Booth Tarkington (1869-1946)

The prolific writings of American author Newton Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) include the novels "Penrod" and "Seventeen" and many successful Broadway plays.

Booth Tarkington was born on July 29, 1869, the second child of lawyer John S. Tarkington and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington, in Indianapolis, Ind., a city which was always his home. His childhood was as happy and secure as his doting, well-educated, church-going, and prosperous parents could make it. He showed an early interest in writing and, like his fictional Penrod, produced his plays in the family hayloft. After mediocre achievement in high school he was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy.

The family suffered financial difficulties, so Tarkington entered first a local business college and then Purdue University to study art. When family fortunes revived, his mother insisted on sending him to Princeton, from which he could not receive a degree because he lacked the requisite classics background, but where he acquired a broad education and formed many associations which served him well during his life. He left Princeton in 1893 and spent the next 5 years writing, without much success in publishing his work. After McClure's Magazine serialized The Gentleman from Indiana in 1899, his novels and short stories appeared regularly in it and other magazines. In 1902 he married Louisa Fletcher and served one term in the Indiana Legislature as a conservative Republican. In 1903 he made his first trip to Europe, to which he returned regularly. A daughter was born in 1906.

From 1907 to 1910 Tarkington spent his time writing plays, mostly comedies such as Your Humble Servant and Springtime (both 1909), many in collaboration with Harry Wilson and Julian Street. Between 1914 and 1924 he wrote some plays and a trilogy of novels chronicling the rise and fall of family fortunes in midwestern industrial society. One of these, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. His best novel, Alice Adams (1920), also received the Pulitzer Prize. During these years he produced his famous characters modeled on his own boyhood, the title character of Penrod (1914) and Penrod and Sam (1916) and Willie Baxter of Seventeen (1916). During both world wars he devoted much effort to writing Allied propaganda.

In 1911 his first wife divorced him, and in 1912 he married Susanah Robinson. They had no children; his daughter, Laurel, died in 1923. Tarkington began losing his eyesight in the late 1920s, and he was blind in his later years. He learned to dictate and continued to write. On May 19, 1946, he died in Indianapolis.

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Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

The French statesman and writer Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was the author of "Democracy in America, " the first classic commentary on American government written by a foreigner.

Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris on July 29, 1805, of an aristocratic Norman family. He studied law in Paris (1823-1826) and then was appointed an assistant magistrate at Versailles (1827).

The July 1830 Revolution which, with middle-class support, put Louis Philippe on the throne, required a loyalty oath of Tocqueville as a civil servant. He was suspect because his aristocratic family opposed the new order and was demoted to a minor judgeship without pay. Tocqueville and another magistrate, Gustave de Beaumont, asked to study prison reform in America, then an interest of the French government. Granted permission but not funds (their families paid their expenses), Tocqueville and Beaumont spent from May 1831 to February 1832 in the United States. Their travel and interviews resulted in On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France (1832). Then followed Tocqueville's famous Democracy in America (vol. 1, 1835; vol. 2, 1840), an immediate best seller. By 1850 it had run through 13 editions.

Tocqueville was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839. He opposed King Louis Philippe but after the Revolution of 1848 again served as a deputy. Tocqueville was foreign minister for a few months in 1849 and retired from public affairs at the end of 1851. During his last years he wrote The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856). He died in Cannes on April 16, 1859.


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Beatrix Potter (1866-1943)

* Born: 28 July 1866

* Birthplace: London, England

* Died: 22 December 1943

* Best Known As: Creator of the Peter Rabbit children's books

Name at birth: Helen Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter was the author and illustrator of a popular series of children's books that includes The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), The Tailor of Gloucester (1903) and The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies (1909). Illustrated with watercolors, her simple and unsentimental stories for children involved the adventures of Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, the hedgehog Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and others. Between the 1890s and 1920s she published more than a dozen books, and sets of her small books have remained popular for more than a century and sold millions of copies. She bought farmland and cared for her aging parents until she was in her 40s, then married the lawyer William Heelis in 1913 and devoted her later years to breeding sheep and fighting for land conservation.

From the age of 15 until she was past 30, Potter kept a journal written in a secret code, a code not broken until nearly 20 years after her death... For more than ten years Potter worked on scientifically accurate paintings of various types of fungi.

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Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965)

(born July 24, 1886, Tokyo, Japan — died July 30, 1965, Yugawara) Japanese novelist. Though his earliest short stories have affinities with those of Edgar Allan Poe and the French Decadents, Tanizaki later turned to exploring more traditional Japanese ideals of beauty. His novels include Some Prefer Nettles (1928 – 29), which tells of marital unhappiness that is in fact a conflict between the new and the old, with the implication that the old will win; and his masterpiece, The Makioka Sisters (1943 – 48; film, 1983), which describes, in the leisurely style of classical Japanese literature, the inroads of the harsh modern world on traditional society. His writings are characterized by eroticism and ironic wit.

Junichiro Tanizaki is a Japanese novelist who lived from 1886 to 1965. He is one of Japan's most famous authors, and his work is widely read all over the world. Junichiro Tanizaki is well known for his experimental writing style paired with very traditionally formatted Japanese narrative. His work is characterized by very strange and often tormented characters who struggle with the clash between Westernization and traditional Japanese values, much like Junichiro Tanizaki himself. Many of his novels are also frankly erotic, although the eroticism tends to take a nontraditional and sometimes non-consensual form. Several of Tanizaki's books were later adapted into films as well.

Junichiro Tanizaki was born into a wealthy merchant family in Tokyo, and in his early years, he was fascinated by Westernization and modernism, living for some time in a Western style house in Yokohama, a very bohemian section of Tokyo, with his wife and child. Junichiro Tanizaki also briefly attended Tokyo University, leaving in 1910 with his fees unpaid. There is some debate over Tanizaki's nonpayment of his University fees, with some biographers arguing that he chose not to pay them as a personal protest, and others suggesting that he was not financially able to continue his studies. Tanizaki published several short stories during his time in Yokohama, including The Tattooer, which hints at the unique macabre style that Junichiro Tanizaki would later develop.

The life of Junichiro Tanizaki took a radical turn with the Kanto earthquake in 1923. His home in Yokohama was leveled, and he ended up leaving his wife and child and moving to Kyoto, traditionally a very old fashioned city that placed a high value on Japanese culture before Westernization. Junichiro Tanizaki himself began to change, and he fed his interest in Japanese history and culture, leading to the production of some of the finest Japanese novels of the 20th century.

Naomi (1924), Tanizaki's first novel from this period, is the story of a very traditionally raised engineer who falls in love with a young Japanese woman who has embraced modern culture. He continued the theme of clashes between traditionalism and modernism in Some Prefer Nettles (1929), a novel about a man who ultimately commits suicide when he decides he cannot survive in the modern world, despite his earlier love of the modern life. Junichiro Tanizaki wrote a number of books about this struggle between values, and they are all characterized by sad, strange characters who leave the reader with an oddly uncomfortable feeling.

Junichiro Tanizaki was also influenced by the years leading to the Second World War, turning away from modern Japanese militarism and looking back to other eras. The Secret History of the Lord Musashi (1935) and The Makioka Sisters (1948) both stem from Tanizaki's interest in Japanese history and culture. Both books were heavily researched and reflect a love and respect for previous eras in Japanese history, and the people who inhabit these stories seem more vivid and alive than Tanizaki's heavily Westernized characters.

As Junichiro Tanizaki neared the end of his life, his nostalgia and frustration with the turn away from traditional Japanese values colored much of his work. He played with themes of fabrication and fable telling, implying that modern Japanese culture was built more upon fiction than reality, in brutal novels such as The Key (1956) and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961).

The work of Junichiro Tanizaki is haunting and compelling, and also brilliantly written. His craft as a storyteller makes him a beloved author, even if his books often state difficult truths and criticisms of the culture they were written in. The legacy of Junichiro Tanizaki lies in his unflinching look at the rapid changes Japan went through in the 20th century, as well his meditations on history and traditional values.


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Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)

* Born: 24 July 1802

* Birthplace: Villers-Cotterets, France

* Died: 5 December 1870 (natural causes)

* Best Known As: The author of The Three Musketeers

Alexandre Dumas wrote the classic adventure novel The Three Musketeers and some of the most famous and popular stories in French literature. Beginning in 1844 he had a string of brilliantly successful books, publishing The Three Musketeers (1844, first printed in serial form) and following it with The Count of Monte Cristo (1845), Twenty Years After (1845) and The Black Tulip (1850), among many others. A great celebrity writer of the day, he was almost as famous for his reckless spending and lavish lifestyle, and he was frequently in debt. In his last days he was supported by his illegitimate son, the author Alexandre Dumas the Younger.

Dumas and his son are often referred to as Dumas peré (father) and Dumas fils (son)... Alexandre Dumas was one-quarter black; his grandfather had married a slave while serving as a government official in what is now Haiti.


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Robert Chambers (1802-1871)

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Robert Chambers was a prolific journalist of Edinburgh. A well-know literary and intellectual figure at his time, he is primarily remembered today as the then secret author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), a work which caused a great sensation in Victorian Britain. His circle of friends included the Combes brothers, Robert Cox, the journalist Alexander Ireland, and the Glasgow professor of astronomy J.P. Nichol. Chambers initially intended his book to be a "philosophy of phrenology".

Vestiges drew heavily on the naturalistic rhetoric and especially the doctrine of the natural laws from Combe's Constitution of Man. Vestiges took the phrenological doctrine of natural laws and brought it to cultural territory it might not otherwise have reached. Vestiges is now usually remembered for the controversy it initiated over transmutation (evolution).

Charles Darwin later remarked that Vestiges was important in preparing many people to accept his own theory of evolution. Reading the book in a post-Darwinian world often leads to the skewed representation of Vestiges as a flawed precursor of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). However, during the 1840s and 1850s Vestiges was the only 'evolution' book readers in the English speaking world were familiar with. Rather than dismissing the book as flawed, we might be impressed by how remarkably modern the book reads today.

Vestiges argues for a general "development" theory. Although much of the critical invective directed against the book focused on the issue of speciation- readers of Vestiges found a grand tale of the "development" or progress of nature from swirling clouds of interstellar gas, to the geological ages of the Earth, to the increasing complexity of organic forms and the improvement of man. Only in 1884 (long after Chambers' death) with the publication of the 12th edition, was it revealed that Vestiges was written by Robert Chambers.

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Robert Chambers