: Emblem of China

• Japan

Above: Imperial seal of Japan

While in Berlin, where the political situation was explosive, Kazantzakis discovered Communism and became an admirer of Vladimir Lenin.

Above: Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (1870 – 1924)

Throughout his life, Kazantzakis reiterated his belief that “only socialism as the goal and democracy as the means” could provide an equitable solution to the “frightfully urgent problems of the age in which we are living“. 

He saw the need for socialist parties throughout the world to put aside their bickering and unite so that the program of “socialist democracy” could prevail not just in Greece but throughout the civilized world. 

He described socialism as a social system that “does not permit the exploitation of one person by another” and that “must guarantee every freedom“.

He never became a committed Communist, but visited the Soviet Union and stayed with the Left Opposition politician and writer Victor Serge.

Above: Flag of the Soviet Union (1922 – 1991)

Above: Russian writer Victor Serge (1890 – 1947)

He witnessed the rise of Joseph Stalin and became disillusioned with Soviet-style Communism.

Above: Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1878 – 1953)

Around this time, his earlier nationalist beliefs were gradually replaced by a more universalist ideology.

As a journalist, in 1926 he interviewed the Prime Minister of Spain Miguel Primo de Rivera and the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Above: Spanish dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera (1870 – 1930)

Above: Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883 – 1945)

During WWII, he was in Athens, where he and the philologist Ioannis Kakridis translated the Iliad.

Above: Greek philologist Ioannis Kakridis (1901 – 1992)

In 1945, he became the leader of a small party on the non-Communist left, and entered the Greek government as Minister without Portfolio.

He resigned this post the following year.

Above: Coat of arms of Greece

In 1946, Kazantzakis became the head of the UNESCO Bureau of Translations, the organization which promoted translations of literary works.

However, he resigned in 1947 to concentrate on writing, and indeed produced most of his literary output during the last ten years of his life.

Above: Flag of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

In 1946, the Society of Greek Writers recommended that Kazantzakis and Angelos Sikelianos be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Above: Greek writer Angelos Sikelianos (1884 – 1951)

In 1957, he lost the Prize to Albert Camus by a single vote.

Camus later said that Kazantzakis deserved the honor “a hundred times more” than himself. 

Above: French writer/philosopher Albert Camus (1913 – 1960)

In total, Kazantzakis was nominated in nine different years.

Late in 1957, even though suffering from leukemia, Kazantzakis set out on one last trip to China and Japan.

According to one theory, while in China Kazantzakis had to be vaccinated, possibly due to symptoms of smallpox and cholera.

Above: (in green) China

The vaccine, however, caused him gangrene and at the expense of the Chinese government he was transported first to Copenhagen and then to Freiburg.

Above: Copenhagen, Denmark

His gangrene was cured, but he had contracted a severe form of Asian flu in China, which eventually led to his death.

Kazantzakis died on 26 October 1957 in Freiburg, Germany, at age 74.

Above: Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

He is buried at the highest point of the Walls of Heraklion, the Martinengo Bastion, looking out over the mountains and Sea of Crete.

His epitaph reads:

“I hope for nothing.

I fear nothing.

I am free.”

Above: Grave of Nikos Kazantzakis, Heraklion, Crete, Greece

Kazantzakis developed this famously pithy phrasing of the philosophical ideal of cynicism, which dates back to at least the 2nd century .

The 50th anniversary of the death of Nikos Kazantzakis was selected as the main motif for a high-value euro collectors’ coin; the €10 Greek Nikos Kazantzakis commemorative coin, minted in 2007.

His image is on the obverse of the coin, while the reverse carries the National Emblem of Greece, with his signature.

Nikos Kazantzakis sought understanding through a synthesis of intuition, personal experience, and rational thought.

His life and literature reflect a tireless quest to reconcile spirituality, philosophy, and the raw realities of existence.

For him, truth could not be learned solely through institutions.

It had to be lived.

Above: Bust of Nikos Kazantzakis, Heraklion, Crete, Greece

Leading writers, literary critics and general readers have proclaimed Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be the great American novel.

The accolades continue.

Admiring readers recall when they first read the novel or had it read to them when they were children and that they were delighted and enthralled by its action and suspense.

Returning to it in childhood, most are surprised to find that it is no longer the same book at all.

The child’s adventure story has been revealed to be a tale that explores serious issues regarding social, political and moral problems.

Disguised behind the children’s tale of escape and freedom is a second story – an allegory of a nation’s lost innocence and the precarious fate of the democratic experiment that is the United States.

Astonishing in its power to provoke and challenge, Huckleberry Finn evokes a range of contradictory responses to the social and cultural situation of America, past and present:

• the hopes and disappointments
• the confidence and dread
• the humor and the violence
• the expectations and bitter frustrations and the resulting anger
• the dreams and desires of millions of young Americans and new immigrants of every generation since the signing of the Constitution.

For many, the narrative of Huck and Jim is about the eternal yearnings of the young and the oppressed for freedom.

It tells of a poor white boy running away from a brutal parent and of an intelligent black man attempting to escape from bondage and free his family from slavery.

It shows how these two very different individuals overcome their differences to form bonds of brotherhood and loyalty.

Joined by their determination to survive the ignorance, prejudice and inhumanity of those who see them as less than human because of class, age and color, they discover in each other the shared qualities of hope, courage and moral character.

For other readers Huckleberry Finn is a tale so disturbing in its plot and so repulsive in some of its language that the positive meanings it may aspire to cannot redeem its negative effects.

In 1885 the book was removed from the shelves of the library of Concord, Massachusetts.

Above: Main Street, Concord, Massachusetts, USA

Today it is the most frequently challenged and censored book in American schools.

Literary critics have also been divided over the artistic merits of the work.

Many call it America’s greatest classic, but others fault it for a variety of narrative flaws.

How can this seemingly simple story be at once the most frequently bought, read and internationally recognized American book, and at the same time the most problematic?

Above: Flag of the United States of America

This brain-teasing paradox would probably have amused Samuel Clemens.

Clemens gave us fair warning that we would not have an easy time with this book when he had his alter ego Mark Twain the “author” insert this “Notice” in the text just before the story opens:

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted.

Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished.

Persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.“

While most dismiss this comic statement as just another dash of Twain’s humor, it is shrewdly prophetic in the way that it indicates the issues around which the controversies would arise, for it draws the critics’ attention to exactly those areas which Clemens wanted them to examine most thoughtfully:

• his reasons for writing the book (motive)
• the actions of the characters and their consequences (plot)
• the potential applications of the narrative to important issues in our own lives and times (moral).

Above: US writer Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) (1835 – 1910)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a picaresque novel by American author Mark Twain that was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States on 18 February 1885.

Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism.

It is told in the first person by Huckleberry “Huck” Finn, the narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective) and a friend of Tom Sawyer.

It is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.

That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.

There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.“

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The book is noted for “changing the course of children’s literature” in the United States for the “deeply felt portrayal of boyhood“. 

It is also known for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River.

Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist over 20 years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.

Perennially popular with readers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has also been the continued object of study by literary critics since its publication.

The book was widely criticized upon release because of its extensive use of coarse language and racial epithets.

Throughout the 20th century, and despite arguments that the protagonist and the tenor of the book are anti-racist, criticism of the book continued due to both its perceived use of racial stereotypes and its frequent use of the racial slur “nigger“.

In St. Petersburg, Missouri, during the 1840s, Huckleberry Finn has received a considerable sum of money following The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

The Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson become his guardians.

Above: Hannibal (aka St. Petersburg), Missouri, USA

“Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there.

She got mad then, but I didn’t mean no harm.

All I wanted was to go somewheres.

All I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular.“

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Despite preferring life as an errant boy, Huck stays so he can be part of Tom Sawyer’s gang.

Huck’s father, “Pap“, an abusive alcoholic, tries to appropriate Huck’s fortune.

When this fails, Pap imprisons him in a remote cabin.

“I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead.

The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful, and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die, and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn’t make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me.“

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

After a delirium tremens crisis in which Pap tries to kill Huck, Huck fakes his own murder and settles on Jackson’s Island, where he reunites with Miss Watson’s slave Jim, who ran away after overhearing she was planning to sell him.

Huck and Jim decide to go down the Mississippi River to Cairo, in the free state of Illinois.

After a flood, they find a timber raft and a house floating downstream.

Inside the house, Jim finds a man who was shot to death but prevents Huck from seeing. 

Huck sneaks into town and discovers there is a reward for Jim’s capture.

He is suspected of killing Huck.

They flee on their raft.

Huck and Jim come across a grounded steamboat on which two thieves discuss murdering a third.

Finding their raft has drifted away, they flee in the thieves’ boat.

They find their raft and sink the thieves’ boat, then Huck tricks a night watchman into a rescue attempt, which fails when the steamboat sinks.

“Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.“

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Huck and Jim are separated in a fog.

When they reunite, Huck tricks Jim into thinking he dreamed the event.

Jim is disappointed in Huck when Huck admits the truth.

Huck is surprised by Jim’s strong feelings and apologizes.

Huck is conflicted about supporting a runaway slave, but when two white men seeking runaways come upon the raft, his lies convince them to leave.

Jim and Huck realize they have passed Cairo.

With no way to go upriver, they decide to continue downriver.

The raft is struck by a passing steamship, again separating them.

On the riverbank, Huck meets the Grangerfords, who are engaged in a 30-year feud with the Shepherdsons.

After a Grangerford daughter elopes with a Shepherdson boy, all of the Grangerford men are killed in a Shepherdson ambush.

“A feud is this way.

A man has a quarrel with another man and kills him.

Then that other man’s brother kills him.

Then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another.

Then the cousins chip in — and by-and-by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud.

But it’s kind of slow and takes a long time.“

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Huck escapes and is reunited with Jim, who has recovered and repaired the raft.

“We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all.

Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t.

You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

It’s lovely to live on a raft.

We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.

Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened.

I judged it would have took too long to make so many.“

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Jim and Huck are joined by two confidence men claiming to be a King and a Duke.

“All kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.

Kings is kings, and you got to make allowances.

Take them all around, they’re a mighty ornery lot.

It’s the way they’re raised.“

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

They rope Huck and Jim into aiding in several scams.

In one town, the King and the Duke cheat the townsfolk over two nights with a short, overpriced stage performance.

On the third, the grifters collect the admission fee from previous audience members bent on revenge, then flee the town.

In the next town, the swindlers impersonate the brothers of the recently deceased Peter Wilks and attempt to steal his estate.

Huck tries to retrieve the money for Wilks’s orphaned nieces.

Two other men claiming to be Wilks’ brothers arrive, causing an uproar.

Huck flees but is caught by the King and the Duke.

He escapes, but finds they sold Jim to the Phelpses.

Huck vows to free Jim, despite believing he will go to Hell for it.

“I couldn’t bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn’t think about nothing else.

I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.

I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to Hell.”

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Phelpses mistake Huck for their nephew Tom, who is expected for a visit.

Huck plays along.

Their nephew is Tom Sawyer.

When Tom arrives he pretends to be his brother Sid.

Tom develops a theatrical plan to free Jim.

Huck attempts to warn the King and the Duke that Jim alerted the local residents to their scam, but sees them tarred and feathered and being run out of town on a rail.

“H’aint we got all the fools in town on our side?

And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?“

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“The pitifulest thing out is a mob.

That’s what an army is — a mob.

They don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.

But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness.“

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Tom is wounded during Jim’s escape.

Instead of fleeing, Jim stays to tend to him and is arrested and returned to the Phelpses. 

Tom’s Aunt Polly arrives and reveals Huck’s and Tom’s true identities.

She explains that Miss Watson has died, and that she freed Jim in her will.

Tom admits he knew but wanted to “rescue” Jim in style.

Jim tells Huck Pap was the dead man in the floating house.

Huck declares he will flee to Indian Territory to escape adoption by the Phelpses.

“A man can’t get his rights in a gov’ment like this.

Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all.

So there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it and aint’t agoing to no more.

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it.

I been there before.”

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn explores themes of race and identity, what it means to be free and civilized; and the ideas of humanity and social responsibility in the changing landscape of America.

A complexity exists concerning Jim’s character.

While some scholars point out that Jim is good-hearted and moral, and he is not unintelligent (in contrast to several of the more negatively depicted white characters), others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word “nigger” and emphasizing the stereotypically “comic” treatment of Jim’s lack of education, superstition and ignorance.

This argument is supported by incidents early in the novel where Huck deliberately “tricks” Jim, taking advantage of his gullibility and Jim still remains loyal to him.

But this novel is also Huck’s ‘coming of age‘ story where he overcomes his initial biases and forms a deeper bond with Jim.

Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives.

Huck is unable consciously to rebut those values even in his thoughts, but he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim’s friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught.

Twain, in his lecture notes, proposes that “a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience” and goes on to describe the novel as “a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat“.

To highlight the hypocrisy required to condone slavery within an ostensibly moral system, Twain has Huck’s father enslave his son, isolate him and beat him.

When Huck escapes, he immediately encounters Jim “illegally” doing the same thing.

The treatments both of them receive are radically different, especially in an encounter with Mrs. Judith Loftus who takes pity on who she presumes to be a runaway apprentice, Huck, yet boasts about her husband sending the hounds after a runaway slave, Jim.

Some scholars discuss Huck’s own character, and the novel itself, in the context of its relation to African-American culture as a whole.

John Alberti quotes Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who writes in her 1990s book Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices:

“By limiting their field of inquiry to the periphery, white scholars have missed the ways in which African-American voices shaped Twain’s creative imagination at its core.”

It is suggested that the character of Huckleberry Finn illustrates the correlation, and even interrelatedness, between white and black culture in the United States.

Above: US Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin

“We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness.

It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle.

We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.“

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

While it is clear that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was controversial from the outset, Norman Mailer, writing in The New York Times in 1984, concluded that Twain’s novel was not initially “too unpleasantly regarded“.

Above: American writer Norman Mailer (1923 – 2007)

In fact, Mailer writes:

“The critical climate could hardly anticipate T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway’s encomiums (praises) 50 years later.”

Above: American poet Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965)

Reviews that would remain longstanding in the American consciousness.

Above: American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961)

Alberti suggests that the academic establishment responded to the book’s challenges both dismissively and with confusion.

During Twain’s time and today, defenders of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn “lump all nonacademic critics of the book together as extremists and ‘censors’, thus equating the complaints about the book’s ‘coarseness’ from the genteel bourgeois trustees of the Concord Public Library in the 1880s with more recent objections based on race and civil rights“.

Upon issue of the American edition in 1885, several libraries banned it from their shelves. 

The early criticism focused on what was perceived as the book’s crudeness.

One incident was recounted in the newspaper the Boston Transcript:

The Concord Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain’s latest book from the library.

One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type.

He regards it as veritable trash.

The library and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.”

Above: Seal of Concord, Massachusetts, USA

Writer Louisa May Alcott criticized the book’s publication as well, saying that if Twain “could not think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them“.

Above: US writer Louisa May Alcott (1832 – 1888)

In 1905, New York’s Brooklyn Public Library also banned the book due to “bad word choice” and Huck’s having “not only itched but scratched” within the novel, which was considered obscene.

When asked by a Brooklyn librarian about the situation, Twain sardonically replied:

I am greatly troubled by what you say.

I wrote ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Huck Finn’ for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them.

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.

I know this by my own experience and to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old.

None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.“

Above: Brooklyn Public Library, New York, USA

Many subsequent critics, Ernest Hemingway among them, have deprecated the final chapters, claiming the book “devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy” after Jim is detained. 

Although Hemingway declared: “All modern American literature comes from Huck Finn.”, and hailed it as “the best book we’ve had“, he cautioned:

“If you must read it you must stop where Jim is stolen from the boys.

That is the real end.

The rest is just cheating.” 

Above: Ernest Hemingway

The African-American writer Ralph Ellison argued that:

“Hemingway completely missed the structural, symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys rescue Jim.

Above: American writer Ralph Ellison (1913 – 1994)

Yet it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance.” Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers states in his Twain biography (Mark Twain: A Life) that “Huckleberry Finn endures as a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters“, in which Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate machinations to rescue Jim.

In his introduction to The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, Michael Patrick Hearn writes that Twain “could be uninhibitedly vulgar“, and quotes critic William Dean Howells, a Twain contemporary, who wrote that the author’s “humor was not for most women“.

Above: American writer William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920)

However, Hearn continues by explaining that:

“The reticent Howells found nothing in the proofs of Huckleberry Finn so offensive that it needed to be struck out.“

Above: US literary scholar Michael Patrick Hearn

Much of modern scholarship of Huckleberry Finn has focused on its treatment of race.

Many Twain scholars have argued that the book, by humanizing Jim and exposing the fallacies of the racist assumptions of slavery, is an attack on racism. 

Others have argued that the book falls short on this score, especially in its depiction of Jim. 

According to Professor Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia, Twain was unable to fully rise above the stereotypes of black people that white readers of his era expected and enjoyed, and, therefore, resorted to minstrel show-style comedy to provide humor at Jim’s expense, and ended up confirming rather than challenging late 19th-century racist stereotypes.

Above: Seal of the University of Virginia

In one instance, the controversy caused a drastically altered interpretation of the text:

In 1955, CBS tried to avoid controversial material in a televised version of the book, by deleting all mention of slavery and omitting the character of Jim entirely.

Above: Logo of the Columbia Broadcasting Service (CBS)

Through Huck’s journey, Twain presents a deeply felt portrayal of boyhood, a scathing satire on entrenched social attitudes, and a powerful exploration of freedom and morality.

The novel is as much a critique of society as it is a reflection of Twain himself — a man increasingly disillusioned with the world’s hypocrisy.

Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993) was an American novelist, writer, environmentalist, and historian.

He was often called “The Dean of Western Writers“. 

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the US National Book Award in 1977.

Above: Wallace Stegner

Stegner was born in Lake Mills, Iowa.

Above: Main Street, Lake Mills, Iowa, USA

He grew up in Great Falls, Montana, Salt Lake City, Utah, and the village of Eastend, Saskatchewan, which he wrote about in his autobiography Wolf Willow.

Stegner says he “lived in twenty places in eight states and Canada“. 

Above: Downtown Great Falls, Montana, USA

Above: Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Above: Main Street, Eastend, Saskatchewan, Canada

He was the son of Hilda (née Paulson) and George Stegner. 

Stegner summered in Greensboro, Vermont.

While living in Utah, he joined a Boy Scout troop at a Mormon Church (although he himself was a Lutheran) and earned the rank of Eagle Scout.

He received a BA at the University of Utah in 1930.

While at the University of Utah he was initiated into Sigma Nu fraternity.

He was inducted into the Sigma Nu Hall of Honor at the 68th Grand Chapter in Washington DC.

Above: Seal of the University of Utah

He also studied at the University of Iowa, where he received a master’s degree in 1932 and a doctorate in 1935.

Above: Seal of the University of Iowa

In 1934, Stegner married Mary Stuart Page.

For 59 years they shared a “personal literary partnership of singular facility“, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. 

Above: US historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917 – 2007)

Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on 13 April 1993, as the result of a car accident on 28 March 1993.

Above: La Fonda, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a 1943 semi-autobiographical novel by American writer Wallace Stegner.

It follows the life of the Mason family (Bo and Elsa with their sons Chester and Bruce) during the early 20th century in the United States and Canada.

The book is structured in ten sections.

The fictional family in the book, like Stegner’s family during his childhood, frequently moves to different cities in pursuit of various financial schemes that never work out.

The novel also matches Stegner’s family history in some of the specific locations lived, including Saskatchewan and Salt Lake City.

The novel is named after the folk song “The Big Rock Candy Mountains“, which is about a mythical Paradise.

One evening as the sun went down
And the jungle fire was burning
Down the track came a hobo hikin’
And he said, “Boys, I’m not turning
I’m headed for a land that’s far away
Beside the crystal fountains
So come with me, we’ll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In The Big Rock Candy Mountains
There’s a land that’s fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings
In The Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In The Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers’ trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow
Where the rain don’t fall, the wind don’t blow
In The Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In The Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come a-trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railroad bulls are blind
There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey, too
You can paddle all around ’em in a big canoe
In The Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In The Big Rock Candy Mountains
The jails are made of tin
And you can walk right out again
As soon as you are in
There ain’t no short-handle shovels
No axes, saws or picks
I’m a-goin’ to stay where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk that invented work
In The Big Rock Candy Mountains.

I’ll see you all this comin’ fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains“

Elsa leaves her family home after breaking with her widowed father when he becomes remarried to Elsa’s best friend.

She moves to North Dakota where she meets Bo Mason, who runs an illegal saloon or blind pig.

Despite being disturbed by Bo’s sometimes violent behavior, Elsa strikes up a romantic relationship with him.

Against her father’s advice, she becomes engaged to Bo.

The Masons try unsuccessfully to run a hotel, with sons Chester and Bruce now in early childhood.

Bo’s relationship with Bruce becomes increasingly abusive, especially around issues of toilet training.

After an especially strong outburst of violence against Bruce, Bo abandons his family.

Above: State flag of North Dakota, USA

Bo has begun to establish a relatively stable life for himself running a bunkhouse in Saskatchewan.

In the meantime, Elsa moves back in with her father after her son Chester gets in trouble for engaging in sexual play with a girl in the orphanage he attends.

After returning home, Elsa considers getting a divorce and marrying a former suitor, but eventually she accepts Bo’s offer of reconciliation.

Above: Provincial flag of Saskatchewan, Canada

This short section of the book is told from the perspective of Bruce.

The family spends an idyllic summer at their homestead.

Also, Bruce begins to regain memories of the abuses he suffered in infancy.

The 1918 flu epidemic has arrived.

Down on his luck, Bo realizes that because of the flu epidemic he stands to make a small fortune if he begins bootlegging whisky to Canada, due to the perceived medicinal benefits of alcohol.

While Bo is away in the US purchasing whisky, the flu epidemic hits his home town and eventually Chester is forced to guard the family homestead himself while all the other family members are sick.

Above: Soldiers sick with Spanish flu at a hospital ward at Camp Funston in Fort Riley, Kansas, USA

It is now the Prohibition Era.

Bo has supported his family for several years by bootlegging, but eventually the family decides to leave the small Canadian town they live in on the Canada / Montana border after Bo is arrested for bootlegging on the same day his son, Chester, is arrested for arson.

Above: Detroit police inspecting equipment found in a clandestine underground brewery during the Prohibition era

The family is now living in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Chester Mason is about to graduate from high school.

His parents attempt to steer him away from his romance with an older girl, Laura, and into a promising career as a baseball player.

However, when the Masons’ house is raided by the police, Chester quits his baseball job and elopes with Laura.

Above: Seal of Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Bruce’s study at law school is interrupted when he learns that Chester has died.

In addition, his mother’s cancer is worsening.

Eventually Bruce returns to his family for his mother’s sake.

Elsa Mason dies of cancer.

A rift subsequently develops between Bo and Bruce Mason, during which Bruce considers murdering his father.

This section is told first from the perspective of Bo Mason, who is now an aging widower in Salt Lake City, oppressed by frequent feelings of self-hatred.

Eventually Bo kills himself after murdering a former lover.

Bruce then attempts to look back on the tumultuous history of his family and try to come to terms with his role as the sole survivor.

Stegner taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University.

Above: Seal of the University of Wisconsin

Above: Coat of arms of Harvard University

Eventually he settled at Stanford University, where he founded the creative writing program.

Above: Seal of Stanford University

He served as a special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (1920 – 2010).

He was elected to the American environmental organization Sierra Club’s board of directors for a term that lasted 1964 – 1966.

He also moved into a house near Matadero Creek on Three Forks Road in nearby Los Altos Hills and became one of the town’s most prominent residents.

Above: Beaver in Matadero Creek, California, USA

In 1962, he co-founded the Committee for Green Foothills, an environmental organization dedicated to preserving and protecting the hills, forests, creeks, wetlands and coastal lands of the San Francisco Peninsula.

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed.

If we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases…

If we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction…

If we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.

And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.

The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.

It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into:

Harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

These are some of the things wilderness can do for us.

That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or “usefulness” or even recreation.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.“

Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose (first published by Doubleday in early 1971) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. 

It was based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote (first published in 1972 by Huntington Library Press as the memoir A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West).

Above: American writer Mary Hallock Foote (1847 – 1938)

Stegner explained his use of unpublished archival letters briefly at the beginning of Angle of Repose but his use of uncredited passages taken directly from Foote’s letters caused a continuing controversy.

Angle of Repose is a 1971 novel by Wallace Stegner about a wheelchair-using historian, Lyman Ward, who has lost connection with his son and living family and decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents.

Stegner’s use of substantial passages from Foote’s actual letters as the correspondence of his fictional character Susan Burling Ward was and remains controversial among some scholars. 

While Stegner’s defenders have claimed that he had received permission to use Foote’s writings, as the book’s acknowledgments page implies, others point out that he secured that permission only after falsely claiming that his novel would not use any direct quotations.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Angle of Repose #82 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

The title, seemingly taken from Foote’s writings, is an engineering term for the angle at which soil finally settles after, for example, being dumped from a mine as tailings.

It seems to describe the loose wandering of the Ward family as they try to carve out a civilized existence in the West and, Susan hopes, to return to the East as successes.

The story details Oliver’s struggles on various mining, hydrology, and construction engineering jobs, and Susan’s adaptation to a hard life.

Another view has to do with a typical construction of canals and the drowning of Ward’s daughter in a canal.

Canal banks are sometimes simply piled mounds of dirt.

Slanted walls of dirt are left at the angle of repose after the canal is built.

Small disturbances to the dirt can cause it to slide down.

Ward’s daughter fell into a canal and couldn’t climb out because of this.

Lyman Ward narrates a century after the fact.

Lyman interprets the story at times and leaves gaps that he points out at other times.

Some of the disappointments of his life, including his divorce, color his interpretation of his grandparents’ story.

Toward the end of the novel, he gives up on his original ambition of writing a complete biography of his grandmother.

Stegner’s use of Mary Hallock Foote’s historical letters gives the novel’s locations — Grass Valley, Leadville, New Almaden, Idaho, and Mexico — an authentic feel.

Above: Grass Valley, California, USA

Above: Leadville, Colorado, USA

Above: New Almaden (Nueva Almadén), San José, California, USA

Above: State flag of Idaho, USA

Above: Flag of Mexico

The letters also add vividness to the Wards’ struggles with the environment, shady businessmen, and politicians.

Lyman’s position in the contemporary culture of the late sixties provides another historical dimension to the story.

Foils for this plot line include Lyman’s adult son, a UC Berkeley-trained sociologist who sees little value in history, and a neighbor’s daughter who helps transcribe Lyman’s tape-recorded notes while she is home on summer break from UC Berkeley, where she has been active in the “hippie” counterculture movement.

Above: Seal of the University of California – Berkeley

In 1977 Stegner won the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird.

The Spectator Bird is a 1976 novel by Wallace Stegner.

It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1977, one of the two most prestigious literary awards in the US.

The book tells the story of retired literary agent Joe Allston, who receives a postcard from an old friend, a Danish countess named Astrid.

Joe initially hides the postcard from his wife, Ruth.

However, he soon reveals to her not only its existence but that of a diary Joe kept 20 years before, when Joe and Ruth met Astrid while visiting Denmark.

The Allstons took the trip in the wake of the death of their only child, Curtis, with whom Joe fought constantly.

Stegner moves the novel’s narration back and forth between the present day, as Joe struggles with the physical and emotional degradations of older age, and Denmark, where Joe and Ruth get caught up in the strange, almost Gothic world of Astrid and her ostracized aristocratic family.

It transpires that Joe became romantically involved with Astrid — to what degree Ruth hopes to find out — and still has unresolved feelings about her.

The novel is both an intriguing, witty observation of Americans returning to the “old country” during post-World War II Europe, as well as a deep meditation on the blessings and frustrations of a long marriage.

In 1992, he refused a National Medal from the National Endowment for the Arts because he believed the NEA had become too politicized.

Stegner’s semi-autobiographical novel Crossing to Safety (1987) gained broad literary acclaim and commercial popularity.

In Crossing to Safety, Stegner explores the mysteries of friendship, and it extends Stegner’s distinguished body of work that had already earned him a Pulitzer Prize (for 1971’s Angle of Repose) and the National Book Award (for 1976’s The Spectator Bird). 

Publishers Weekly described the novel as “an eloquent, wise and immensely moving narrative” and “a meditation on the idealism and spirit of youth, when the world is full of promise, and on the blows and compromises life inevitably inflicts“. 

The story is told mostly in flashback.

The narrator, Larry Morgan, and his wife, Sally, settle into their new home in Madison, Wisconsin, as Larry begins a term teaching creative writing at the university’s English department.

They soon befriend another couple, Sid and Charity Lang, and learn of Sid’s ambition to succeed as a writer.

As their careers mature, they take different paths, but they spend much of their time together on summer vacations in the small Vermont town where Charity’s family has been coming for decades.

Stegner’s powerful but unassuming narrative traces the bond that develops between the Langs and the Morgans from their first meeting in 1937 through their eventual separation on the occasion of Charity’s death from cancer.

Above: Madison, Wisconsin, USA

Stegner’s non-fiction works include Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954), a biography of John Wesley Powell, the first white man to explore the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

Above: American explorer John Wesley Powell (1834 – 1902)

Powell later served as a government scientist and was an advocate of water conservation in the American West.

“It has never been man’s gift to make wildernesses.

But he can make deserts, and has.“

Wallace Stegner, “The War Between the Rough Riders and the Bird Watchers”, reprinted in Wildlands and Our Civilization, David Brower

Stegner wrote the foreword to and edited This Is Dinosaur, with photographs by Philip Hyde.

The Sierra Club book was used in the campaign to prevent dams in Dinosaur National Monument and helped launch the modern environmental movement.

“It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs.

If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks.

And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries.

Our own species is going to need them too.

It needs them now.“

Wallace Stegner, “The Marks of Human Passage“, This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and its Magic Rivers (1955)

A substantial number of Stegner’s works are set in and around Greensboro, Vermont, where he lived part-time.

Some of his character representations (particularly in Second Growth) were sufficiently unflattering that residents took offense, and he did not visit Greensboro for several years after its publication.

Wallace Stegner examined how history, both personal and collective, shapes human identity.

In Angle of Repose, a wheelchair-bound historian reconnects with the past to find meaning in his present, while Crossing to Safety explores the evolving mysteries of friendship.

Through his writing, Stegner reminds us that the past is not just something to be studied — it is something we carry with us, shaping who we become.

Above: Walter Stegner

“There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.“

Walter Stegner, All the Little Live Things (1967)

“I always know the ending.

That’s where I start.“

Toni Morrison, Every Day a Word Surprises Me & Other Quotes by Writers by Phaidon (2018)

Above: Toni Morrison

Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor.

Above: Toni Morrison

Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970.

The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987).

She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a BA in English.

Above: Lorain, Ohio, USA

Above: Seal of Howard University

Morrison earned a master’s degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955.

Above: Seal of Cornell University

In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964.

Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s.

She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and ’80s.

Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998.

Morrison’s works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the US and the Black American experience.

The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the US federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996.

She was honored with the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year.

President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on 29 May 2012.

Above: US President Barack Obama (r. 2009 – 2017)

Above: Presidential Medal of Freedom

She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016.

Morrison was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2020.

Above: National Women’s Hall of Fame, Seneca, New York, USA

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, the second of four children from a working-class, black family, in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. 

Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child.

Above: Butler County Courthouse, Greenville, Alabama, USA

She was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. 

George Wofford grew up in Cartersville, Georgia.

Above: City Hall, Cartersville, Georgia, USA

When Wofford was about 15 years old, a group of white people lynched two African-American businessmen who lived on his street.

Morrison later said:

“He never told us that he’d seen bodies.

But he had seen them.

And that was too traumatic, I think, for him.” 

Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio’s burgeoning industrial economy.

He worked odd jobs and as a welder for US Steel (USS).

In a 2015 interview Morrison said that her father, traumatized by his experiences of racism, hated whites so much he would not let them in the house.

When Morrison was about two years old, her family’s landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent.

Her family responded to what she called this “bizarre form of evil” by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair.

Morrison later said her family’s response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such “monumental crudeness“.

Morrison’s parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and singing songs. 

She read frequently as a child.

Above: English novelist Jane Austen (1775 – 1817)

Among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.

Above: Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

Morrison became a Catholic at the age of 12 and took the baptismal name Anthony (after Anthony of Padua), which led to her nickname, Toni. 

Above: Anthony of Padua (1195 – 1231)

Attending Lorain High School, she was on the debate team, the yearbook staff, and in the drama club.

In 1949, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington DC, seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals. 

She was the first person in her family to attend college, meaning that she was a first-generation college student. 

Above: US Capitol, Washington DC, USA

Initially a student in the drama program at Howard, she studied theatre with celebrated drama teachers Anne Cooke Reid and Owen Dodson. 

Above: US stage director/academic Anne Cooke Reid (1907 – 1997)

Above: American poet Owen Dodson (1914 – 1983)

It was while at Howard that she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time. 

She graduated in 1953 with a BA in English and a minor in Classics, and was able to work with key members of the Harlem Renaissance era such as Alain Locke and Sterling Brown.

Above: American writer Alain Leroy Locke (1885 – 1954)

Above: American academic/poet Sterling Allen Brown (1901 – 1989)

Additionally, she participated in the university’s theater group, known as the Howard Players, where she had the opportunity to travel the Deep South, which was a defining experience of her life.

Morrison went on to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1955 from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. 

Above: Arts Quad, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA

Her master’s thesis was titled “Virginia Woolf’s and William Faulkner’s treatment of the alienated“. 

Above: English writer Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941)

Above: American writer William Faulkner (1897 – 1962)

She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston from 1955 to 1957, and then at Howard University for the next seven years.

Above: Seal of Texas Southern University

While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958.

Their first son was born in 1961.

She was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.

After her divorce and the birth of her son Slade in 1965, Morrison began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House, in Syracuse, New York.

Above: Syracuse, New York, USA

Two years later, she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department.

In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream.

Above: New York City, New York, USA

One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), a collection that included work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and South African playwright Athol Fugard.

Above: Nigerian author Wole Soyinka

Above: Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013)

Above: South African playwright Athol Fugard

She fostered a new generation of Afro-American writers, including poet and novelist Toni Cade Bambara, radical activist Angela Davis, Black Panther Huey Newton and novelist Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered.

Above: American writer Toni Cade Bambara (1939 – 1995)

Above: American activist Angela Davis

Above: American activist Huey Newton (1942 – 1989)

Above: American writer Gayl Jones

She also brought to publication the 1975 autobiography of the outspoken boxing champion Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story.

Above: American boxer Muhammad Ali (1942 – 2016)

In addition, she published and promoted the work of Henry Dumas, a little-known novelist and poet who in 1968 had been shot to death by a transit officer in the New York City subway.

Above: American writer Henry Dumas (1934 – 1968)

Among other books that Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and documents of black life in the US from the time of slavery to the 1920s.

Random House had been uncertain about the project but its publication met with a good reception.

Alvin Beam reviewed the anthology for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, writing:

“Editors, like novelists, have brain children – books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page.

Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes.“

Morrison had begun writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work.

She attended one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes.

Morrison later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye, getting up every morning at 4 am to write, while raising two children on her own.

The Bluest Eye was published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1970, when Morrison was aged 39. 

“There is really nothing more to say — except why.

But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.“

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1969)

It was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by John Leonard, who praised Morrison’s writing style as being “a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.

But The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music.” 

The novel did not sell well at first, but the City University of New York put The Bluest Eye on its reading list for its new Black studies department, as did other colleges, which boosted sales. 

Above: Seal of the City University of New York

The book also brought Morrison to the attention of the acclaimed editor Robert Gottlieb at Knopf, an imprint of the publisher Random House.

Gottlieb later edited all but one of Morrison’s novels.

Above: American writer/editor Robert Gottlieb (1931 – 2023)

In 1975, Morrison’s second novel Sula (1973), about a friendship between two black women, was nominated for the National Book Award.

“Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.“

Toni Morrison, Sula (1973)

No one can blame the conqueror for writing history the way he sees it, and certainly not for digesting human events and discovering their patterns according to his own point of view.

But it must be admitted that conventional history supports and complements a very grave and almost pristine ignorance.

Because the very nature of history is to make large distinctions, it encourages the intellect, therefore, to forgo finer ones.

Because historians must deal with rice in bulk, rather than grain-by-grain, heavy dependence on the conventions of that discipline lead us to do likewise in human relationships.

If such history continues to be the major informer of our sensibilities, we will remain functionally unintelligent.

Because, after all, it is the ability to make distinctions — and the smaller the distinctions made, the higher the intellect that makes them — by which we judge intellect.

Toni Morrison, “A Humanist View“, an address at the Portland State University Black Studies Center, Public Dialogue on the American Dream Pt. 2 (30 May 1975)

Above: Toni Morrison

Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), follows the life of Macon “Milkman” Dead III, from birth to adulthood, as he discovers his heritage.

“What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?“

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

This novel brought her national acclaim, being a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940. 

Above: American writer Richard Wright (1908 – 1960)

Song of Solomon also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded Morrison its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.

Above: Seal of Barnard College, Manhattan, New York City

Morrison gave her next novel, Tar Baby (1981), a contemporary setting.

In it, a looks-obsessed fashion model, Jadine, falls in love with Son, a penniless drifter who feels at ease with being black.

“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough.

You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it.

It is enough.

No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to.

When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.“

Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (1981)

Resigning from Random House in 1983, Morrison left publishing to devote more time to writing, while living in a converted boathouse on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York. 

Above: Nyack, New York, USA

She taught English at two branches of the State University of New York (SUNY) and at Rutgers University’s New Brunswick campus. 

In 1984, she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, SUNY.

Above: Alsatian polymath Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965)

Morrison’s first play, Dreaming Emmett, is about the 1955 murder by white men of black teenager Emmett Till.

The play was commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute at the State University of New York at Albany, where she was teaching at the time.

Above: American youth Emmett Till (1941 – 1955)

Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American youth, who was abducted and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family’s grocery store.

The brutality of his murder and the acquittal of his killers drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the US.

Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.

Above: The remains of Bryant’s Grocery and (Meat) Market, the store that Emmett Till walked into in Money, Mississippi, where he interacted with a woman related to Till’s murderers. 

Born Mamie Elizabeth Carthan on 23 November 1921, in Webb, Mississippi, she was a young child when her family relocated from the Southern United States during the Great Migration, the period when many African-Americans moved to the Northern United States due to continued racial violence, including lynching and racial massacres.

Above: Image from Webb, Mississippi, USA

In 1922, shortly after her birth, Mamie’s father, Nash Carthan, moved to Argo, Illinois, near Chicago.

There, he found work at the Argo Corn Products Refining Company.

Alma Carthan joined her husband in January 1924, bringing along two-year-old Mamie and her brother, John.

They settled in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Argo.

When Mamie was 13 years old, her parents divorced.

Devastated, Mamie threw herself into her schoolwork and excelled in her studies.

Alma had high hopes for her only daughter.

Mamie later stated that although at that time “girls had one ambition—to get married“, Alma encouraged her to concentrate on her schooling instead.

Mamie was the first African-American student to make the “A” Honor roll and only the 4th African-American student to graduate from the predominantly white Argo Community High School.

Above: Argo Community High School, Argo, Illinois, USA

At age 18, Mamie met a young man, who had grown up orphaned, from New Madrid, Missouri named Louis Till.

Above: New Madrid, Missouri, USA

Employed by the Argo Corn Company, he was an amateur boxer who was popular with women, but Mamie’s parents disapproved of the charismatic Till, thinking he was “too sophisticated” for their daughter.

At her mother’s insistence, Mamie broke off their courtship.

However, the persistent Till won out, and they got married on October 14, 1940.

Both were 18 years old. 

Above: Louis Till (1922 – 1945)

Their only child, Emmett Louis Till, was born nine months later, on July 25, 1941.

However, they separated in 1942 after Mamie found out that Louis had been unfaithful.

He later choked her close to unconsciousness, to which Mamie responded by throwing scalding water at Louis.

Eventually, Mamie obtained a restraining order against him.

After Louis violated this repeatedly, he was forced by a judge to choose between enlistment in the US Army or jail time.

Choosing the former, Louis enlisted in 1943.

In 1945, Mamie received notice from the War Department that, while serving in Italy, Louis was executed due to “willful misconduct“.

Her attempts to learn more were comprehensively blocked by Army bureaucracy. 

Above: Seal of the US Department of War (1789 – 1947)

The full details of Louis Till’s criminal charges and execution only emerged 10 years later.

While serving in the Italian Campaign (1943 – 1945), Till learned to speak the Neapolitan dialect of the Italian language fluently.

On 19 July 1944, Till was arrested by Military Police, who suspected him and two fellow soldiers of the murder of Allied civilian Anna Zanchi, an Italian woman, and the rape of two others in Civitavecchia.

Above: Civitavecchia fort and harbor, Italy

Pvt. James Thomas, Jr., was granted immunity in exchange for testimony against Pvts. McMurray and Till. 

Thomas testified that Till and McMurray took 20 minutes to plan the home invasion and raped the two women.

Military Police investigators had found an envelope at the crime scene addressed to Pvt. McMurray.

Above: Insignia of US Army Military Police Corps

Under interrogation, Pvt. McMurray confessed and stated that Till said,

“Everybody follow me:

If anybody turns back I’ll blast him.”

McMurray also testified that he begged Till not to shoot, but that Till had fired a shot into the house which killed Zanchi.

On 17 February 1945, the Court Martial of Privates Till and McMurray began before a panel of seven military judges at Livorno.

Above: Livorno, Italy

As with most Allied-on-Allied atrocities, which are not covered by the laws of war, both soldiers, who raised no objection to a joint trial, stood accused of one count of murder and two counts of carnal knowledge in violation of the 92nd Article of War. 

2nd Lieutenant Mervin R. Samuel appeared for the prosecution as Trial Judge Advocate, while First Lieutenant John W. Wynn appeared as Defense Counsel for both soldiers.

Fellow African-American GI Private James Thomas, Jr. testified for the prosecution and described witnessing the 27 June 1944, assault, armed robbery and attempted murder of US Navy sailor James E. Carter.

Private Thomas identified Till as Carter’s assailant and alleged that Till had shouted:

“I’m going to kill the motherfucking son of a bitch!”

Till allegedly attempted to shoot Carter with his own sidearm.

Carter managed, however, to jump into a jeep and flee the scene after the gun jammed.

According to Pvt. Thomas, the shot that later killed Anna Zanchi had been fired from the M1911 pistol that Louis Till had stolen that morning from the US Navy serviceman.

Italian witness John Masi testified about witnessing the home invasion and assault against all three women on the evening following the sailor’s assault.

He testified that Louis Till had fired the shot that killed Anna Zanchi and had told him personally:

“Get in the house or I’ll blow your head off!”

Both surviving rape victims also gave evidence, but stated that their assailants wore masks and they accordingly declined to identify them as the defendants.

Pvt. Thomas did, however, identify Louis Till as having fired the shot that killed Anna Zanchi.

Despite being informed of their right to do so, both soldiers elected not to give evidence in their own defense.

As their defense counsel, Lt. Wynn objected to the introduction into evidence of Private McMurray’s confession, alleging that it had been made involuntarily.

The objection was overruled by Law Member Colonel Roger W. Whitman, who instructed the jury, however, that the confession could only be used as evidence against Private McMurray.

Lt. Wynn also objected in vain to the fact that Pvt. Louis Till’s involvement was only established by the uncorroborated testimony of an alleged accomplice.

After this objection was also overruled by Col. Whitman, the United States military jury voted unanimously to convict both defendants and sentenced them to death by hanging.

As was the usual practice within the Army during the Italian Campaign, both defendants were transferred to the Army Disciplinary Training Center near Aversa to await review of their trial and sentencing by the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.

On 18 April 1945, Col. Claudius O. Wolfe ruled that the trial record was sufficient to support a verdict of guilty.

Regarding the two surviving victims inability to recognize their attackers, Col. Wolfe wrote:

“The place, time, and circumstances were such as to exclude reasonable doubt as to their identity.“

In support of similarly confirming the verdict and sentences, the Judge Advocate General’s Corps cited the relevant passage of A Manual for Courts-Martial, US Army:

“A conviction may be based on uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice, but such testimony is of doubtful integrity and is to be considered with great caution.“

Private Louis Till was hanged immediately following his co-defendant Private Fred A. McMurray at Aversa on 2 July 1945.

Multiple photographs were taken to document before, during and after both executions and are still in existence.

Above: Image from Aversa, Italy

Before his execution, Till had been imprisoned alongside highly influential American free verse poet Ezra Pound, who was imprisoned for treason and collaboration with both the Nazis and Italian Fascists.

Till is accordingly mentioned in lines 171–173 of Canto 74 of Pound’s Pisan Cantos:

“Pisa, in the 23rd year of the effort in sight of the Tower

And Till was hung yesterday

for murder and rape with trimmings“.

While Pound and Till had met briefly at the MTO DTC near Pisa, the American poet was taking artistic license, as Pvt. Till was actually hanged at Aversa.

Above: American poet Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)

US Army Chaplain William O. Strother, an African-American Methodist minister, presided over the funerals of both soldiers at the US Military Cemetery in Naples.

Above: Naples, Italy

Telegrams were dispatched by the War Department to notify both soldiers’ next of kin.

Despite her later statements that the US Army told her nothing, the War Department telegram sent to Mamie Till read, according to Col. French Maclean, that her husband’s cause of death was:

“Judicial Asphixiation due to his own willful misconduct in Italy.” 

In 1948, Private Till’s remains were moved to the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery Plot E.

Above: Location of “Plot E” at Oise-Aisne War Cemetery (France) where the “dishonored dead” are buried.

Plot E is highlighted in red.

It contains the remains of 94 American military prisoners, all of whom were executed under military authority for crimes of murder, rape or both crimes committed during or shortly after World War II.

The official ABMC guide pamphlet (from which this map is derived) does not show Plot E.

Officially, Plot E does not exist.

Access is difficult and visitors are not encouraged.

Above: Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial, France

According to Colonel French Maclean:

“The Army returned Louis Till’s silver ring, bearing the initials ‘LT’, to his estranged wife in Chicago.

In 1955, she let her son Emmett take the ring to visit relatives in Mississippi, where he was soon murdered, resulting in a civil rights case that gained lasting national attention.

Authorities identified Emmett’s mutilated body, in part, through the distinctive ring.“

US Army Colonel French Maclean, who tracked down and examined the case file and sentencing documents, ultimately believes Louis to be guilty.

In a book published in 2013 titled The Fifth Field: The Story of the 96 American Soldiers Sentenced to Death and Executed in Europe and North Africa in World War II, which documents the court martial proceedings and executions of every one of the World War II GIs who, like Pvt. Till, lie buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery Plot E, Col. MacLean wrote:

“From the manner in which Private Louis Till spoke and the way he carried himself, you might think he was a small time gangster from Chicago.

Fear was Till’s game.

He terrorized his wife, terrorized his fellow soldiers and terrorized local Italians who did not cooperate with him.

Unfortunately for Private Till, one of his co-conspirators was not afraid of him and agreed to testify against the tough guy from the Windy City in return for a recommendation of clemency in his own case.“

While Maclean acknowledges the murder of Emmett and states it to be unjust, he insists his conclusion that Louis Till was, in fact, guilty.

In 2016, notable African-American novelist and essayist John Edgar Wideman tracked down the same case files as Maclean and reached a different conclusion, believing his innocence.

Above: American writer John Edgar Wideman

Wideman explored the circumstances leading to and including the military conviction of Louis Till in the partly fictional book Writing to Save a Life – The Louis Till File.

In October 1955, after the murder trial and extremely controversial acquittal gained international media attention, US Senators from Mississippi James Eastland and John C. Stennis uncovered details about Louis Till’s court-martial and execution and leaked them to media sources sympathetic to continued segregation.

Above: US Senator James O. Eastland (1904 – 1986)

Above: US Senator John C. Stennis (1901 – 1995)

In November 1955, a Leflore County grand jury declined to return an indictment against Emmett Till’s two killers for kidnapping, despite a recent magazine interview in which they both had freely admitted to being guilty of that very offense.

Above: Leflore County Courthouse, Greenwood, Mississippi, USA

Wideman examines the trial record and compares it to the trial of Emmett’s killers, calling both “a farce“, and expresses the belief that the leak of Mr. Till’s military records during 1955 was an intentional effort to further demonize Emmett Till and retroactively justify the acquittal of his murderers.

Wideman expresses the viewpoint that Louis Till may have been punished for the “Crime of being Black“, rather than for committing any real crimes, citing the disproportionate punishment of African-American soldiers for rape as well as laws in the United States that defined all sexual encounters between African-American men and white women as rape.

Wideman’s analysis of Till’s murder trial alleged one of its witness insisted that the killer was a white person before recanting their statement.

In Till’s rape trial, both victims said that they were assaulted in darkness and could not identify their attackers, declining to label Till or his co-defendant as suspects.

Wideman believed that their execution, due to these inconsistencies, was racially motivated.

Ollie Gordon, one of Emmett Till’s cousins, was recorded visiting Louis Till’s grave in France for the final episode of the ABC documentary series Let the World See, which aired in January 2022.

Referencing Wideman’s analysis of Till’s murder and rape trials, she said:

“He’s laying in this less than honorable area for a crime that we’re still not sure that he committed.“

During the decade after World War II, Mamie had two brief marriages that both ended in divorce, first to Lemorse Mallory (in 1946) and then to Pink Bradley (1951).

 By the early 1950s, Mamie and Emmett had moved to an apartment on Chicago’s South Side in Woodlawn.

Above: Chicago, Illinois, USA

She worked for the Air Force as a clerk and was in charge of confidential files.

Mamie worked more than 12-hour days and Emmett took care of the home while she worked.

Emmett Till was born to Mamie and Louis Till on 25 July 1941, in Chicago.

Emmett’s mother, Mamie [née Carthan], was born in the small Delta town of Webb, Mississippi.

The Delta region encompasses the large, multi-county area of northwestern Mississippi in the watershed of the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers.

When Carthan was two years old, her family moved to Argo, Illinois, near Chicago, as part of the Great Migration of rural black families out of the South to the North to escape violence, lack of opportunity and unequal treatment under the law. 

Argo received so many Southern migrants that it was named “Little Mississippi“.

Carthan’s mother’s home was often used by other recent migrants as a way station while they were trying to find jobs and housing.

Mississippi was the poorest state in the US in the 1950s, and the Delta counties were some of the poorest in Mississippi. 

Mamie Carthan was born in Tallahatchie County, where the average income per white household in 1949 was $690 (equivalent to $9,100 in 2024).

For black families, the figure was $462 (equivalent to $6,100 in 2024). 

In the rural areas, economic opportunities for blacks were almost nonexistent.

They were mostly sharecroppers who lived on land owned by whites.

Blacks had essentially been disenfranchised and excluded from voting and the political system since 1890 when the white-dominated legislature passed a new constitution that raised barriers to voter registration.

Whites had also passed ordinances establishing racial segregation and Jim Crow laws.

Mamie largely raised Emmett with her mother.

She and Louis Till separated in 1942.

At the age of six, Emmett contracted polio, which left him with a persistent stutter. 

Mamie and Emmett moved to Detroit, where she met and married “Pink” Bradley in 1951.

Emmett preferred living in Chicago, so he returned there to live with his grandmother.

His mother and stepfather rejoined him later that year.

After the marriage dissolved in 1952, “Pink” Bradley returned alone to Detroit.

Above: Detroit, Michigan, USA

Mamie Till-Bradley and Emmett lived together in a busy neighborhood in Chicago’s South Side near distant relatives.

She began working as a civilian clerk for the US Air Force for a better salary.

She recalled that Till was industrious enough to help with chores at home, although he sometimes got distracted.

Till’s mother remembered that he did not know his own limitations at times.

Above: Emmett Till’s last home, at 6427 S. St. Lawrence Avenue in Chicago

Following the couple’s separation, Bradley visited Mamie and began threatening her.

At 11 years old, Till, with a butcher knife in hand, told Bradley he would kill him if the man did not leave. 

Till was typically happy, however.

He and his cousins and friends pulled pranks on each other.

(Till once took advantage of an extended car ride when his friend fell asleep and placed the friend’s underwear on his head.)

They also spent their free time in pickup baseball games.

Till was a smart dresser and was often the center of attention among his peers.

Above: Emmett Till

In 1955, Mamie Till-Bradley’s uncle, 64-year-old Mose Wright, visited her and Emmett in Chicago during the summer and told him stories about living in the Mississippi Delta.

Emmett wanted to see for himself.

Wright planned to accompany Till with a cousin, Wheeler Parker; another cousin, Curtis Jones, would join them soon after.

Wright was a sharecropper and part-time minister who was often called “Preacher“. 

He lived in Money, Mississippi, a small town in the Delta that consisted of three stores, a school, a post office, a cotton gin, and a few hundred residents, 8 miles (13 km) north of Greenwood.

Above: Cotton gin –  a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation

Before Till departed for the Delta, his mother cautioned him that Chicago and Mississippi were two different worlds.

He should know how to behave in front of white people in the South. 

Till assured her that he understood.

Statistics on lynchings began to be collected in 1882.

Since that time, more than 500 African Americans have been killed by extrajudicial violence in Mississippi alone, and more than 3,000 across the South. 

Most of the incidents took place between 1876 and 1930.

Though far less common by the mid-1950s, these racially motivated murders still occurred.

Throughout the South, interracial relationships were prohibited as a means to maintain white supremacy. 

Even the suggestion of sexual contact between black men and white women could carry severe penalties for black men.

A resurgence of the enforcement of such Jim Crow laws was evident following World War II, when African-American veterans started pressing for equal rights in the South.

Racial tensions increased after the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end segregation in public education, which it ruled unconstitutional.

Many segregationists believed the ruling would lead to interracial dating and marriage.

Whites strongly resisted the court’s ruling; one Virginia county closed all its public schools to prevent integration.

Other jurisdictions simply ignored the ruling.

In other ways, whites used stronger measures to keep blacks politically disenfranchised, which they had been since the turn of the century.

Segregation in the South was used to constrain blacks forcefully from any semblance of social equality.

A week before Till arrived in Mississippi, a black activist named Lamar Smith was shot and killed in front of the county courthouse in Brookhaven for political organizing.

Three white suspects were arrested, but they were soon released.

Above: American activist Lamar Smith (1892 – 1955)

During summer vacation in August 1955, he was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region.

Till arrived at the home of Mose and Elizabeth Wright in Money, Mississippi, on 21 August 1955.

On the evening of 24 August, Till and several young relatives and neighbors were driven by his cousin Maurice Wright to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to buy candy.

Till’s companions were children of sharecroppers and had been picking cotton all day.

The market mostly served the local sharecropper population and was owned by a white couple, 24-year-old Roy Bryant and his 21-year-old wife Carolyn.

Till spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the white, married proprietor of a local grocery store.

Above: Bryant’s Grocery Store, Money, Mississippi, USA

Although what happened at the store is a matter of dispute, Till was accused of flirting with, touching, or whistling at Bryant.

Till’s interaction with Bryant, perhaps unwittingly, violated the unwritten code of behavior for a black male interacting with a white female in the Jim Crow-era South. 

(The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation, “Jim Crow“ being a pejorative term for an African American. 

The last of the Jim Crow laws were generally overturned in 1965.)

Above: Cover of an early edition of “Jump Jim Crow” sheet music (1832)

The facts of what took place in the store are still disputed.

Journalist William Bradford Huie reported that Till showed the youths outside the store a photograph of a white girl in his wallet, and bragged that she was his girlfriend. 

Till’s cousin Curtis Jones said the photograph was of an integrated class at the school Till attended in Chicago. 

According to Huie and Jones, one or more of the local boys then dared Till to speak to Bryant. 

Above: American journalist William Bradford Huie (1910 – 1986)

However, in his 2009 book, Till’s cousin Simeon Wright, who was present, disputed the accounts of Huie and Jones.

According to Wright, Till did not have a photo of a white girl, and nobody dared him to flirt with Bryant. 

Speaking in 2015, Wright said:

“We didn’t dare him to go to the store—the white folk said that.

They said that he had pictures of his white girlfriend.

There were no pictures.

They never talked to me.

They never interviewed me.” 

The FBI report completed in 2006 notes:

“Curtis Jones recanted his 1955 statements prior to his death and apologized to Mamie Till-Mobley.”

According to both Simeon Wright and Wheeler Parker, Till wolf-whistled at Bryant.

Wright said:

“I think Emmett wanted to get a laugh out of us or something,”, adding:

“He was always joking around, and it was hard to tell when he was serious.”

Wright stated that following the whistle, he became immediately alarmed.

“Well, it scared us half to death,” Wright recalled.

“You know, we were almost in shock.

We couldn’t get out of there fast enough, because we had never heard of anything like that before.

A black boy whistling at a white woman?

In Mississippi?

No.”

Wright stated:

“The Ku Klux Klan and night riders were part of our daily lives.” 

Above: Emblem of the Ku Klux Klan

Following his disappearance, a newspaper account stated that Till sometimes whistled to alleviate his stuttering. 

His speech was sometimes unclear.

Mamie said he had particular difficulty with pronouncing “b” sounds, and he may have whistled to overcome problems asking for bubble gum. 

Above: Haribo factory bubble gum balls

She said that, to help with his articulation, Mamie taught Till how to whistle softly to himself before pronouncing his words.

During the murder trial, Bryant testified that Till grabbed her hand while she was stocking candy and said:

“How about a date, baby?” 

Bryant said that after she freed herself from his grasp, Till followed her to the cash register, grabbed her waist and said:

“What’s the matter baby, can’t you take it?” 

Bryant said she freed herself.

Till said:

“You needn’t be afraid of me, baby“, used “one ‘unprintable’ word” and said “I’ve been with white women before.” 

Bryant also alleged that one of Till’s companions came into the store, grabbed him by the arm, and ordered him to leave. 

According to historian Timothy Tyson, Bryant admitted to him in a 2008 interview that her testimony during the trial that Till had made verbal and physical advances was false. 

Bryant had testified Till grabbed her waist and uttered obscenities but later told Tyson:

“That part’s not true.” 

As for the rest of what happened, the 72-year-old stated she could not remember. 

Bryant is quoted by Tyson as saying:

“Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.” 

However, the tape recordings that Tyson made of the interviews with Bryant do not contain Bryant saying this.

In addition, Bryant’s daughter-in-law, who was present during Tyson’s interviews, says that Bryant never said it.

Decades later, Simeon Wright also challenged the account given by Carolyn Bryant at the trial. 

Wright claims he entered the store “less than a minute” after Till was left inside alone with Bryant. 

He saw no inappropriate behavior and heard “no lecherous conversation“. 

Wright said Till “paid for his items and we left the store together“.

In their 2006 investigation of the cold case, the FBI noted that a second anonymous source, who was confirmed to have been in the store at the same time as Till and his cousin, supported Wright’s account.

Author Devery Anderson writes that in an interview with the defense’s attorneys, Bryant told a version of the initial encounter that included Till grabbing her hand and asking her for a date, but not Till approaching her and grabbing her waist, mentioning past relationships with white women, or having to be dragged unwillingly out of the store by another boy.

Anderson further notes that many remarks prior to Till’s kidnapping made by those involved indicate that it was his remarks to Bryant that angered his killers, rather than any alleged physical harassment.

For instance, Mose Wright (a witness to the kidnapping) said that the kidnappers mentioned only “talk” at the store.

Sheriff George Smith only spoke of the arrested killers accusing Till of “ugly remarks“.

Anderson suggests that this evidence taken together implies that the more extreme details of Bryant’s story were invented after the fact as part of the defense’s legal strategy.

After Wright and Till left the store, Bryant went outside to retrieve a pistol from underneath the seat of a car.

Till and his companions saw her do this and left immediately. 

It was acknowledged that Till whistled while Bryant was going to her car.

However, one witness, Roosevelt Crawford, maintained that Till’s whistle was directed not at Bryant, but at the checkers game that was taking place outside the store.

Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, was on an extended trip hauling shrimp to Texas and did not return home until 27 August.

Above: State flag of Texas, USA

Historian Timothy Tyson said an investigation by civil rights activists concluded Carolyn Bryant did not initially tell her husband Roy Bryant about the encounter with Till, and that Roy was told by a person who frequented their store. 

Roy was reportedly angry at his wife for not telling him.

Carolyn Bryant told the FBI she did not tell her husband because she feared he would assault Till.

When Roy Bryant was informed of what had happened, he aggressively questioned several young black men who entered the store.

That evening, Bryant, with a black man named J. W. Washington, approached a black teenager walking along a road.

Bryant ordered Washington to seize the boy, put him in the back of a pickup truck, and took him to be identified by a companion of Carolyn’s who had witnessed the episode with Till.

Friends or parents vouched for the boy in Bryant’s store, and Carolyn’s companion denied that the boy Bryant and Washington seized was the one who had accosted her.

Somehow, Bryant learned that the boy in the incident was from Chicago and was staying with Mose Wright. 

Several witnesses overheard Bryant and his 36-year-old half-brother, John William “J. W.” Milam, discussing taking Till from his house.

Above: Emmett Till

Several nights after the encounter, Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam, who were armed, went to Till’s great-uncle’s house and abducted Till, age 14.

In the early morning hours of 28 August 1955, sometime between 2:00 and 3:30 a.m., Bryant and Milam drove to Mose Wright’s house.

Armed with a pistol and a flashlight, he asked Wright if he had three boys in the house from Chicago.

Till was sharing a bed with another cousin and there were a total of eight people in the cabin. 

Milam asked Wright to take them to “the nigger who did the talking“.

Till’s great-aunt offered the men money, but Milam refused as he rushed Emmett to put on his clothes.

Mose Wright informed the men that Till was from up north and did not know any better.

Milam reportedly then asked:

“How old are you, preacher?”

To which Wright responded: “64“.

Milam threatened that if Wright told anybody, he would not live to see 65.

The men marched Till out to the truck.

Wright said he heard them ask someone in the car if this was the boy, and heard someone say “yes“.

When asked if the voice was that of a man or a woman Wright said that:

“It seemed like it was a lighter voice than a man’s.” 

Above: Emmett Till and Carolyn Bryant Donham

In a 1956 interview with Look magazine, in which they confessed to the killing, Bryant and Milam said they would have brought Till by the store in order to have Carolyn identify him, but stated they did not do so because they said Till admitted to being the one who had talked to her.

Milam and Bryant tied up Till in the back of a green pickup truck and drove toward Money, Mississippi.

According to some witnesses, they took Till back to Bryant’s Groceries and recruited two black men.

The men then drove to a barn in Drew, pistol-whipping Till on the way and reportedly knocked him unconscious. 

Willie Reed, who was 18 years old at the time, saw the truck passing by and later recalled seeing two white men in the front seat, and “two black males” in the back. 

Some have speculated that the two black men worked for Milam and were forced to help with the beating, although they later denied being present.

Willie Reed said that while walking home, he heard the beating and crying from the barn.

Reed told a neighbor and they both walked back up the road to a water well near the barn, where they were approached by Milam.

Milam asked if they heard anything.

Reed responded: “No”

Others passed by the shed and heard yelling.

A local neighbor also spotted “Too Tight” (Leroy Collins) at the back of the barn washing blood off the truck and noticed Till’s boot.

Milam explained he had killed a deer and that the boot belonged to him.

They beat and mutilated him before shooting him in the head and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River.

Some have claimed that Till was shot and tossed over the Black Bayou Bridge in Glendora, Mississippi, near the Tallahatchie River.

Above: Tallahatchie River, Mississippi

The group drove back to Roy Bryant’s home in Money, where they reportedly burned Till’s clothes.

Three days later, Till’s mutilated and bloated body was discovered and retrieved from the river.

Till’s body was returned to Chicago, where his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket, which was held at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. 

It was later said that:

“The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley (1921 – 2003) exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till’s bloated, mutilated body.

Her decision focused attention on not only American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy.” 

Above: Mamie Till at Emmett Till’s funeral, 6 September 1955

Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his open casket, and images of Till’s mutilated body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the US.

Intense scrutiny was brought to bear on the lack of black civil rights in Mississippi, with newspapers around the US critical of the state.

Above: State flag of Mississippi, USA

Although local newspapers and law enforcement officials initially decried the violence against Till and called for justice, they responded to national criticism by defending Mississippians, giving support to the killers.

In September 1955 an all-white jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty of Till’s murder.

Above: Mamie Till-Mobley during an interview outside the courthouse before Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were acquitted for the murder of her son Emmett Till, 23 September 1955

Protected against double jeopardy, the two men publicly admitted in a 1956 interview with Look magazine (1937 – 1971) that they had tortured and murdered Till, selling the story of how they did it for $4,000 (equivalent to $46,000 in 2024). 

In an interview with William Bradford Huie that was published in Look magazine in 1956, Bryant and Milam said that they intended to beat Till and throw him off an embankment into the river to frighten him.

They told Huie that while they were beating Till, he called them bastards, declared he was as good as they were and said that he had sexual encounters with white women.

Well, what else could we do?

He was hopeless.

I’m no bully.

I never hurt a nigger in my life.

I like niggers — in their place — I know how to work ’em.

But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice.

As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place.

Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live.

If they did, they’d control the government.

They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids.

And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin’.

I’m likely to kill him.

Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights.

I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind.

‘Chicago boy,’ I said.

‘I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble.

Goddam you, I’m going to make an example of you — just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.‘

J. W. Milam, Look magazine, January 1956

Above: Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam

They put Till in the back of their truck, and drove to a cotton gin to take a 70-pound (32 kg) fan — the only time they admitted to being worried, thinking that by this time in early daylight they would be spotted and accused of stealing — and drove for several miles along the river looking for a place to dispose of Till.

They shot him by the river and weighted his body with the fan.

Mose Wright stayed on his front porch for 20 minutes waiting for Till to return.

He did not go back to bed.

Wright and another man went into Money, got gasoline, and drove around unsuccessfully trying to find Till.

They had returned home by 8:00 a.m.

After hearing from Wright that he would not call the police because he feared for his life, Curtis Jones placed a call to the Leflore County sheriff, and another to his mother in Chicago.

Distraught, she called Emmett’s mother Mamie Till-Bradley.

Wright and his wife Elizabeth drove to Sumner, where Elizabeth’s brother contacted the sheriff.

Above: Tallahatchie County Courthouse, Sumner, Mississippi

Till’s murder was seen as a catalyst for the next phase of the civil rights movement.

In December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott began in Alabama and lasted more than a year, resulting eventually in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional.

According to historians, events surrounding Till’s life and death continue to resonate.

Toni Morrison was also a visiting professor at Bard College from 1986 to 1988.

Above: Seal of Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, New York, USA

In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved.

It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner, whose story Morrison had discovered when compiling The Black Book.

Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters.

Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself. 

Morrison’s novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family.

Above: Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s 1867 painting The Modern Medea was based on Garner’s story

“Would it be all right?

Would it be all right to go ahead and feel?

Go ahead and count on something?

More it hurt more better it is.

Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know.

He knew exactly what she meant:

To get to a place where you could love anything you choose — not to need permission for desire — well now, that was freedom.

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Beloved was a critical success and a bestseller for 25 weeks. 

The New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that the scene of the mother killing her baby is “so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single unwavering line of fate“. 

Above: American writer Michiko Kautani

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote in a review for The New York Times:

“Ms. Morrison’s versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds.

If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest.“

Above: Canadian writer Margaret Atwood

Some critics panned Beloved.

African-American conservative social critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review in The New Republic that the novel “reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries“, and that Morrison “perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials“.

Above: American writer Stanley Crouch (1945 – 2020)

Despite overall high acclaim, Beloved failed to win the prestigious National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Forty-eight black critics and writers, among them Maya Angelou, protested the omission in a statement that The New York Times published on 24 January 1988. 

“Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve“, they wrote. 

Above: American novelist Maya Angelou (1928 – 2014)

Two months later, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

It also won an Anisfield – Wolf Book Award.

Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy. 

Morrison said they are intended to be read together, explaining:

“The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you.“

The second novel in the trilogy, Jazz, came out in 1992.

Told in language that imitates the rhythms of jazz music, the novel is about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York City.

“How soon country people forget.

When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever.

As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it.

The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it.

There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.“

Toni Morrison, Jazz

According to Lyn Innes:

“Morrison sought to change not just the content and audience for her fiction.

Her desire was to create stories which could be lingered over and relished, not ‘consumed and gobbled as fast food’, and at the same time to ensure that these stories and their characters had a strong historical and cultural base.“

Above: Toni Morrison

In 1992, Morrison also published her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), an examination of the African-American presence in white American literature. 

(In 2016, Time magazine noted that Playing in the Dark was among Morrison’s most-assigned texts on US college campuses, together with several of her novels and her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture.)

Lyn Innes wrote in the Guardian obituary of Morrison:

“Her 1990 series of Massey lectures at Harvard were published as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and explore the construction of a ‘non-white Africanist presence and personae‘ in the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Cather and Hemingway, arguing that ‘all of us are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes‘.“

Above: American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849)

Above: American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864)

Above: American writer Willa Cather (1873 – 1947)

Before the third novel of the Beloved Trilogy was published, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

The citation praised her as an author “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality“. 

She was the first black woman of any nationality to win the Prize. 

In her acceptance speech, Morrison said:

“We die.

That may be the meaning of life.

But we do language.

That may be the measure of our lives.“

In her Nobel lecture, Morrison talked about the power of storytelling.

I believe that one of the principal ways in which we acquire, hold, and digest information, is via narrative — so I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin with the first sentence of our childhood — that we all remember — the phrase: “Once upon a time.“

To make her point, she told a story.

“Once upon a time there was an old woman.

Blind.

Wise.

In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town.

Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question.

Among her people she is both the law and its transgression.

The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away.

To the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.

One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is.

Their plan is simple:

They enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability:

Her blindness.

They stand before her, and one of them says:

“Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird.

Tell me whether it is living or dead.“

She does not answer, and the question is repeated.

“Is the bird I am holding living or dead?”

Still she doesn’t answer.

She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands.

She does not know their color, gender or homeland.

She only knows their motive.

The old woman’s silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.

Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern.

“I don’t know“, she says.

“I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands.

It is in your hands.”

They demand of her:

“Is there no context for our lives?

No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong?

Think of our lives and tell us your particular world.

Make up a story.“

Above: Toni Morrison

“The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. 

Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it.

It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie.

When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said:

“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.

But it will never forget what they did here,” his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600,000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war.

Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the “final word“, the precise “summing up“, acknowledging their “poor power to add or detract“, his words signal deference to the un-capturability of the life it mourns.“

Above: Toni Morrison

“Word-work is sublime, because it is generative.

It makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life.

We die.

That may be the meaning of life.

But we do language.

That may be the measure of our lives.

Passion is never enough, neither is skill.

But try.

For our sake and yours forget your name in the street.

Tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light.

Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear.

Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names.

Language alone is meditation.“

Above: Toni Morrison

In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the US federal government’s highest honor for “distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities“. 

Morrison’s lecture, entitled “The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations“, began with the aphorism:

“Time, it seems, has no future.”

She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future. 

Morrison was also honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer “who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work“.

The third novel of her Beloved Trilogy, Paradise, about citizens of an all-black town, came out in 1997.

“Born lost.

Take over the world and still lost.

Which was what love was:

Unmotivated respect.

Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good.

Love is none of that.

There is nothing in nature like it.

Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal.

Love is divine only and difficult always.

If you think it is easy you are a fool.

If you think it is natural you are blind.

It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God.

You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured.

You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong.

You do not deserve love just because you want it.

You can only earn – by practice and careful contemplations – the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it.

Which is to say you have to earn God.

You have to practice God.

You have to think God – carefully.

And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love.

Love is not a gift.

It is a diploma.

A diploma conferring certain privileges:

The privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it.

How do you know you have graduated?

You don’t.

What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love.

Do you understand me?

God is not interested in you.

He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest.

Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive.

They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life.

But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won’t mean a thing.

God bless the pure and holy.

Amen.“

Toni Morrison, Paradise

The following year, Morrison was on the cover of Time magazine, making her only the second female writer of fiction and second black writer of fiction to appear on what was perhaps the most significant US magazine cover of the era.

Also in 1998, the movie adaptation of Beloved was released, directed by Jonathan Demme and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey, who had spent ten years bringing it to the screen.

Winfrey also stars as the main character, Sethe, alongside Danny Glover as Sethe’s lover, Paul D, and Thandiwe Newton as Beloved.

The movie flopped at the box office.

A review in The Economist opined that:

“Most audiences are not eager to endure nearly three hours of a cerebral film with an original storyline featuring supernatural themes, murder, rape, and slavery.” 

Film critic Janet Maslin, in her New York Times review “No Peace from a Brutal Legacy“, called it a “transfixing, deeply felt adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel.

Its linchpin is of course Oprah Winfrey, who had the clout and foresight to bring ‘Beloved’ to the screen and has the dramatic presence to hold it together.” 

Film critic Roger Ebert suggested that Beloved was not a genre ghost story but the supernatural was used to explore deeper issues and the non-linear structure of Morrison’s story had a purpose.

Above: American film critic Roger Ebert (1942 – 2013)

In 1996, television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey selected Song of Solomon for her newly launched Book Club, which became a popular feature on her Oprah Winfrey Show (1986 – 2011).

An average of 13 million viewers watched the show’s Book Club segments. 

As a result, when Winfrey selected Morrison’s earliest novel The Bluest Eye in 2000, it sold another 800,000 paperback copies.

John Young wrote in the African American Review in 2001 that Morrison’s career experienced the boost of “the Oprah Effect, enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience“.

Winfrey selected a total of four of Morrison’s novels over six years, giving Morrison’s works a bigger sales boost than they received from her Nobel Prize win in 1993. 

The novelist also appeared three times on Winfrey’s show.

Winfrey said:

“For all those who asked the question ‘Toni Morrison again?’

I say with certainty there would have been no Oprah’s Book Club if this woman had not chosen to share her love of words with the world.” 

Morrison called the Book Club a “reading revolution“.

Above: Oprah Winfrey

Love, Morrison’s first novel since Paradise, came out in 2003.

From 1997 to 2003, Morrison was an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

Above: Seal of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA

In 2004, she put together a children’s book called Remember to mark the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional.

In 2004, Morrison was invited by Wellesley College to deliver the commencement address, which has been described as “among the greatest commencement addresses of all time and a courageous counterpoint to the entire genre“.

Above: Seal of Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA

In June 2005, the University of Oxford awarded Morrison an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.

Above: Coat of arms of Oxford University, Oxford, England

In the spring 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years, as chosen by a selection of prominent writers, literary critics, and editors. 

In his essay about the choice, “In Search of the Best“, critic A. O. Scott said:

“Any other outcome would have been startling since Morrison’s novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals.

With remarkable speed, ‘Beloved’ has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic.

This triumph is commensurate with its ambition since it was Morrison’s intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living Black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain.“

Above: American critic A. O. Scott

In November 2006, Morrison visited the Louvre Museum in Paris as the second in its “Grand Invité” program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of “The Foreigner’s Home“, about which The New York Times said:

“In tapping her own African-American culture, Ms. Morrison is eager to credit ‘foreigners‘ with enriching the countries where they settle.“

Above: Louvre Museum, Paris, France

Morrison’s novel A Mercy, released in 2008, is set in the Virginia colonies of 1682. 

Diane Johnson, in her review in Vanity Fair, called A Mercy: 

“a poetic, visionary, mesmerizing tale that captures, in the cradle of our present problems and strains, the natal curse put on us back then by the Indian tribes, Africans, Dutch, Portuguese, and English competing to get their footing in the New World against a hostile landscape and the essentially tragic nature of human experience.”

From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. 

Above: Coat of arms of Princeton University

She said she did not think much of modern fiction writers who reference their own lives instead of inventing new material.

She used to tell her creative writing students:

“I don’t want to hear about your little life, OK?”

Above: Toni Morrison

“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.“

“Black Matters” in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

“You need intelligence and you need to look.

You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving — that’s what’s useful for art.“

Toni Morrison, Interview with Don Swaim (1987)

Above: Toni Morrison

“I’m just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now.

Novels are always inquiries for me.“

Toni Morrison, Interview in Salon magazine (2 February 1998)

Above: Toni Morrison

Similarly, she chose not to write about her own life in a memoir or autobiography.

Though based in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, Morrison did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, a fact that earned her some criticism.

Above: Toni Morrison

“Writing to me is an advanced and slow form of reading.

If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.“

Toni Morrison, Cincinnati, Ohio, September 1981

Rather, she conceived and developed the Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together students with writers and performing artists.

Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration.

Inspired by her curatorship at the Louvre Museum, Morrison returned to Princeton in the fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled “The Foreigner’s Home“.

Above: Toni Morrison

“We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores.

These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble.

It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. 

Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources.

The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening.

Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow.“

Toni Morrison, Burn This Book (2009)

On 17 November 2017, Princeton University dedicated Morrison Hall (a building previously called West College) in her honor.

Above: Morrison Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA

In May 2010, Morrison appeared at PEN World Voices for a conversation with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature and specifically van Niekerk’s 2004 novel Agaat.

Morrison wrote books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who was a painter and a musician.

Slade died of pancreatic cancer on 22 December 2010, aged 45, when Morrison’s novel Home (2012) was half-completed.

In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Rutgers University – New Brunswick.

During the commencement ceremony, she delivered a speech on the “pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity and truth“.

Morrison had stopped working on her latest novel when her son died in 2010, later explaining:

“I stopped writing until I began to think, he would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop.

‘Please, Mom, I’m dead, could you keep going?‘”

She completed Home and dedicated it to her son Slade. 

Published in 2012, it is the story of a Korean War veteran in the segregated United States of the 1950s who tries to save his sister from brutal medical experiments at the hands of a white doctor.

In August 2012, Oberlin College became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society, an international literary society founded in 1993, dedicated to scholarly research of Morrison’s work.

Above: Seal of Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, USA

Morrison’s 11th novel, God Help the Child, was published in 2015.

It follows Bride, an executive in the fashion and beauty industry whose mother tormented her as a child for being dark-skinned, a trauma that has continued to dog Bride.

Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board of The Nation, a magazine started in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.

Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, on 5 August 2019, from complications of pneumonia.

She was 88 years old.

Above: Montefiore Medical Center, The Bronx, New York, USA

Morrison spoke openly about American politics and race relations.

In writing about the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, she claimed that since Whitewater, Bill Clinton was being mistreated in the same way black people often are:

Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs:

White skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President.

Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.

After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

The phrase “our first black president” was adopted as a positive by Bill Clinton supporters.

When the Congressional Black Caucus honored the former President at its dinner in Washington, DC, on 29 September 2001, for instance, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the chair, told the audience that Clinton “took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president“.

In the context of the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign, Morrison stated to Time magazine:

“People misunderstood that phrase.

I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him.

I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp.

I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.” 

Above: US President Bill Clinton (r. 1993 – 2001)

In the Democratic primary contest for the 2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton, though expressing admiration and respect for the latter. 

When he won, Morrison said she felt like an American for the first time.

She said:

“I felt very powerfully patriotic when I went to the inauguration of Barack Obama.

I felt like a kid.“

Above: US President Barack Obama (r. 2009 – 2017)

In April 2015, speaking of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Walter Scott – three unarmed black men killed by white police officers – Morrison said:

“People keep saying:

‘We need to have a conversation about race.’

This is the conversation.

I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back.

And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman.

Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.“

Above: Michael Brown Jr. (1996 – 2014)

Above: Eric Garner police confrontation (1970 – 2014)

Above: Screenshot from witness’s video, showing Officer Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott (1965 – 2015)

After the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, Morrison wrote an essay, “Mourning for Whiteness“, published in the 21 November 2016 issue of The New Yorker.

In it she argues that white Americans are so afraid of losing privileges afforded them by their race that white voters elected Trump, whom she described as being “endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan“, in order to keep the idea of white supremacy alive.

Above: US President Donald Trump

Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison did not identify her works as feminist.

When asked in a 1998 interview, “Why distance oneself from feminism?” she replied:

“In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can’t take positions that are closed.

Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book – leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.” 

She went on to state that she thought it “off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I’m involved in writing some kind of feminist tract.

I don’t subscribe to patriarchy, and I don’t think it should be substituted with matriarchy.

I think it’s a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things.“

In 2012, she responded to a question about the difference between black and white feminists in the 1970s.

“Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves“, she explained.

“They were not the same thing.

And also the relationship with men.

Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.“

Above: Toni Morrison

W. S. Kottiswari writes in Postmodern Feminist Writers (2008) that Morrison exemplifies characteristics of “postmodern feminism” by “altering Euro-American dichotomies by rewriting a history written by mainstream historians” and by her usage of shifting narration in Beloved and Paradise.

Kottiswari states:

“Instead of Western logocentric abstractions, Morrison prefers the powerful vivid language of women of color.

She is essentially postmodern since her approach to myth and folklore is revisionist.“

Many of Toni Morrison’s works have been cited by scholars as significant contributions to black feminism, reflecting themes of race, gender, and sexual identity within her narratives.

Barbara Smith’s 1977 essay “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” argues that Toni Morrison’s Sula is a work of black feminism, as it presents a lesbian perspective that challenges heterosexual relationships and the conventional family unit.

Smith states:

“Consciously or not, Morrison’s work poses both lesbian and feminist questions about black women’s autonomy and their impact upon each other’s lives.”

Above: American writer Barbara Smith

Hilton Als’s 2003 profile in The New Yorker notes that:

“Before the late sixties, there was no real Black Studies curriculum in the academy — let alone a post-colonial-studies program or a feminist one.

As an editor and author, Morrison, backed by the institutional power of Random House, provided the material for those discussions to begin.”

Toni Morrison consistently advocated for feminist ideas that challenge the dominance of the white patriarchal system, frequently rejecting the notion of writing from the perspective of the “white male gaze“. 

Above: Toni Morrison

Feminist political activist Angela Davis notes that:

“Toni Morrison’s project resides precisely in the effort to discredit the notion that this white male gaze must be omnipresent.”

Above: American writer Angela Davis

In a 1998 episode of Charlie Rose, Toni Morrison responded to a review of Sula, stating:

“I remember a review of Sula in which the reviewer said:

‘One day, she,’ meaning me, ‘will have to face up ‘to the real responsibilities, and get mature, ‘and write about the real confrontation ‘for black people, which is white people.‘

As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze, and I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”

In a 2015 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Toni Morrison reiterated her intention to write without the white gaze, stating:

“What I’m interested in is writing without the gaze, without the white gaze.

In so many earlier books by African-American writers, particularly the men, I felt that they were not writing to me.

But what interested me was the African-American experience throughout whichever time I spoke of.

It was always about African-American culture and people — good, bad, indifferent, whatever — but that was, for me, the Universe.”

Regarding the racial environment in which she wrote, Toni Morrison stated:

“Navigating a white male world was not threatening.

It wasn’t even interesting.

I was more interesting than they were.

I knew more than they did.

And I wasn’t afraid to show it.”

Above: Toni Morrison

In a 1986 interview with Sandi Russell, Toni Morrison stated that she wrote primarily for black women, explaining:

“I write for black women.

We are not addressing the men, as some white female writers do.

We are not attacking each other, as both black and white men do.

Black women writers look at things in an unforgiving / loving way.

They are writing to repossess, rename, re-own.”

Above: Toni Morrison

In a 2003 interview, when asked about the labels “black” and “female” being attached to her work, Toni Morrison replied:

“I can accept the labels because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from.

It doesn’t limit my imagination.

It expands it.

It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.”

Above: Toni Morrison

In a 1987 article in The New York Times, Toni Morrison argued for the greatness of being a black woman, stating:

“I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.

I really do.

So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer.

It just got bigger.”

Above: Toni Morrison

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, includes writing by Morrison. 

Visitors can see her quote after they have walked through the section commemorating individual victims of lynching.

Above: National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, USA

If there is one thing that defines Toni Morrison beyond her literary genius, it is her dedication to her craft.

She wrote at 4 a.m. while raising two children alone, demonstrating an unyielding commitment to storytelling.

Her prose, precise and faithful to speech, transcends fiction, becoming poetry, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music.

Her work is a testament to the idea that literature is not just about what is written — it is about the passion and perseverance that bring words to life.

Above: Toni Morrison

These five writers, each in their own way, prove that literature is not just an act of creation but an act of self-revelation.

Their works are mirrors reflecting their deepest struggles, philosophies and perceptions of the world.

Some, like Kielland and Kazantzakis, challenged established thought.

Others, like Stegner, wove fiction from personal experience.

Some, like Morrison and Twain, used language itself as a tool for transformation.

Though they are no longer with us, their words remain.

Their books are not just stories — they are testaments to their inner worlds, the keels upon which their legacies are built.

As writers, we too must ask ourselves:

What framework are we building with our words?

What truths do we seek to understand?

What of ourselves are we revealing with each page we write?