How Mark Twain gave us Thurgood Marshall

Margaret Mitchell and Mark Twain are two authors who are often discussed in the context of racism in literature. Gone With the Wind  and The Adventures of Huck Finn  are two of the most frequently banned books across the U.S.

But while debate rages in school boards across the country, it’s interesting to note that in their personal lives Mitchell and Twain were quite generous to aspiring black professional students. Over a number of years Mitchell secretly funded dozens of African American medical students at Morehouse college and elsewhere, helping to lift up a class of black professionals in the segregated South. 

And while Twain’s philanthropy centered on one student in particular, it may have had an even more powerful impact on society. Warner T. McGuinn, the man whose room and board Twain paid at Yale Law School, graduated #1 in his class and went on to become a force in the early civil rights movement in Maryland and a mentor to Thurgood Marshall. In a letter to the dean of the law school, Twain explained his reasoning for supporting McGuinn:

“I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask for the benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them, and the shame is ours, not theirs, and we should pay for it.”

 Interesting, no?

H.L. Mencken Steps In It

In 1917, H.L.  Mencken published an essay about what he saw as the abject, cultural wasteland of the American South, titled “The Sahara of the Bozart-” Bozart being a low-brow play on the term ‘beaux-arts.’ You can read the whole thing here. Now, there are a whole host of things one could say about his wacky racial theories (Anglo-Saxon blood is apparently best, Celtic blood the worst, with Blacks and Frenchmen somewhere in the middle), but I’ll just pick out a few choice lines from the essay to give you the gist of his argument:

“Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity.”

“There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac;”

“Once you have counted James Branch Cabell (a lingering survivor of the ancient regime: a scarlet dragon-fly imbedded in opaque amber) you will not find a single Southern prose writer who can actually write.”

“There is a state (Georgia) with more than half the area of Italy and more population than either Denmark or Norway, and yet in thirty years it has not produced a single idea.”

He sure doesn’t pull any punches. But one of the chief risks of being an arrogant, condescending blowhard, is the possibility that the object of your scorn might just turn around and prove you to be an idiot.

As it turned out, the timing of Mencken’s essay coincided with a Southern literary renaissance that would make any region of the world envious. Writers like William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Kathryn Anne Porter were already hard at work and would come to share 6 Pulitzers and a Nobel Prize between them. The “Fugitive” poets at Vanderbilt University were emerging at the same time. And this early group would inspire a follow-on generation of southern writers like Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy, William Styron, Harper Lee, Truman Capote and John Kennedy Toole. (Not too shabby, South!)

But speaking of tools, Mencken was no dummy. Rather than claiming he had been wrong when reprinting his famous essay, he simply prefaced it with this audacious claim: “there is reason to believe that my attack had something to do with that revival of Southern letters which followed in the middle 1920 's.”

I’m  not buying it, but well-played Mr. Mencken. Well-played.

Literary Lucre

The idea of money, both the unlikely accumulation of it and the nerve racking experience of watching it run out, can be a pretty powerful thread to pull the reader through a book. It’s as universal a theme as there is. But you don’t have to read Og Mandino or Horatio Alger to see it done. Just consider these lasting images from some of our literary greats:

• The coffee can piggy bank nailed to the floor of the tenement closet in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – always dutifully fed, and all-too-frequently raided in times of need.
• The bags of gold buried under the brick floor in George Eliot’s Silas Marner  - which are dug up for continual counting, but disappear at the hands of a thief.
• The small stash of silver hidden away in the earthen walls of Wang Lung’s farm house in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth – a stash that is multiplied and invested in land until it becomes the makings of a “great house”.
• The forty dollar kitty of the westward-bound Joad family in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath - a precarious sum that keeps us on pins and needles to see whether it can get their run-down jalopy across the desert and into California.

Money can be the driving force of the story, as are the boons bestowed by Pip’s mysterious benefactor in Dickens’ Great Expectations.  It can raise the stakes of the plot, as do Bingley’s and Darcy’s fortunes in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It can provide a mysterious back-story for a character as does Jay Gatsby’s ill-gotten wealth in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  Or it can be the measure of the rise or fall of a protagonist, like those experienced by Scarlett in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. 

Money is something we’ve all got experience with (some more than others, to be sure) and it’s something that most of us keep a keen interest in throughout our lives. So while a good “up from nothing” story can appeal to all of us, it can be equally gripping to follow a monied protagonist- whether that’s Hank Reardon fighting to protect his wealth and his property in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged , or whether it’s Ebenezer Scrooge finding inspiration to share his wealth in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol .

I’m looking for more great books in this vein. Do any of you have any reading recommendations to share?

Author Look-Alikes: Round 6

The almond-shaped eyes with the little crease underneath, the rounded eyebrows and flawless complexion… they might hail from geographical antipodes, but I think it’s safe to say there’s a little Ashley Judd in Jhumpa Lahiri:

And how about a very young Margaret Mitchell? With those cheekbones and that ultra-serious gaze, she reminds me more than a little of Olivia Wilde:

Another certified looker in her youth, Pearl Buck matured into an amiable Aunt Bee type in her later years:

Now, this kind of match is rare. Look at the hairline, the eyebrows, the ears, the nose, the heavy eyelids- heck, look at everything but that beard and tell me Herman Melville and Hugh Grant aren’t one and the same:

Finally, we have to deal with David Foster Wallace and his persistent bandana at some point. Take away the scruff, the half-smirk, the glasses and about thirty years, and DFW could be reborn as Danny Laruso, AKA the Karate Kid:

Sweep the leg? I don't think so.

Vintage Mitchell

One more interesting tidbit from the Margaret Mitchell House:

Long before she was producing Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction, young  Margaret Mitchell was naturally producing non-Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction. Take, for example, this early, early story- written in her own girlish hand:

In case you can’t read the words through the glare of my cell-phone pictures, here is the full text below:

Two Little People

Two little people live in my backyard. One is named Tommy, and the other, Sarah. Tommy is the boldest and the bravest. Each morning he gets up and salutes Sarah, saying “Come Sarah, the sun has been up an hour you are very sleepy, my dear.” Sarah rubs her eyes. They go together and get breakfast. Sarah is lazy and lets Tommy do the work. She does not even cook her food, but eats it raw.

Every day they have a singing lesson. This is what they sing. “Quack, quack, quack,” for Tommy and Sarah are two ducks.

The End.

Not quite Pulitzer material, I admit. But you can’t help but be moved by the social commentary provided by Sarah’s unwillingness to wake-up, just as the post-bellum South was reticent to wake up to the harsh realities of reconstruction. Or the symbolism of the raw breakfast as a stand-in for man’s unfulfilled potential. Or how the skilled use of onomatopoeia reminds us all that we are all, at center, just brute animals striving for an unattainable transcendence.

How a pre-teen Mitchell accomplishes all that in just 10 or 11 sentences is downright remarkable, no?

Literary Atlanta

My little brother was in town this weekend, rounding out the list of Atlanta attractions he’s visited on previous trips. Our wanderings took us to the Oakland cemetery, where Margaret Mitchell is buried, and then to the Margaret Mitchell house downtown.

Now, the Margaret Mitchell House is a bit of a misnomer. It really should be called the Margaret Mitchell one-bedroom apartment, because that’s all the living space she took up in the grand three-story building that now bears her name. 

But hey, false advertising seems to have been a running theme in Ms. Mitchell’s life. She found herself engaged to five different men, falsified her resume to gain employment at the Atlanta Journal, and when talking about her masterpiece, Gone With the Wind,  tossed off this classic line: “In a weak moment I have written a book-” as if the muse attacked her one long weekend and she dashed the thing off on a whim. That weak moment actually lasted her a good ten years from start to finish.

Oh well, if you get caught up in Mitchell-mania, stop on in. It’s worth your time. You’ll see the apartment she referred to as “the Dump,” you’ll see the front door of the Tara movie set, and you’ll learn a thing or two you might not have known otherwise. (Fun fact, Scarlet was originally named Pansy O’Hara, and she lived not at Tara, but at Fontenoy Hall. Also, if Margaret Mitchell had her way, Rhett Butler would have been played not by Clark Gable, but… wait for it… Basil Rathbone. What a name!!)

Next up? The Ernest Hemingway museum in Oak Park, Illinois, which I’ll visit this coming weekend.

My life story- in ten authors or less

Like Wallace Thurman and Neal Cassady, I was born in Salt Lake City.

I went to the same high school as another Wallace, Wallace Stegner.  (and Roseanne Barr as a matter of fact. High School Musical was filmed there-yep, okay. I’ll stop.)

Like both Wallaces, I went on to the University of Utah. And like Thurman, I was a pre-med student while there.

Like Pearl Buck, I spent time abroad as a missionary.

Like Harper Lee I was once an airline reservations agent. Unlike Harper Lee, I didn’t have friends who funded a one-year sabbatical so that I could finally write my lasting literary masterpiece.

Which is why I’m a marketing slave in corporate America, which kind of makes be like Kurt Vonnegut, who worked as a PR man at GE before exploding onto the literary scene.

Like Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Mitchell, I now live in central Georgia. (But yikes, unlike  those illustrious southern belles, I hope to live past their average 46 year lifespan. Perhaps Erskine Caldwell, who was born just 20 miles away and lived to age 83, bodes a little better for me.)

What about you? Who shares your biography?

Bookish Nerd Bait: Vol. 1

We thought we'd start sharing some of our favorite quotes from the books we love, and do it in a way that's easy for you ladies to share on your pinboards. Here is the first installment. Enjoy.