Wayward Saints

LitStack Recs: A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople & Wayward Saints

A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople, by Patrick Leigh Fermor A classic of the travel memoir genre, A Time of Gifts is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his trek by foot from the Netherlands to Turkey in 1933-34. Though, famously, Fermor didn’t actually write the book until decades […]

LitStack Rec: Havanas in Camelot & Wayward Saints

Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays, by William Styron Though William Styron is best know for his novels (The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice), and a late memoir chronicling his depression (Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness), he wrote wonderful essays that draw on his power of insight, intellectual acuity, […]

Birthdays

On this day, August 11, in 1921, Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York. He was author of the 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a fictionalized account of his own family’s history, for which he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize. One year later, the book was made into the popular television miniseries, “Roots”, which was seen by a record breaking 130 million viewers. He also was the ghostwriter for The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He died of a heart attack in 1992; he was 80.

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.