2,435 words
Part 1 of 4
When the “New Zealander”[1] Lionel Terry is recalled at all it is generally by liberals and Leftists, who judge him to be nothing more than a psychotic racist murderer. (more…)
2,435 words
Part 1 of 4
When the “New Zealander”[1] Lionel Terry is recalled at all it is generally by liberals and Leftists, who judge him to be nothing more than a psychotic racist murderer. (more…)
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed. “He is too many people, if he’s any good.” This dictum holds particularly true in the case of Jack London (1876–1916). For biographers and critics as well, he is the most elusive of subjects. As a person, as a writer, and most of all as a man of ideas, he continually takes on different and sharply contrasting forms.
Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney in San Francisco on January 12, 1876. An adventurer and Jack of all trades in his youth, London achieved fame and fortune as a fiction writer and journalist. But he never forgot his working class roots and remained a life-long advocate of workers’ rights, unionism, and revolutionary socialism. (See his essay “What Life Means to Me.”)
I was born in the working-class. Early I discovered enthusiasm, ambition, and ideals; and to satisfy these became the problem of my child-life. My environment was crude and rough and raw. I had no outlook, but an uplook rather. My place in society was at the bottom. Here life offered nothing but sordidness and wretchedness, both of the flesh and the spirit; for here flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented.
A. R. D. Fairburn, 1904–1957, is not usually identified with the “Right.” As a central figure in the development of a New Zealand national literature, much of the contemporary self-appointed literary establishment would wish to identify Fairburn with Marxism or liberalism, as were other leading literary friends of Fairburn’s such as the Communist R. A. K. Mason. (more…)
1,113 words
Slovak translation here
Years ago, when a young woman set out from Alabama to go to college in California, her uncle told her the story of how California was born. America, you see, was populated by people who just did not fit in back in Europe: religious fanatics, horse thieves, bail jumpers, fortune seekers, and other footloose folk. When they settled on the East Coast, the ones who didn’t fit in there moved a little further West and settled. Those who didn’t fit in there, moved still further West. (more…)