Literature

Literature

PAGE CONTENTS:

Pot Pourri

Beowulf

Crossword Puzzles

1984

Frankenstein

Literary Monsters

Crime and Punishment

The World's First Great Novel

The World's Greatest Library

A Brief History of the Encyclopedia

Samuel Johnson - Doctor Dictionary

Pot Pourri

Edgar Allan Poe introduced mystery fiction's first fictional detective, Auguste C. Dupin, in his 1841 story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

Isaac Asimov wrote more than 500 books during his lifetime(1920-1992). He has the honor of being the only person who has authored a book in each of the Dewey Decimal System classifications.

Samuel Beckett's play Breath is the shortest recorded play ever written, consisting of 35 seconds of human cries and breathes.

Edgar Allan Poe introduced mystery fiction's first fictional detective, Auguste C. Dupin, in his 1841 story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind between 1926 and 1929. In her early drafts, the main character was named "Pansy O'Hara" and the O'Hara plantation we know as Tara was called "Fountenoy Hall."

Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published March 20, 1852. It was the first American novel to sell one million copies.

Dr. Seuss wrote "Green Eggs and Ham" after his editor dared him to write a book using fewer than 50 different words.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), America's most famous female poet, published only seven poems in her lifetime; all were published anonymously and against her will. It wasn't until after her death, at 56, that her nearly 2000 poems were discovered.

Before writing 007 novels, Ian Fleming studied languages at Munich and Geneva universities, worked with Reuters in Moscow, and then became a banker and stockbroker.

Voltaire considered Shakespeare's works so deplorable that he referred to the Bard as "that drunken fool."

In the book, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, is one sentence that is 823 words long. When Victor wrote to his editor inquiring about their opinion of the manuscript, he wrote, "?" They answered, "!"

In 1939 an author named Ernest Vincent wrote a 50,000 word novel called Gadsby. The only thing unusual about the novel is that there is not a single letter e in the whole thing.

Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story. Before he wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget," the genre was totally unknown in English or American literature.

John Milton used 8,000 different words in his poem, "Paradise Lost."

Barbara Bush's book about her English Springer Spaniel, Millie's book, was on the bestseller list for 29 weeks. Millie was the most popular "First Dog" in history.

Marco Polo dictated the story of his adventures while in prison.

Robert Louis Stevenson said he had envisioned the entire story "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" in a dream and simply recorded it the way he saw it. Stevenson claimed to be able to dream plots for his stories at will.

The life of Homer, author of the two earliest monuments of Greek literature, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," is a mystery. His name, date and place of birth, and very existence have been disputed since late antiquity. Most scholars agree that he lived, if at all, in the latter part of the eighth century B.C., around 725-700 B.C.

Socrates, one of the most famous Greek philosophers, never wrote down a single word of his teachings. The only knowledge we have of his thinking today comes from the notes taken by his great student, Plato.

The last dictionary that Noah Webster wrote contained 70,000 words and their meanings. He wrote it with no help and by hand. (Source: Useless Trivia)

Aesop - legendary Greek writer of the famous Fables, was less than 3 1/2 feet tall.

L. Frank Baum, the author of the "The Wizard of Oz," couldn't swim. He always smoked a cigar when he was wading in the water so he could tell when he was getting in too deep.

Murderer John Horwood was hanged on April 13, 1821. His skin was used to bind a book describing the dissection of his body by surgeon Richard Smith.

Copyrights are not forever. Typically, a copyright lasts for 50 years past the natural life of the original author.

The Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, stores 18 million books on approximately 850 km (530 miles) of bookshelves. The collections include 119 million items, 2 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4 million maps and 53 million manuscripts.

John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's Progress, wrote most of his famous book while in jail. He was imprisoned for twelve years for preaching without a license.

It took Leo Tolstoy six years to write "War & Peace".

Famous writer Oscar Wilde bragged that he gave his talent to his work and saved his genius for his life.

The word 'dude' was coined by Oscar Wilde and his friends. It is a combination of the words 'duds' and 'attitude'

William Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets.

The first version of “A Christmas Carol” made its debut in 1908.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published March 20, 1852. It was the first American novel to sell one million copies.

Reportedly, Louisa May Alcott didn't want to write her classic novel, Little Women. She despised young girls and wrote the bestseller for the money.

Oh, %#$#@
"A curiosity-breeding little joker" is how Mark Twain described the typewriter. His Life on the Mississippi (1883) was the first book-length manuscript published that had been written on one of the new machines. It's rumored that a Twain's descendant wrote the first novel on a windows based computer. After losing a chapter when the machine crashed, she is said to have called the computer a %$#@! little *$%#@. Source: JUST CURIOUS JEEVES

What famous writer fought to ban Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn from the public library, claiming it was inappropriate for "our pure-minded lads and lasses?
Lousia May Alcott, the author of Little Women, Little Men, and Jo's Boys. She wasn't alone - many people objected to Twain's work when it was first published, although it has since gone on to be regarded as a classic.

WHAT IS THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SAMUEL CLEMENS/MARK TWAIN AND HALLEY'S COMET?
In 1835, the year Samuel Clemens, writer, reporter, and publisher was born, Halley's Comet passed over. Twain vowed that he would not die until he saw the famous comet again. Then, just before Twain died, Halley's Comet passed over. He died the next day--April 10th, 1910 at 6:30 p.m.

Was Cinderella’s glass slipper the result of a typo?
Cinderella's slipper, many scholars believe, was made of fur, not glass. The word verre, or "glass," they claim, was incorrectly substituted in early versions of the story for the word vaire. In medieval French, vaire means "fur."

Who originated that phrase about humans and rodents?
The phrase "The best laid plans of mice and men" was first used in a poem titled "To a Mouse" by Robert Burns: "The best laid schemes o' mice and men / Gang aft a-gley; / And leave us naught but grief and pain / For promised joy." The "of mice and men" words were used as the title to John Steinbeck's popular novel, "Of Mice and Men." It later became a hit film and stage play.

WHO WROTE “MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB”?
One of the earliest and most influential American magazine editors, Sarah Joseph Hale - in 1830. In addition to founding the first national women's magazine, Godley's Ladies' Magazine, and successfully campaigning to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, she was inspired to write the rhyme by an actual case of a child's being followed to school by a pet lamb.

WAS MARGARET MITCHELL'S MAIN CHARACTER ORIGINALLY A PANSY?
Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind between 1926 and 1929. In her early drafts, the main character was named "Pansy O'Hara" and the O'Hara plantation we know as Tara was called "Fountenoy Hall."

What's the oldest printed book with a date?
The oldest known printed book that can be clearly dated is a copy of the Sanskrit Vajracchedika-prajnaparamitasutra (Buddha's Diamond Sutra), dated by its maker on May 11, 868 AD in China. It is one of Buddhism's greatest treasures. To make the book, seven rolls of paper were printed with wooden blocks, then cut and glued together. It is written in Chinese, with elaborately detailed illustrations of the Buddha and his disciples. Although the Diamond Sutra is the oldest dated book, it is not the oldest printed work. Wood block printing was known for more than 100 years prior to the Diamond Sutra's printing.

Who was Sherlock before he was a Holmes?
Before deciding on the name Sherlock, Arthur Conan Doyle had named his now famous detective - Sherrinford. The name was used in a short story Doyle wrote in 1886. Holme's sidekick in the story was called Ormond Sacker - soon to be renamed Thomas Watson.

Crossword Puzzles

The first crosswords appeared in England during the 19th century. They were of an elementary kind, apparently derived from the word square, a group of words arranged so the letters read alike vertically and horizontally, and printed in children's puzzle books and various periodicals. In the United States, however, the puzzle developed into a serious adult pastime.

The first known published crossword puzzle was created by a journalist named Arthur Wynne from Liverpool, and he is usually credited as the inventor of the popular word game. December 21, 1913 was the date and the 'word-cross' appeared in a Sunday newspaper, the New York World. Wynne's puzzle differed from today's crosswords in that it was diamond shaped and contained no internal black squares.

The first appearance of a crossword in a British publication was in Pearson's Magazine in February 1922, and the first Times crossword appeared on February 1 1930. British puzzles quickly developed their own style, being considerably more difficult than the American variety. In particular the cryptic crossword became established and rapidly gained popularity.

In 1944, Allied security officers were disturbed by the appearance, in a series of crossword puzzles published in The Daily Telegraph, of words that happened to be secret code names for military operations. On June 2, just four days before the invasion, the puzzle included both the words "Neptune" (the naval operations plan) and "Overlord". That was the last straw, and the author of the puzzles, a schoolteacher named Leonard Dawe, was arrested and interrogated. The investigators finally concluded that the appearance of the words was just a coincidence. However, in 1984 the schoolteacher revealed that one of his students had picked up the words while hanging around army camps. When the teacher had asked his students to provide unusual words as ingredients for his puzzles, he had innocently passed them on.

Beowulf

Beowulf is a thousand-year-old poem written in Old English--the old Germanic language that eventually became today's English language.

The poem took shape between the 8th and 11th century, but the theme is age-old: it's man vs. monsters. It's Beowulf vs. Grendel. Every child knows Grendel--not by name, but in spirit. Grendel is the monster that lives under your bed. It's Grendel's foot that makes the floorboards creak at night after you've put out the light. Grendel is the horrible thing that lurks in the darkness and waits for you to go to sleep.

In Beowulf, the epic poem, a Danish king named Hrothgar knows Grendel all too well. Hrothgar has built himself a magnificent drinking hall, but when he and his men start feasting there, Grendel ruins the party. Grendel sneaks up on them when they have fallen asleep and kills and devours them thirty at a time. The walls and floor are spattered with blood and gore, and Hrothgar is at a loss. Not one of his warriors can match Grendel's raw strength and ferocity.

But across the water in southern Sweden live a people called the Geats, and when word reaches them of Grendel's killing, their greatest warrior sets sail to test his strength against the monster. His name is Beowulf, and he is so strong that he decides to sleep in Hrothgar's hall without any weapons, saying it would be too easy to slay Grendel with a sword since the monster fights bare-handed.

So Beowulf lays down in the hall and pretends to sleep, and when Grendel creeps up on him, Beowulf seizes him by the arm. The monster tries to twist away and run, but Beowulf is too powerful. They wrestle there in the hall until Grendel, in desperation, tears his arm from the socket and flees, mortally wounded, back to his lair to wait for death.

But kill one monster and another steps forward to take its place. Grendel's mother, in true Anglo-Saxon fashion, comes looking for revenge, and she kills Hrothgar's greatest warrior in the drinking hall. Beowulf, undaunted, tracks her to the watery place where she lives and swims to the bottom, where he battles and kills her, too.

Beowulf the hero returns to the Geats and becomes a good and wise king, tempting his wyrd (fate) against the monsters that threaten until the end. (Yes, there are even more monsters for him to fight.) And Beowulf the poem becomes the greatest achievement of Old English literature, both a window on the culture of the Germanic peoples who took England from the Celts and a tale of the hero's ongoing struggle against the terror that thrives in the darkness.

--Mark Diller

1984

Eric Arthur Blair (June 25, 1903 - January 21, 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. Noted as a political and cultural commentator, as well as an accomplished novelist, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language essayists of the 20th century. He is best known for two novels published towards the end of his life: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The novel focuses on Winston Smith, who stands, seemingly alone, against the corrupted reality of his world: hence the work's original working name of The Last Man in Europe. Although the storyline is unified, it could be described as having three parts (it has been published in three parts by some publishers). The first part deals with the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four as seen through the eyes of Winston; the second part deals with Winston's forbidden sexual relationship with Julia and his eagerness to rebel against the Party; and the third part deals with Winston's capture and torture by the Party.

Originally Orwell titled the book The Last Man in Europe, but his publisher, suggested a change to assist in the book's marketing. The reasons for the current title is not absolutely known. In fact, Orwell may have only switched the last two digits of the year in which he wrote the book (1948). Alternatively, he may have been making an allusion to the centenary of the Fabian Society, a socialist organization founded in 1884. The allusion may have also been directed to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (in which the power of a political movement reaches its height in 1984), to G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (also set in that year), or to a poem that his wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, had written, called End of the Century, 1984.

The totalitarian superstate of Oceania is comprised of four ministries which are housed in huge pyramidal structures, each roughly 300 metres high and visible throughout London, displaying the three slogans of the party on their facades. The Ministry of Peace (Minipax) concerns itself with conducting Oceania's perpetual wars. The Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty) is responsible for rationing and controlling food and goods. The Ministry of Truth (Minitrue) is the propaganda arm of Oceania's regime. Minitrue controls information: political literature, the Party organization, and the telescreens. The Ministry of Love (Miniluv) is the agency responsible for the identification, monitoring, arrest, and torture of dissidents, real or imagined. The ministries' names are ironic, as the Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Plenty: starvation, the Ministry of Truth: lies, and the Ministry of Love: torture. However, from the perspectives of the Oceanians who accept the propaganda, these names are accurate.

Some of 1984's lexicon has entered into the English language. One such phrase is 'Big Brother', as in 'Big Brother is watching you'. Today, security cameras are often thought to be modern society's big brother. The phrase 'thought police' is also derived from Nineteen Eighty-Four, and might be used to refer to any alleged violation of the right to the free expression of opinion. It is particularly used in contexts where free expression is proclaimed and expected to exist. The adjective Orwellian is mainly derived from the system depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It can refer to any form of government oppression, but it is particularly used to refer to euphemistic and misleading language originating from government bodies with a political purpose.

Frankenstein

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel by Mary Shelley, first published in London in 1818 but more often read in the revised third edition of 1831. It's a novel infused with some elements of the Gothic and the Romantic movement and was also a warning against the "over-reaching" of modern man and the Industrial Revolution. The story has had an influence across literature and popular culture and spawned a complete genre of horror stories and films. Many distinguished authors, such as Brian Aldiss, claim that it is the very first science fiction novel.

During the snowy summer of 1816, the "Year Without A Summer," the world was locked in a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Tambora in 1815. The then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, age 19, and her husband-to-be Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather was consistently too dreary to enjoy outdoor activities, so after reading an anthology of ghost stories, Byron challenged the Shelleys and his personal physician John William Polidori to each compose a story of their own, the contest being won by whoever wrote the scariest tale. Mary conceived an idea after she fell into a waking nightmare during which she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." This was the germ of Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley completed her writing in May 1817, and Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was first published on January 1, 1818. It was issued anonymously, with a preface written for Mary by Percy Bysshe Shelley and with a dedication to philosopher William Godwin, her father. It was published in an edition of just 500 copies in three volumes, the standard "triple-decker" format for 19th century first editions. Critical reception of the book was mostly unfavorable, compounded by confused speculation as to the identity of the author, which was not well disguised. Despite the reviews, Frankenstein achieved an almost immediate popular success. It became widely known especially through melodramatic theatrical adaptations - Mary Shelley saw a production in 1823.

Mary Shelley always maintained that she derived the name "Frankenstein" from a dream-vision, yet the name and what it means has been a source of many speculations. Literally, in German, the name Frankenstein means stone of the Franks. Frankenstein is the former name of Zbkowice Slaskie, a city in Silesia. There is a town called Frankenstein in the palatinate with Burg Frankenstein (Frankenstein Castle) and Burg Frankenstein near Darmstadt. Moreover Frankenstein is a common family name in Germany. More recently, Radu Florescu, in his In Search of Frankenstein, argued that Mary and Percy Shelley stayed at Castle Frankenstein on their way to Switzerland, near Darmstadt along the Rhine, where a notorious alchemist named Konrad Dippel had experimented with human bodies, but that Mary suppressed mentioning this visit, to maintain her public claim of originality.

The Modern Prometheus is the novel's subtitle. Prometheus, in some versions of Greek mythology, was the Titan who created mankind, and Victor's work by creating man by new means obviously reflects that creative work. Prometheus was also the bringer of fire who took fire from heaven and gave it to man. Zeus then punished Prometheus by fixing him to a rock where each day a predatory bird came to devour his liver. Prometheus was also a myth told in Latin but was a very different story. In this version Prometheus makes man from clay and water, again a very relevant theme to Frankenstein as Victor rebels against the laws of nature and as a result is punished by his creation. For Mary Shelley on a personal level, Prometheus was not a hero but a devil, whom she blamed for bringing fire to man and thereby seducing the human race to the vice of eating meat. For Romance era artists in general, Prometheus' gift to man compared with the two great utopian promises of the 18th century: the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, containing both great promise and potentially unknown horrors.

Literary Monsters

Literature is full of monsters that threaten and warn, monsters that scare us and monsters that are us--monsters that, properly challenged, give rise to heroes that show the way through our fears. Here--just in time for Halloween--are the greatest of those literary monsters.

Medusa - "Snakes. Why Did It Have To Be Snakes?"

Everyone knows Medusa: shame about the hair. Medusa's most famous moment was her death. The story goes that a hero, Perseus, was told by his evil stepfather to bring home her serpent-haired head--not easy, because anyone who looked into Medusa's eyes turned to stone. So, with help from Athena (goddess of wisdom, practical reason, and the arts), Perseus hatched a plan. He snuck up on Medusa while she slept and, looking only at her reflection in his shield, cut off her head and stuffed it in a bag.

In death Medusa retained her power--anyone who looked at the head turned to stone. Athena eventually claimed the head and fixed it on her shield to frighten her enemies. In fact, the head of Medusa was everywhere in ancient Greece. It was carved into temples, painted on shields, and fashioned into masks. In all of these pictures, Medusa's petrifying eyes stare out at the viewer. Sometimes her tongue dangles from a fanged mouth. Many pictures show her with powerful, churning legs, perfect for chasing down her prey.

The Greeks, who were obsessed with manly courage, went to some trouble to develop a complementary theology of fear. They knew of panic, the fear that makes you bolt and run. Such fear came from the goat-god Pan--part man, part beast, all vigor and stampeding lust. And they knew of the fear that roots you to a spot and captures you like a deer in the headlights, unable to move as your doom descends upon you. In that fearful sphere, Medusa reigned supreme.

It was not always so. The original idea of Medusa was probably far different. Her name means "queen" or "the wide-ruling one," and some myths say she was so beautiful that the god Poseidon was consumed with desire for her. But by the time of recorded history, Medusa had become a wild thing--a dreadful, devouring creature that lurks in the dark spaces of the world, and hisses.

Fenrir - World-Destroying Wolf

Some monsters just happen, while others are deliberately crafted. Fenrir the wolf was the creation of the trickster Loki, who spent his life looking for ways to destroy the gods of the Norsemen--the "Vikings" of Scandinavia and northern Europe. Finally, he hit on a winning strategy: reproduction. With the female giant Angerboda, Loki had three children: Fenrir; Jormungand, a serpent so enormous that it stretched around the world; and Hel, the half-dead goddess of the underworld.

Fenrir grew so large and terrifying that the gods feared him immediately and sought a way to imprison him. Twice they brought a set of chains--with iron links larger than those of anchor chains--and challenged Fenrir to let them bind him, so he could prove that he could break the bonds. Twice Fenrir broke free easily.

The third time the gods went to the dwarves--a race of superlative craftsmen--who fashioned a rope called Gleipnir from the beard of a woman, the sound of a cat's footsteps, the breath of a fish, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, and the spittle of a bird. Fenrir agreed to let the gods bind him in Gleipnir, but only if the god Tyr would hold his hand inside Fenrir's mouth as a sign of good faith. The wolf was bound and could not break the rope, but, realizing the gods' trickery, he bit off Tyr's hand.

Fenrir remained bound and beyond trouble until Ragnarok: doomsday. In the Norsemen's world, the gods held evil and chaos at bay only with constant vigilance and heroism--and only for a time. At Ragnarok, it was fated that Fenrir would break free from his bonds and join his siblings. Jormungand would emerge from the sea, and Hel would lead an army of the dead from the underworld. With their father, Loki, and the race of giants, they would wage terrible war on the gods.

The thunder god Thor would kill Jormungand, crushing the giant serpent's head with his magical hammer Mjollnir, but would die from poison spit out by the snake. Fenrir, meanwhile, would battle Odin, the father of the gods, and swallow and kill him, but Odin's son Vidar would avenge his father by tearing Fenrir's jaws apart. The monsters die in Ragnarok, but the gods die with them, and the world-tree Yggdrasil burns to the ground. Yet a new world would rise from its ashes, protected by a new generation of gods.

Grendel - The Bogeyman of Beowulf

Every child knows Grendel--not by name, but certainly in spirit. Grendel is the monster that lives under your bed. It's Grendel's foot that makes the floorboards creak at night after you've put out the light. Grendel is the horrible thing that lurks in the darkness and waits for you to go to sleep.

In Beowulf, an epic poem written in Old English in the first half of the 8th century, a Danish king named Hrothgar knew Grendel all too well. Hrothgar built himself a magnificent drinking hall, but when he and his men started feasting there, Grendel came and ruined the party. Grendel would sneak up on them when they had fallen asleep and kill and devour them thirty at a time. The walls and floor were spattered with blood and gore, and Hrothgar was at a loss. Not one of his warriors could match Grendel's raw strength and ferocity.

But across the water in southern Sweden lived a people called the Geats, and when word reached them of Grendel's killing, their greatest warrior set sail to test his strength against the monster. His name was Beowulf, and he was so strong that he decided to sleep in Hrothgar's halls without any weapons, saying that it would be too easy to slay Grendel with a sword since the monster fought bare-handed.

And so Beowulf lay down with his men in the hall and pretended to sleep, and when Grendel crept up on him, Beowulf seized him by the arm. The monster tried to twist away and run, but Beowulf was too powerful. They wrestled there in the hall until Grendel, in an act of sheer desperation, tore his arm from the socket and fled, mortally wounded, back to his lair to wait for death.

But kill one monster and another steps forward to take its place. Grendel's mother, in true Anglo-Saxon fashion, came looking for revenge, and she killed Hrothgar's greatest warrior in the drinking hall. Yet Beowulf tracked her down to the watery place where she lived and swam to the bottom, where he battled and killed her, too.

Beowulf the hero returned to the Geats and became a good and wise king, tempting his wyrd (fate) against the monsters that threatened until the end. Beowulf the poem became the greatest achievement of Old English literature, both a window on the culture of the Germanic peoples who came to England in 449 and a tale of the hero's continual struggle against the raging terror that thrives in the surrounding darkness.

Mark Diller
October 30, 2006

Now, the horror continues with procreation gone bad, the evil lurking within a good man, and the undead reincarnation of a Romanian price known for impaling people on spikes.

Frankenstein's Monster - "My Hideous Progeny"

Hollywood didn't give birth to Frankenstein. A 19-year-old named Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin did. In the summer of 1816, she and her lover, the poet Percy Shelley (whom she married later that year), visited the poet Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Bad weather forced them inside, where they and Byron's other guests read ghost stories to amuse themselves. One evening, Byron challenged his guests to write their own stories. Mary's harrowing response, inspired by a dream, became Frankenstein (1818).

The tale of Victor Frankenstein, a student who cobbles together a monster out of corpses, has come to symbolize the dangers of science run amok. On a cold and dreary night, he manages to "infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing." Horrified at his abominable creation, Victor abandons the monster, who remains nameless (though Hollywood will later call it "Frankenstein," after its creator). Craving sympathy and understanding, the monster finally turns to evil and takes dreadful revenge on the scientist.

The novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, pinpoints the source of evil. Prometheus was chained to a stone, his liver pecked out by an eagle, as a punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to mortals. Likewise, Frankenstein is punished for usurping God's power to create life. His fatal flaw is not madness. In fact, he's the opposite of the "mad scientist" stereotype presented in the movies. Rather, he commits the monstrous sin of pride.

Mary Shelley knew more about mortality than most teens. Pregnant at 16, she lost several babies soon after birth. It's hard to read without shuddering the diary entry in which she records the loss of her first child: "Dream that my little baby came to life again, that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby." It's no great leap to link such loss to Frankenstein's wish: "I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption."

Mr. Hyde - The Evil Within

A spare yet complex tale whose popularity has endured for more than a century, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) has become synonymous with the battle between good and evil waged within ourselves. Jekyll, a good and generous London physician, invents a drug that turns him into the demonic Mr. Hyde. As Hyde, he tramples children and commits other unspeakable acts. Although Jekyll develops an antidote that returns him to his respectable self, it gradually loses its power to quell the monster within. Finally unable to obtain one of the ingredients for the antidote mixture, and on the verge of being discovered, he commits suicide.

Acknowledging the two sides of his own nature, Jekyll writes, "If each . . . could be housed in separable identities, life would be relieved of all that was intolerable." The book's power to frighten stems from the elusiveness of this goal. It's not just that Dr. Jekyll is good and Mr. Hyde is evil, but that a seemingly respectable London citizen can't control the monster within. To focus on drinking the potion (which Stevenson himself dismissed as "so much hugger-mugger") is to miss the deeper psychological implications of the case.

The idea for the book sprang from the deepest recesses of Stevenson's own mind--a nightmare from which his wife Fanny awakened him. He wrote the manuscript in a frenzied three days. His wife was so appalled when she read it that he burned the original manuscript and rewrote it from scratch in another three days. Just weeks later, in January 1886, Longmans published the book. Its success was immediate, selling over 40,000 copies in six months.

Just a year after its publication, it was adapted as a stage play starring the American Richard Mansfield. Although Mansfield thrilled audiences with his grotesque transformation into the monstrous Hyde, he soon had an all-too-real rival. In one of the most horrifying examples of life imitating art, the notorious rapist Jack the Ripper began, in 1888, to terrorize London's Whitechapel district. Because of the skill with which he cut up his victims, speculation grew that Jack, like Jekyll, may have been a respectable physician by day. Indignant observers accused Mansfield of being the Ripper, since he played the part so convincingly. The play eventually closed in deference to the public uproar.

Dracula - Love of Evil, or Evil Love?

Despite their reputation for strict propriety, the Victorians produced a surprising number of steamy texts. And none throbs with more lustful energy than Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. The world's most famous vampire speaks directly to the era's fascination with and anxiety about sex.

The novel begins as an upstanding young lawyer, Jonathan Harker, travels to Transylvania (in modern-day Romania) to complete a real-estate transaction. There he finds the mysterious Count Dracula as well as three vampire women who try to suck his blood and hold him captive. Although Harker eventually escapes, Dracula follows him back to England, where he stalks Harker's fiancée Mina and her best friend Lucy. Harker and his friends finally conquer the Count, but only after he leaves his mark on British soil.

Harker's simultaneous fear of the vampire women and "his wicked, burning desire that they would kiss with those red lips" suggests volumes about Victorian attitudes toward sexuality. Stoker unchains his most seductive prose for the passages in which Dracula bites Lucy, turning her vaunted purity into "voluptuous wantonness"--and overturning everything the Victorians expected from a lady. Several critics have noted that in addition to the palpable sexual anxiety, the text seems to betray significant fears about a foreigner invading England and tainting British blood.

Of course, Stoker, an Irish author, didn't invent vampires or even the name Dracula. The historical Dracula was a 15th-century Romanian prince also known as Vlad the Impaler. He got the nickname "Dracula" because his father's name was Vlad Dracul. The prince enjoyed a reputation for sadistic exploits: impaling enemies on sharp spikes, skinning them, or boiling them alive. Stoker apparently discovered "Dracula" in an obscure history book he checked out of the library while vacationing in Whitby (an English resort where much of the novel takes place). He then fused it with Slavic folklore about the restless souls of heretics, criminals, and suicides, condemned neither to live or die.

Maggie Debelius
October 31, 2006

First came three mythical monsters. Next came three movie monsters from 19th-century books. Finally, monstrous manipulators round out our top 10. Could it be . . . Satan?

Milton's Satan - Sympathy for the Devil?

Satan is the supreme enemy, the monster of all monsters, the incarnation of absolute evil--but that doesn't mean we can't like him a little bit. Or so John Milton's magisterial epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) seems to suggest. The most striking feature of Milton's Satan is neither his deceitfulness nor his violence, but his sympathetic appeal. The Romantic poet William Blake even claimed that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it."

But Milton was no simple-minded Satanist. On the contrary, he was a dedicated Christian who wanted to use his talents to, as he put it, "justify the ways of God to man." He had spent much of his adult life preparing to write his epic by studying classical literature, Christian theology, and even contemporary science. He had also written widely on politics and had served for a decade in Oliver Cromwell's Puritan government following the English Civil War.

Still, the first two parts of Paradise Lost focus primarily on Satan, and they depict him as a hero of literally epic proportions. Satan, we learn, was once an archangel, but he and his formerly angelic followers have been thrown into hell for daring to revolt against God. Awakening in the utter misery, chaos, and darkness of damnation, Satan rallies his troops, comforts them in spite of everything, and volunteers to venture forth alone to investigate a rumor that the Lord has created a new sort of creature: human beings.

Compared with his compatriots in hell, Satan is a clear standout, displaying classically heroic characteristics: leadership, courage, even a sort of nobility. As the epic continues, however, and the familiar story of Adam and Eve unfolds, we discover that Satan's apparent heroism belies a fundamental depravity and powerlessness. Filled with envy and spite, he tries to destroy God's new creation through manipulation and deceit. His attempt at temptation proves fruitful, but his victory is hollow.

God knows all along what Satan is up to and how Adam and Eve will respond. He also knows that Christ will one day redeem the fallen humans and that, in the end, Satan will be roundly defeated again. The end of the epic struggle--the end of Milton's Paradise Lost--is a foregone conclusion, known to God from the start. In hell, Satan looks heroic. In the Garden of Eden, he seems dangerous and demonic. But in relation to God, he appears as little more than a plot device, a complex figure through which to spin an epic tale.

Shakespeare's Iago - Monstrous Manipulation

Shakespeare's Othello (1604) is a tragedy of mistaken motives and malicious manipulations, most of which are worked by the play's diabolical villain, Iago. Unlike the mythical monsters of yore, Iago is no obviously inhuman enemy. On the contrary, he's part of Othello's inner circle, a friend who proves more treacherous than anyone in the play can imagine until much too late. Attacking from within, he seems to know his victims better than they know themselves. He is, in short, both a master and a monster of manipulation.

In the play, Othello the "Moor" (a term used in Shakespeare's time to refer to all sorts of dark-skinned people) elopes with Desdemona, the fair daughter of a Venetian senator. Othello is a trusted general in Venice, an imposing figure who has earned considerable influence and respect. Nevertheless, one of his underlings, Iago, convinces him that his wife is having an affair with his lieutenant. Iago carefully manipulates Othello's insecurities, turning him against his innocent wife and driving him to murder her in a jealous rage.

No character in any of Shakespeare's other tragedies exerts the control over events that Iago enjoys in Othello. His power is nearly unopposed. Othello is noble and honest, but that blinds him to Iago's depravity and deceit.

Desdemona is pure, but like Othello, seems incapable of fathoming the depths of Iago's groundless hatred. Iago manipulates everyone, exploiting their racial prejudices, sexist ideologies, and personal insecurities throughout. He is repeatedly able--and more than willing--to draw out the ugliest tendencies in human nature and turn them to his advantage.

Yet Iago's own motivation remains a mystery, apparently even to him. He first claims to hate Othello for passing him up for promotion. Later, he says that he's heard Othello has slept with his wife. But neither seems to explain the depth of his hatred. In the end, the mysteriousness of Iago's motives may be his most frightening trait. He may manipulate others, but he can't control himself. Nor can we hope to control him without discovering what makes him tick--and that, the play seems to suggest, is a secret hidden deep inside his hate.

Orwell's Big Brother - Totalitarian Terrors

Monsters can be beasts. Monsters can be people. Monsters can even be your "Big Brother." In George Orwell's famous 1949 novel, 1984, "Big Brother" peers into every corner of human life, controlling people's behaviors, people's language, and even people's thoughts. The slogan "Big Brother Is Watching You" is everywhere.

Orwell's protagonist, Winston Smith, is never sure whether "Big Brother," the seemingly all-powerful ruler of Oceania, is a real human being or not. As the story unfolds, Smith appears as a disgruntled worker in Oceania's Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical documents to suit the needs of the nation's ruling party. Everywhere he goes, "Big Brother" watches him through "telescreens," hidden cameras that monitor people's behavior even as they project a constant barrage of propaganda designed to portray the ruling party, and "Big Brother," in the best possible light.

Eventually, Smith begins an illegal love affair with a woman named Julia, and the two confide their hatred for the party in a man named O'Brien. But O'Brien turns out to be a spy, and directs Smith's torture at the Ministry of Love, where dissenters are sent for "reeducation." Faced with the prospect of having his face eaten off by rats, Smith snaps, begging O'Brien to use the rats on Julia rather than on him. Torture drives him to accept the party line entirely, to such an extent that, in the end, he learns to love "Big Brother."

Our greatest literary nightmares, it would seem, no longer revolve around ghosts and goblins. The monsters we fear now are conspiratorial societies, invisible systems of control, and technologies run amok.

These are nine of the greatest literary monsters ever to terrorize the page. And remember, we're talking literary monsters, so the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Darth Vader, and the Blob don't count.

Steve Sampson
November 1, 2006

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" is a classic about a man racked by guilt over murder.

On December 22, 1849, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was minutes from death. Just months earlier, the young radical had been arrested for circulating a letter that called for the abolition of serfdom, an ancient system of land ownership that reduced Russian peasants to virtual slavery. Now the 28-year-old ex-army engineer, and his friends, faced a firing squad.

The prisoners were bound to a stake. White hoods were put over their heads. A drum roll began. Then, suddenly, a soldier handed a sealed packet to the commanding officer. The sentence had been commuted to four years of hard labor in Siberia, plus compulsory military service. The whole execution had been staged by the state to terrify the men. It worked. A few went insane from the shock. Dostoyevsky would relive the experience again and again.

The mock execution and exile to Siberia changed Dostoyevsky's outlook forever. Before his ordeal, the young writer had been friendly with socialists who wanted to overthrow the czar. On his return to Russia in 1859, Dostoyevsky dismissed his high-minded pals as nihilistic "egg-heads." Convinced that radical politics would lead to tyranny, he felt Russia's real strength was its common people, their traditional values, and Orthodox Christianity.

Prison not only changed Dostoyevsky's politics; it sharpened his fascination with human psychology. In letters to his brother, he described fellow inmates as complex, passionate, and contradictory. Even the worst criminals "wanted to suffer," to ease a conscience they didn't know they had. Deeply interested in the effect of suffering on the human mind, Dostoyevsky put his characters through so many torments that critics would accuse him of fictional sadism.

For the next decade, Dostoyevsky's reputation as a literary talent and man of the people grew. But happiness didn't follow. He had epileptic seizures. He gambled himself into deep debt. Both his wife and his brother died. The troubled author poured his personal sorrow and political rage into Notes from the Underground, an attack on socialist utopians who argued that free will didn't exist--that people's lives were determined by economics, class, or historical events. For Dostoyevsky, human nature was never that simple.

Desperate for money, he leapt at a publisher's shady deal: a cash advance in exchange for a novel by November 1866. If he failed to produce the book, the publisher got rights to all his previous work. As the deadline loomed, Dostoyevsky hired Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, a female stenographer, and cranked out The Gambler, a personal novel. Not long after, he married Anna, who helped stabilize the rest of his life.

It was while writing The Gambler that Dostoyevsky produced Crime and Punishment, which probed more closely into the mind of a criminal than any book ever had. The novel's plot was simple. An educated young man decides there are two kinds of people: extraordinary and ordinary, and that the first aren't bound by moral laws. Convinced he is extraordinary, Raskolnikov kills an old pawnbroker to test his theory. He rationalizes that since she is a bad person anyway, her money should be distributed to the poor and do some good.

After he commits the murder, Raskolnikov is haunted by terrible guilt. Though he can't account for his reaction or explain his motivation, he is eventually moved to confess to the case detective. Amoral behavior, it seems, carries its own punishment. Raskolnikov is exiled to Siberia, where he repents his crime and adopts a Christian morality.

Dostoyevsky continued to explore morality and meaning in The Idiot and The Devils, but most critics regard his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, as his masterpiece. Ivan, the most philosophical of the four brothers, argues that if God does not exist, then "everything is permitted." The novel laid bare the author's painful struggle with the existence of God, about which he said "I have been consciously or unconsciously tormented all my life."

In one of the most famous passages in western literature, Ivan tells a story called "The Grand Inquisitor," an imaginary encounter between the head of the Spanish Inquisition and Christ himself. The inquisitor maintains that people are happier without free will, that they prefer the safe comforts of "miracle, mystery, and authority." Dostoyevsky had heard this argument many times from revolutionaries, who thought perfect systems could create perfect people. His imaginary Christ simply listens patiently and responds with a loving kiss.

In 1880, Dostoyevsky gave a stirring nationalistic speech at the dedication of a monument to the writer Pushkin in Moscow. Fearing Russia's future direction, he urged his countrymen to return to Slavic values and make Russia a model for the rest of the world, but to no avail. In January 1881, Dostoyevsky died from a ruptured lung, only decades before the politics he had resisted erupted in the Russian revolution and the repressive regimes that followed.

Dostoyevsky had seemed to predict that the revolution would eventually bring about the tyranny of Lenin and Stalin. His political novel The Devils, published in 1872, warned that "unlimited freedom" would lead to "unlimited despotism." For the sake of equality, the great author wrote, "Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned."

Claire Vail
Updated November 16, 2006

The World's First Great Novel

Friends, if you're ever accused of "tilting at windmills" or being a bit quixotic, don't be too quick to take offense. You're being compared to the pure-hearted title character of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, considered by many the world's first great novel.

The fictional Don may have been a bit loony, but he's been popular for more than 400 years. Even Cervantes' contemporary, William Shakespeare, is said to have read his story. But unlike old Will, Cervantes could have been famous for his real-life adventures, rather than for those of Quixote.

Born near Madrid in 1547, Cervantes studied Greek and Roman classics with the help of a humanist priest, though he never went to college. In 1569, he left home for Italy, where he signed on with a Spanish military unit that was gearing up for a showdown with Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean.

Mobilized to the Gulf of Lepanto in Greece, Cervantes fought bravely and was shot three times. The third lead ball maimed his left hand--and gave him a nickname, "the cripple of Lepanto." Despite his injuries, Cervantes remained in the army and continued to fight valiantly.

In 1575, he finally headed home. But pirates seized the ship he was on and sold him into slavery in Algiers. He was basically held for ransom until 1580, when a group of friars secured his release by funneling money from home.

When Cervantes got back to Spain, times were tough, and his war-hero status didn't help him land a job. He tried writing full time, but without much success. Eventually, he wound up in jail, accused of skimming money while working for the state as a tax collector. Many think his days behind bars gave Cervantes time to dream up Don Quixote, a "man of La Mancha" whose imagination couldn't be contained.