Herman Melville

LitStack Recs: Bartleby, The Scrivener & The Emperor’s Blades

Bartleby, the Scrivener, by Herman Melville Overworked employees, endless legal documents to be copied, the futility of dead letters—it’s no wonder Bartleby, Melville’s titular anti-hero is in a bad way. Whether he’s mad or not depends on who you ask, though in Melville’s world, the law copyist, or scrivener, who […]

Literary Board Games

Flavorwire discovered the cure for the frigid winter temperatures when you’ve finished a great book and still aren’t keen to go outside: Literary Board Games. When it’s cold outside, book nerds tend to hibernate with their novels. But what about a bookish activity that’s also social (and indoors)? This week, […]

Birthdays

On this day, June 21, in 1905, Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris, France. This champion of existentialism, which posits that beliefs come from not from merely thinking about life, but through feeling and acting upon it, was drafted into the French Army in 1939 and captured by the Germans a year later, spending 9 months as a POW. His 1943 treatise, Being and Nothingness, written to prove that free will exists, remains a monumental philosophical work. Politically active throughout his life, he refused the Nobel Prize in 1964 because he felt a writer should not become “an institution.” Long time companion to feminist Simone de Beauvoir, he died of edema of the lung in 1980 at age 74.

Birthdays

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.