blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

For several years now, Cormac McCarthy has received his due as one of the best living writers around. However, he has never had the reputation of being a particularly accessible writer. If you’ve had trouble reading McCarthy’s work, you’re not alone. Even Harold Bloom, one of today’s most eminent readers, confessed to two false starts reading Blood Meridian. The evocative power of the novel’s violence, Bloom said, was difficult to bear. And indeed, as a distinct writer, McCarthy’s work can require a certain sensitivity and attentiveness to behold. Yet despite its difficulties, legions of Cormac McCarthy’s fans will assure you the extra effort the work requires is well worth it.

The author himself once referred to it as “my apocryphal county.” A Frankensteinian creation of two very real regions, Yoknapatawpha County is home to a number of William Faulkner's most famous novels and stories, including the famed Snopes family trilogy, which features the novels The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). Faulkner’s fictional county is a landscape fraught with struggle and conflict, a place of drifters and vagrants, the morally apathetic and the socioeconomically disenfranchised. It’s a region of extreme racial tension and inequality, with a storied history of slavery, succession, KKK activity, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination. 

Which is perhaps why it makes perfect sense Faulkner chose to set so much of his work in this invented-yet-wholly-reflective-of-real-life setting, particularly his Snopes family novels. But to truly understand the choice of Yoknapatawpha for the Snopes, one must understand more clearly how the county came into being and the ways in which Faulkner pulled from history — and his own life — to create such a haunting, mythic place. 

Chief expositor of the "Jazz Age," F. Scott Fitzgerald's name has become synonymous with the 1910s, '20s, and '30s. No other literary figure proffers the pictures of that generation like Fitzgerald does through his four novels and numerous short stories. Born in 1896, the experience of his characters in the first few decades of the twentieth century is largely contemporaneous with his own. Even outside of This Side of Paradise, explicitly described by the author as semi-autobiographical, rarely can we find a story of Fitzgerald's not permeated with similar autobiography: in fact, we often times see very obvious correlations between Fitzgerald's character's lives and his own. Here are five interesting facts about F. Scott Fitzgerald.

When Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, it contained just twelve poems. He fronted the money for the publication himself and almost no copies were sold. The now-iconic photo of young, jaunty-hatted Whitman that served in place of the author’s name cast an odd shadow over what were already terribly peculiar poems. At best, the volume of billowing, exuberant free-verse was considered a curiosity. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance, appreciated its attempt to revive the spirit of transcendentalism, but found the verse itself a bit loose. At worst, the collection was thought of as an abomination. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was said to have thrown his copy into a fire. Boston’s District Attorney found the book to be obscene and attempted to suppress it. It even cost Whitman his job after the Secretary of the Interior read it and deemed it offensive.

In the Santa Fe nursing home in which Evan S. Connell, Jr. spent the final years of his life, he spoke so little that some residents thought him to be mute. He kept to himself, generally, granting few interviews and was perpetually turning down teaching positions. Spouseless and childless, some might say Connell lived the definition of a solitary life. It seems as if writing was where he displaced the majority of his vitality. Connell has a reputation among writers and readers for valuing his writing above all else. There’s one anecdote where the author, upon seeing two attractive girls sunbathing on the roof outside his writing room, drew the blinds. Finally able to return to writing free of distractions, he was happy.

In June 2015, Garrison Keillor announced he would be retiring from hosting his popular radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. At first many people were skeptical that Keillor would truly retire. Like a star athlete, he has a reputation for betraying such promises. Yet this time, it seems to be true. He has already selected his replacement: mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile, who has received Keillor’s enthusiastic endorsement. While he may be stepping down, fans can still hope the 72 year-old host will continue to have a contributing role in broadcasting the world of Lake Wobegon. What is Keillor so eager to do in his retirement? “To stay home and read books,” he said.

Richard Wright is a giant name in American literature. His novel Native Son (1940) became a bestseller nearly as soon as it was published by Harper & Brothers, just before the United States entered into World War II. With the release of Native Son, Wright also became the wealthiest African American writer in the country. Yet there’s a lot you may not know about Richard Wright and the influence his life and work have had on thinkers of the Civil Rights movement, anti-colonial figures, and fiction writers from across the globe.

Over the last several months, speculation ran high about Harper Lee’s second novel, Go Set a Watchman. Then, following the release of the book on July 14th, negative reviews flooded the news. Not only have critics claimed the novel is “a mess,” many have been shocked by Atticus' transformation from hero to racist. Beyond the literary merits of the book, strange circumstances surround its publication. So the question arises: should one read the so-called sequel of To Kill a Mockingbird?

Richard Russo believes in books — the people who write them, the people who publish them, and the people who get them into the hands of readers. As one of three Vice Presidents of the Author's Guild, along with Judy Blume and James Shapiro, he has put on the mantle of defender of what he calls, “the writing life.” As such, he says he wants to see all areas of the literary "ecosystem" flourish. To maintain the health of this ecosystem, he has taken an active role in promoting young writers, supporting libraries, and advocating for the diversity of the publishing industry.

It has often been said that the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson are best experienced as a series of profound quotes strung together.While that may be the case, Henry David Thoreau, one of Emerson’s fellow seminal transcendentalists and the author of Walden (1854) and Cape Cod (1865), has an oeuvre that is equally laden with excellent quotations. “The mass of men,” he says in Walden, his classic rumination on solitude, self-reliance, and nature, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”Sometimes the cure for that desperation, Thoreau’s writing seems to suggest, is an expertly deployed quote.