James Metcalf on the fictionality of the latest archaeological page-turners
Stephen Puddicombe looks at the unusual appeal of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
Ciaran Rafferty investigates the science of book classification
In literature this tradition extends much further back , Mary Shelley may never have devoted her teenage years to Frankenstein without having fallen for Percy Shelley as a young girl, and Seneca’s Letters to a Stoic would have been rather aimless without a recipient. But some cases seem entirely pointless without somebody to admire.
JS Mill after the death of wife Harriet Taylor claimed his writings were a loss for the departure of his soulmate. After waiting 21 years to be with her, their marriage only lasted for seven more but her impact on his works was colossal with him writing-in entire chapters at her insistence. JS Mill appeared to want for little in his life and in true epicurean fashion emphasized the good years that he had spent with ‘The Greatest Friendship of My Life’.
As for friendships, that of Neal Cassady was a defining one for 20th Century pop culture. Jack Kerouac had met him through Allen Ginsberg who hailed him in Howl, while Kerouac’s relationship with Cassady was detailed in On the Road, presenting Cassady as the heroic but flawed Dean Moriarty, while Kerouac, as Sal Paradise, was the dreamer who tagged along for the ride. On the back of this Cassady joined Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and was immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Of all the muses to have happened upon a writer Zelda LaSayre must be one of the greatest. Living a life stuck somewhere between fact and fiction F. Scott Fitzgerald and his beloved Zelda travelled throughout the US and Europe as the golden couple of the Jazz Age. She seemed quite unpopular with Ernest Hemingway, and looking at his letters he was undoubtedly whipped, but of his 5 novels published the first was to win her back, the third and fourth were about her and the last was unfinished. The second was The Great Gatsby, written in their Honeymoon Period and regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century.
Of course Charles Bukowski did fine without ever really being in a happy marriage, and JK Rowling was a single mother at the time of writing Harry Potter. But Charles Bukowski wrote about being miserable and JK Rowling's soppy side was just a little underpronounced in the wizardry series.
So this is what a feature looks like. Very nice.
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